A tenement with more interesting neighbours?

Thomson's Govan Road / Carmichael Street building

In the 1850s, you would look in vain for many buildings along Govan Road (then just called ‘Main Road’). Even in the following decade, there were still acres of unoccupied land adjacent to the various villas. However, the banks of the Clyde were being slowly filled by shipbuilding yards and wharves, and the first tenements were being constructed. Eden Villa, the name given to a pair of classical buildings, stood alone in what would become Carmichael Street. The 35-acre Cessnock Dock (renamed Prince’s Dock when opened by the Duke of York in 1897) would eventually take up most of what is shown on the right of the map while graving docks would fill the land north of Govan Road.

A decade later, the spaces were being filled in. On the east side of Carmichael Street, the grandly named Princess’s Buildings were constructed around 1870, while a new tenement arose opposite, abutting Eden Villa and stretching along Govan Road. In Gavin Stamp’s ‘List of Works’ in Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, its description reads:

Glasgow: 485-503 Govan Road / 2-6 Carmichael Street
†?New block of tenements
c.1872
Demolished
Walker; G&W¹

Essentially, the attribution was questionable, referenced only by David M Walker’s notes from the 1960s and in Gomme & Walker’s Architecture of Glasgow² as ‘probably by Alexander Thomson’ and had anyway been demolished by the time the ‘List of Works’ was being compiled.

The tenement is shown above in 1970, a century after its construction. The Govan Road / Carmichael Street block was under construction in late 1870, described as ‘a handsome range’³. By February 1871, apartments were being advertised as ‘Two rooms and Kitchen, with lighted bathroom, oriel window, venetian blinds, 4 Carmichael Street’. The single shops below, at 6 and 8 Carmichael Street, were available ‘to be fitted up to suit tenants’⁴.

The tenement shows many known Thomson features, such as the window treatment of the third floor and the string course connecting the second-floor windows. However, the incised carving on the corner stonework between the second and third floors is less common (but may suggest that other unattributed buildings with similar carving may have come from Thomson’s office). Even the arrangement of the door panels seems consistent with other work produced by him.

In addition, the block appears to be the same as one constructed at the other end of Carmichael Street (Nos. 22 to 26), at the corner with No. 22 Vicarfield Street (below, seen in 1967). It is possible that Thomson’s Carmichael Street block included Nos. 18 and 20, with only the double building of Eden Villa between (although the Ordnance Survey shows Nos. 18 and 20 as having a different depth from the Thomson block).

The residents in Thomson’s blocks appear to have been a mix of owners of small businesses or retired people and later, probably, shipyard workers: at No. 4 in 1874, they comprised a curled hair manufacturer and ‘Angus Logan, portioner’. A century later, as seen here, Thomson’s Carmichael Street / Govan Road was derelict and ready to be taken down.

The adjacent Eden Villa had a more complex history.

Eden Villa

Frank Worsdall’s image from the late 1960s (above) shows the northern pair of buildings that made up Eden Villa (No. 8 Carmichael Street). The two properties always seem to have shared one name, but the southern one must have been taken down sometime after 1964.

Constructed possibly in the late 1840s, one of the houses was occupied by accountant George Wink and his family. Initially from Birnie in Moray, his 1869 obituary claimed him as ‘one of the many deserving young men brought from the north by the late James McHardy, Esq., Sheriff-Clerk Depute of Lanarkshire and placed by that shrewd and painstaking lawyer at a desk under his own watchful eye’⁵. Wink appears to have trained in Elgin. In Glasgow, he became Sheriff-Clerk Depute in the Small Debt Court. He prospered under Sheriff Principal Sir Archibald Alison (Wink named his youngest son after him), leaving by 1849 to set up in partnership as Manford & Wink, accountants, house factors, land agents, insurance brokers and agents, of 91 Buchanan Street, and later as a chartered accountant at 42 West George Street and, in a new partnership[, as Wink and Wight, accountants of 175 West George Street.

His obituary suggests that Wink was well-respected both in his profession and by a new generation of young men coming to Glasgow from the north, when a group from Moray met at the Villa to present him with a silver salver ‘as a mark of their esteem and regard’⁶.

Wink also seems to have been a keen gardener:

Early Currants.- We were shown yesterday a sample of red currants fully ripe, and of a larger size than usual, grown at Eden Villa, in the garden of Mr Wink. The same garden produced the same fruit ripe on 21st June two years since.⁷

In the 1850s, one neighbour was Alexander Miller, a spirit dealer, and his wife Margaret Neilson. She died at Eden Villa at the end of July 1853; George Wink died there in June 1869.

At least one son, James, had followed him as a chartered accountant, establishing a new partnership as Mitchell, Watson & Wink, Chartered Accountants and Stockbrokers, at 75 St George’s Place. The family continued to live at Eden Villa but, by 1872, had moved to Doune Terrace, off Great Western Road (one of the other partners lived at Kew Terrace, so may have suggested the move to a more fashionable address).

By then, either the Wink family or their neighbours had been replaced by David Kinghorn, General Manager of the London & Glasgow Engineering and Iron Ship Building Company. Established in 1864, this company, which took over several smaller yards, would construct various liners for Cunard, for service in China, and for the Royal Navy before being taken over by Harland & Wolff in 1912. Kinghorn had moved out by 1880.

In 1875, Eden Villa was listed in the Post Office Directory as a ‘Government School of Science and Art... in connection with the Science and Art Department, South Kensington, London. The school’s committee was chaired by Provost Wilson of Govan, and its membership appears to have been drawn largely from local shipbuilders, including Robert A Napier and Alexander Stephen, with A R Brown as art master and teacher.

At a prize-giving in November that year, the secretary reported that ‘of 27 pupils who had been examined, 22 were successful, and took 37 certificates and 12 Government prizes. The following year, there were 40 pupils, of whom 38 were examined, and 31 took prizes, including 20 taking ‘Queen’s prizes’. The press noted that ‘With the exception of three, the whole of the pupils being to the working class’⁸.

Financially, however, the School appeared to struggle: in 1877, a bazaar at Govan Hall was held to pay off a debt of nearly £400 and to raise funds for a purpose-built home for what was now called the ‘Government School of Science and Art’. The funds raised might have been sufficient to clear the debt but not enough to provide a basis for a new building⁹. It may well be that the Govan School closed in the face of competition from the longer-established and larger ones in Glasgow and Paisley.

One resident after that was Henry McGenn, a self-styled ‘architect, surveyor and property agent’, who lived at Eden Villa in 1884. He operated from various addresses in Govan between 1871 and 1889, promoting ‘Rood’s Terrace, 499 Govan Road, which was completed in 1876 (and which may be the ‘Three tenements in West Govan’ he was promoting the following year. However, he sailed close to the financial wind: he was sequestrated in 1879 and named at least twice for unpaid bills in 1884 and 1887. Although we know nothing of any buildings he designed, when he died in Shettleston in 1889 at 62, his occupation was still given as ‘Architect’.

The northern half of Eden Villa (No. 8 Carmichael Street) then became a restaurant run by a Mrs Gemmell, who probably lived on the ground floor with the restaurant upstairs. An 1888 chimney fire destroyed the upper flat and damaged the lower one¹⁰. Almost a decade later, painter and decorator George Gemmell lived at No. 8, while John Gemmell ran a grocery at No. 4 while living at No. 2¹¹.

Govan United Presbyterian Church

At the Govan Road end of Thomson’s tenement, on the corner with Copland Road, the 350-seater Govan United United Presbyterian Church opened in March 1847, replacing the congregation’s previous use of a schoolroom for worship. This was notable for being the first church opened after the coming together of the Secession and Relief churches¹². That church was extended with a gallery in 1857, but two decades later, James Thomson’s replacement building, seating 1,000, was opened in October 1870 (below)¹³.

Alexander Thomson might well have approved of the new building, although it came at a cost. Three years after its completion, the congregation carried a debt of some £3,000. The situation was not helped by internal divisions within the congregation, which led in 1880 to the resignation of the senior minister’s two assistants. It is possible that, by 1893, the Copland Road tenement to the church's right, also probably erected in 1870, was ready to be taken down since the Church trustees applied to build a church hall there¹⁴. But the opening of another U.P. Church nearby reduced the congregation to just over 400 by late 1899, and the new hall does not seem to have gone ahead.

The building became the United Free Church in 1900, and precisely thirty years later, the congregation united with St Columba Gaelic as St Columba’s Copeland Road. The building was demolished around the same time as Thomson’s tenement.

1. Gavin Stamp, Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson, London 1999

2. Andor Gomme & David Walker, Architecture of Glasgow, Lund Humphries, London 1968

3. Glasgow Herald, 31 Dec 1870

4. Glasgow Herald, 20 Feb 1871

5. Glasgow Evening Citizen, 14 Jun 1864

6. Glasgow Courier, 29 Oct 1850

7. North British Daily Mail., 8 Jul 1856

8. Glasgow Herald, 4 Nov 1875; The Scotsman, 25 Oct 1876

9. North British Daily Mail, 27 Dec 1877; Govan Chronicle, 4 January 1878

10. Glasgow Herald, 8 Nov 1888

11. Glasgow Post Office Directory, 1895

12. Glasgow Courier, 3 Jul 1847

13. North British Daily Mail, 6 Oct 1870

14. Glasgow Evening Post, 12 Jul 1893