Over the next few months, I’ll be posting daily with extracts from my open book draft about the entire history of Glasgow Road. Collecting the social history and comments from many thousands of people on this site over the last few years, I’ll be further exploring, every Glasgow Road building through each Century, the people who lived there and its modern transitions with unique bespoke graphics and many previously unseen photos. I hope you find it as interesting as I did to research and write it. I hope you all comment on each of the Glasgow Road posts you see, so as full a picture as possible can be told in the book. Thanks.
“Blantyre – Glasgow Road, The Real Story” by Paul Veverka (c) 2016 – 2018.
We begin this definitive, epic journey of historical analysis of Blantyre’s Glasgow Road at its most eastern end, at the Parish boundary we recognize at Burnbank. However, just before we immerse ourselves in all things ‘Blantyre’ lets start a little further eastwards again beyond the boundary of the Park Burn, something worth doing to explore what was happening on the outskirts of Blantyre centuries ago and how it helped shape the roads we know today.
Forgotten Former Farms
Like much of Blantyre and the surrounding villages of the time, this land was initially rural with fields and hedge rows as far as one could see, all in open expanses. Roy’s Military Map of 1752 denotes the area as largely being farm fields belonging to two former farms. ‘Newhouse’ on the Blantyre side and ‘Nether’ or “Nitherhous” on the opposing, lower Burnbank side.
Figure 1 East Boundary Crossing Highlighted on Roy’s Military Map 1752
Both of those ancient, former farms are no longer there and indeed the names are now lost and forgotten to time. What is apparent from Roy’s map and the previous graphic, is that the main road from Glasgow to Hamilton was along what we now know as Glasgow Road with Blantyre at that time being some 14 miles from the centre of the City. You’ll notice also that it was one straight road, (as military and main roads often were), going from Blantyre, past ‘Newhouse’, later to become Springwells and past ‘Nitherhous’, a name that would later evolve into the more recognizable name of ‘Greenfield.’
The former Village of Greenfield would at the end of the 1800’s become Blantyre’s nearest neighbour, placed between Springwells and Burnbank. It would however, in the 20th Century be swallowed up by Burnbank.
From “Blantyre – Glasgow Road, The Real Story” by Paul Veverka (c)