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#glasgowhistory

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By the 1940s, 20 million packets, all made in this factory, were being sold each year around the world. In the 1970s, they ramped up their advertsing with an advert featuring the Miseries, cartoon characters drawn by Roger Hargreeves, the creator of the Mr Men, and featuring the slogan 'Askit fights the Miseries'. Running unchanged until the mid-1990s, this was one of Britain's longest running and most successful advertaing campaigns.

The former Askit factory on Saracen Street in the Possilpark area of Glasgow. Designed by William B. Whitie, it was built in the 1930s. Invented by the Glasweigian pharmacist Adam Laidlaw in the late 1890s, Askit Powder contained a mix aspirin, phenacetin and caffeine, and was sold as a cure-all for many types of minor ailments such as headaches and colds.

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I love how this mid-Victorian church on Tharsis Street in the east of Glasgow is set into the slope of Garngad Hill. Originally, St Rollox Church, in 1894, it became home to the St Rollox branch of the Foundry Boys Religious Society, an organisation created in the Olympia Music Hall in the Cowcaddens area of the city in 1865.

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For the duration of the festival, this model village complete with traditional black houses, was inhabited by gaelic-speaking highlanders employed specifically for this purpose. The site of this villiage was alongside the River Kelvin, just upstream of the Prince of Wales Bridge, and it's still marked to this day with a memorial stone carved with the name An Clachan and the date 1911.

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The toilets closed in the 1980s, and fell into disrepair before being saved and converted into a cafe in the early 2000s. The name of the cafe, An Clachan, means village in Gaelic and comes from the model highland village set up as part of the Scottish National Exhibition that was held in park in 1911 (about the same time the building itself was first constructed).

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If you're familiar with Kelvingrove Park in the West End of Glasgow, you're probably familiar with this cafe, but did you know that the building itself started life as a public toilets? Built in 1913 as part of improvements to the park, it was designed to serve kids playing in the nearby playground, with the arched doorway on the right leading to the boys' toilets, and the one on the left to the girls'.

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A ghost building on Robertson Street in Glasgow. I love all the different phases visible in the stone and brickwork, especially the window at the top right which is made from blonde sandstone and then has been half filled with red bricks and half with concrete blocks, presumably at different times. This effect may have taken between 100 and 150 years to create.

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From here, Twomax produced their upmarket knitwear which was sold by the likes of Selfridges, House of Fraser and Harrods. Their products were seen as being particularly fashionable in the 1960s and 1970s, but by the start of the 1980s the business was in decline and it soon closed. The building remained and is currenty being converted into residential housing.

The former Twomax factory on Old Rutherglen Road in the Gorbals area of Glasgow. Originally built as a cotton mill in 1817, it was taken over by Twomax, a Glasgow-based knitwear manufacturer, in the 1920s. Twomax was started in a disused pub in the Bridgeton by Hugh McClure and Donald McIntosh (the two Macs from which its name was derived), before moving to this location.

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Such tramways should not be confused with the metal tramlines on which the city's trams once ran on. However, they're both part of the same rich seam of technological developments going back as far as Ancient Greece (where they were used a paved trackway to help move boats across the Isthmus of Cornith) from which tramways, tramlines and railway lines all evolved to help make wheeled transport more efficient.

An iron kerb protector and tramway on Waterloo Lane in central Glasgow. Designed to make it easier for horses to pull carts up hills on cobbled streets, these metal ones were an updated version for the older stone tramways, which can still be found on some Glasgow streets.

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#glasgow #glasgowhistory #tramway #ironwork #kerbprotector #railwayhistory #metaltramway #trams
#streets #glasgowstreets #streetlife #streetphotography

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While I can't find a reference to it, I seem to remember that there is a clause in the title for this land that means it can never be built on, which may explain why it survives to this day when the last burial in it took place in 1857. Running parallel to Keith Street is Purdon Street, which another remider of the life of John Purdon as it's named after him.