In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a hospital was more likely to be an almshouse or school than a hospital in the modern, medical sense. Christ’s Hospital, for example was one of the five royal hospitals founded in the sixteenth century to house and educate the poor children in the City of London. In Scotland, Heriot’s Hospital in Edinburgh was founded as a school in the seventeenth century. This short post looks at another example – Hutcheson’s Hospital in Glasgow.

Recently I was sent an enquiry about the listing of someone’s address in 1921 as 133 Hospital Street, Glasgow. They wanted to know what that meant. At first I thought it was rather a daft question, Hospital Street is just the address where the person lived. I think perhaps they actually meant why was it called Hospital Street. There are quite a few Hospital Streets and Hospital Roads in Britain, as well as Workhouse and Union Roads – named very simply because they led to a hospital or workhouse. The name ‘Spittal’ Street also suggests that there was once a hospital in the locality, probably of monastic origins.

Hospital Street in Glasgow no longer exists. It was in the Gorbals, and I was not aware that there had never been a hospital in the vicinity, so why was it called Hospital Street? The reason will be obvious to anyone who knows Glasgow well, but for those who, like me, are not so familiar with the city and its history, I thought it was worth explaining. Thanks to the National Library of Scotland’s online maps collection, it was an easy enough question to answer. They have digitised many Town Plans, including Flemings map of Glasgow of 1807. This showed that the area here belonged to Hutcheson’s Hospital.

Hutcheson’s Hospital was not a hospital in the modern sense, but an almshouse and school, named after its founders Thomas and George Hutcheson, and established in 1641 in the Trongate. It moved to new premises in 1805. This handsome building in Ingram Street was designed by David Hamilton, and is now called Hutcheson’s Hall. Initially this housed both the elderly men and the school pupils, but as the school grew, a larger building was needed. A new, separate school was built in Crown Street, south of the Clyde in the Gorbals area, in 1841 designed by Robert Craig. The Hospital owned a large tract of land there, as marked on Fleming’s map. They may well have owned more, and had partly funded the construction of the bridge over the Clyde there.

When the school moved here the area was just beginning to be developed southwards, providing the workforce for the industries nearer the river. The map shows the many factories, cotton mills, and ironworks located along the grandly named Adelphi Terrace to the east of Hutcheson (later Hutchesontown) Bridge. The bridge shown on the map below was the new stone bridge built in 1829-34 replacing earlier wooden bridges.

Hospital Street had been built up with tenements by the 1850s, along with three substantial churches. This being an area dominated by industry and business premises, it was mapped by the Goad Fire Insurance Company. Only the west side of the road was covered, where it backed on to the railway lines. The extract from the map below shows the stables, garages and small businesses that occupied the railway arches in the mid-1930s.

Hospital Street was within the Gorbals Comprehensive Development Area. The area of Hutchesontown was rebuilt with high-rise tower blocks designed by Robert Matthew and Basil Spence alongside low-rise development, the first to be built and completed in the late 1950s. In the 1960s the development was highly acclaimed for its brutalist architecture, but a combination of factors meant that by the 1980s the towers were in a poor condition. The Hutchesontown tower blocks were demolished in the early 1990s.

Sources: National Library for Scotland online maps collection; Canmore; University of Glasgow, Hutchesontown development; Hutcheson’s Grammar School ‘our history’.