Tolbooth Steeple, Glasgow

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Glasgow's Tolbooth Steeple

The Tolbooth Steeple is the most important feature of Glasgow Cross. From medieval times and until 1846, (when the railway station near George Square opened), Glasgow Cross had been the city's main intersection. Glasgow Cross is the junction of Trongate, Gallowgate and the High Street. The High Street was Glasgow's main street running from the Cathedral towards river.

The seven storey, turreted seventeenth-century Tolbooth Steeple appears almost like a clock tower crowned with a stone crown. However the Tolbooth Steeple is all that remains of a more sunstantial building which was home to the council hall and the Town Clerk's office. It also acted as the city prison.

Rather than the strict and regimental prisons of today Glasgow's debtors' prison was relaxed to the extreme. The inmates elected dtheir own provost and even produced their own regulations. In 1789 one such regulation stated that the jailor (or turnkeys) could not force people into the apartments of others who were "thought unworthy". Another amusing rule dictated that every prisoner, when released, should provide his fellow prisoners with one shilling's worth of liquor.

The Tolbooth was the place where public hangings and other punishments where carried out. It was a place where, upon a platform, public proclamations were read. As the centre of Glasgow, Glasgow Cross, was the fashionable place to be seen. The paved area infront of the Tolbooth was often populated by Tobacco Lords and the rich upper classes parading in all their finery.