Dear green place grew from Mungo's burn into Empire's second city
Scotland's largest city hugs the Clyde and ranks third in the United Kingdom. Victorians called Glasgow the second city of the British Empire. Its Brittonic name points to a green hollow—Glaschu in Gaelic—while affection still says dear green place for the settlement Saint Mungo planted in the sixth century.
Kentigern, or Mungo, built a church on the Molendinar Burn about 540 where the cathedral now stands after King Rhydderch Hael backed his mission. Glasgu appears in 1116; the motto Let Glasgow Flourish shortens a sermon line, and salmon-with-rings supporters recall Mungo's miracles on the 1866 arms. Romans left Antonine Wall altars now in the Hunterian. The university opened beside the cathedral in 1451; royal-burgh status came in 1611. Defoe later praised it as Britain's cleanest and best-built city outside London when only about twelve thousand lived there.
Trade scaled after Port Glasgow opened downriver in 1668 and the 1707 Union unlocked imperial markets. Clyde merchants dominated sugar, tobacco, and cotton; by the late eighteenth century more than half of British tobacco trade concentrated here, peaking above forty-seven million pounds a year. Scottish slave ships from Greenock and Port Glasgow carried roughly three thousand enslaved Africans between 1717 and 1766. Coal, hot-blast iron from 1828, steel, locomotives, and Clyde shipyards then made Glasgow a world workshop.
Population hit 1,034,174 in the 1921 census and peaked at 1,127,825 in 1938 before sixties clearance shifted residents to new towns. The 2020 estimate was 632,350 in the city, over a million in Greater Glasgow, and more than 1.8 million in the city region—about a third of Scotland. European Capital of Culture in 1990, fifth-most-visited UK city, and host of the 2014 and 2026 Commonwealth Games, it still trades on museums, music, and the Old Firm.
Source: Glasgow
