Glasgow

A 16th-century traveler described Glasgow as "a flourishing cathedral city reminiscent of the beautiful fabrics and florid fields of England." Daniel Defoe in 1727 described it as "the cleanest and beautifullest and best-built of cities." Booming prosperity, however, created a Glasgow less clean and less beautiful.

Stretching along both banks of the widening River Clyde, Glasgow was transformed into a depressed city in the early 20th century, and fifty years ago its slums of dockland and the Clyde banks were infamous. "All Glasgow needs," said an architecture pundit then, "is a bath and a little loving care." In the past two decades, happily, it got both. Modern Glasgow has undergone a full-fledged urban renaissance: Trendy downtown stores, a booming and diverse cultural life, stylish restaurants, and above all, a general air of confidence make it Scotland's most exciting city.

The city's development has always been unashamedly commercial, tied up with the wealth of its manufacturers and merchants, who constructed a vast number of civic buildings throughout the 19th century. Many of these have been preserved, and Glasgow claims, with some justification, to be Britain's greatest Victorian city.

But Glasgow, always at the forefront of change, boasts, side by side with the overly Victorian, an architectural vision of the future in the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928). The Glasgow School of Art, the Willow Tearoom, the Glasgow Herald building, and the churches and schools he designed point clearly to the clarity and simplicity of the best of 20th-century design.