History
Pollokshields was one of the first Garden Suburbs in Britain, with construction starting in 1851 on land owned by the Stirling Maxwell family of Pollok House.
The Maxwells made great efforts to ensure a first class residential district with strict planning controls of the position, quality and use of buildings.The area is divided into two distinctive parts, namely East Pollokshields laid out on a grid pattern of sandstone tenements, whilst West Pollokshields consists of Victorian and Edwardian villas, with green spaces and wide oft tree-lined streets on one side of the railway and large, elegant tenements on the other.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century the character of Pollokshields, as we know it today, was well established with villas, tenements and public buildings built of sandstone, gardens and parks, all a reflection of the city’s late Victorian and Edwardian prosperity. In 1973 Pollokshields was designated as a Conservation and Outstanding Area to halt the decline that had been threatening to destroy the character of the area
Pollokshields Burgh Hall
East Pollokshields
The eastern area was mainly developed between 1855 and 1910 in a grid street pattern as an upmarket area of tenement flats. The later tenements, mainly south and west of Nithsdale Road, are some of the finest anywhere in Scotland. Provision for shops on the ground floor was strictly regulated.
West Pollokshields
West Pollokshields contains villas by most of the prominent Victorian and Edwardian architects in Glasgow including Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, H.E. Clifford, James Miller, Sir John James Burnet, J.C. McKellar, John Gordon and William Hunter McNab. Within these houses are superb examples of the work of some of Glasgow’s finest craftspeople of stained glass, ornamental plasterwork, cast iron and marble, wood carvings and wally tiles.
Streets of Pollokshields database
Did your relatives live in Pollokshields?
Do you live in Pollokshields and wish to know a bit more about who might have lived in your house through the years?
This database will allow you to see who lived in a particular house or street from 1861 to 1932.
Data for 1875, 1885, 1895, 1905, 1915, 1920 & 1925 taken from Valuation Rolls
Data for 1861, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911 extracted from the Census
Data for 1932 and 1940 taken from the Post Office Directories.
The database is currently available as a CSV spreadsheet to download:
Streets of Pollokshields database (ZIP, 1.4MB)
Or you can view it online here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Ud-Na4vMYzMUOVSTC3FIexpGgLrtqqkJ-894VNMYvjE/edit?usp=sharing or use this link to copy it to your own Google Drive.