55.8611°N / 4.2500°W · United Kingdom
A grid, but a grid with moods. And a motorway that does not go round this city: it runs straight through the middle of it.
You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.
Look at what the motorway actually does here. It comes up from the south-west, crosses the Clyde, runs north along the west side of the centre, turns east along the top, and then simply leaves. It is a hook, not a ring, and the shape is not an accident of framing: an inner ring road was planned and only its northern and western flanks were built. The south and east sides were never made, so what you see is a road that goes three-quarters of the way round a city and gives up.
Beneath it, the grid is doing something Edinburgh’s never did. It is not one plan by one hand but a stack of private developments, which is why it tilts to the river in the middle and comes apart at the edges instead of ending cleanly. The lawn pushing to the water in the east is Glasgow Green. The hill of winding paths in the north-east is the Necropolis; it is there, though at this distance it reads as slope rather than mass. And the Clyde itself is less natural than it looks: the channel was deepened by engineering, which is the only reason ships ever reached the city at all.
Two sandstones share this city, the red of the eastern and southern tenements and the blond of the western terraces, and giving them two distinct ochres rather than one brown is what will make the print look like Glasgow rather than any northern city. Keep the Clyde a dark ribbon. Glasgow Green and the Necropolis want opposite greens, one flat and open, the other dense and vertical. If you colour the motorway at all, let it cut against everything else: it is a scar, not scenery.
Vertical, though the city stretches east to west along its river. The portrait works because the motorway hook is the strongest shape on the sheet and it runs corner to corner. Keep the whole curve of the Clyde in frame, since it is the curve that explains why the grid tilts. Come in and you gain the streets at the cost of both parks and, worse, of the open ends of the hook, which is the part that tells you something.
The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. A street that climbs, a square, a date: that line is what turns a plan of Glasgow into your plan of Glasgow.
Medieval Glasgow had no grid at all. It had two centres, the cathedral to the north and Glasgow Cross to the south, with four streets running out from the cross: High Street, Saltmarket, Gallowgate and Trongate. The West Port, the western gate, was pulled down in 1751 as the town prepared to spill past its old plan. That matters for the drawing, because Trongate and Argyle Street became the line everything later was built parallel to. The tilt of the modern grid is a medieval street, still giving orders.
From the 1770s the landowners around Argyle Street began feuing their ground in lots. Barry’s plan of 1782 set out Queen Street and Buchanan Street towards what became George Square. The Campbells feued the Blythswood estate, four hundred and seventy acres, with rules about street widths, and its hilltop grid was laid out in 1796, imposing right angles on a slope steep enough to make the streets hard work. The rectangular parcels were finally fixed on Gillespie’s plan of 1820. There was no single civic scheme: what looks like one plan is fifty years of separate ones agreeing to line up.
The Queen Mother opened the Kingston Bridge on 26 June 1970, two hundred and seventy metres long and more than forty wide, and it now carries over 150,000 vehicles a day. It was built as part of an inner ring road, but the southern and eastern sides of that ring were never constructed. The motorway was left alone to carry the crossing of the city centre, which is why the heaviest line on this map has two ends rather than joining up with itself.
Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.
From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.
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Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.
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The street you climbed with the shopping, the side of the motorway you lived on, the corner of the Green you cut across. The river is the same for everyone. Which side of the scar you grew up on is not.
Compose my Glasgow print
