The classic Glasgow Memoir with a new introduction by Tom Morton This is Clifford Hanley's vibrant, unsentimental and hilarious account of growing up in the 1920s and '30s, and his later working life as a radio broadcaster and journalist. His razor-sharp observations and anecdotes cover many topics, from family life, art and showbiz to politics, sex, TB and what it was like to be a conscientious objector during the Second World War. But even the most bittersweet stories are leavened with humour, and the irrepressible Glasgow spirit always shines through. 'Hanley writes with consistent relish for his native city . . . captures Glasgow and its people nonchalantly and unfussily' – Ian Jack, The Guardian 'Like a portal into a vanished Glasgow, but one where the city, its people – their foibles, hopes, humour and warmth – are instantly familiar' – Norry Wilson, Lost Glasgow

There is a story in the name of almost every street and district in Glasgow, with some tracing their origins to pagan times, long before Glasgow could even be called a city. In this hugely informative and entertaining book, Carol Foreman not only investigates the influences and inspirations for many of the city's most famous thoroughfares, but also considers the origins of particular districts, buildings and even the great River Clyde itself. This revised edition includes new information on city-centre street names from the M8 to the north bank of the Clyde, to Glasgow Green and Bridgeton in the east and to Kingston Bridge in the west. Also included are the districts of the Gorbals, the West End and Anderston. Packed with fascinating information and enhanced with over a hundred photographs and drawings, Glasgow Street Names is an indispensable book which introduces the history of the city in an imaginative and accessible way.

Colin MacFarlane was born in the Gorbals in the 1950s, 20 years after the publication of No Mean City, the classic novel about pre-war life in what was once Glasgow's most deprived district. He lived in the same street as its fictional 'razor king', Johnnie Stark, and subsequently realised that a lot of the old characters represented in the book were still around as late as the 1960s. Men still wore bunnets and played pitch and toss; women still treated the steamie as their social club. The razor gangs were running amok once again, and filth, violence, crime, rats, poverty and drunkenness abounded, just like they did in No Mean City. MacFarlane witnessed the last days of the old Gorbals as a major regeneration programme, begun in 1961, was implemented, and, as a street boy, he had a unique insight into a once great community in rapid decline. In this engrossing book, MacFarlane reveals what it was really like to live in the old Gorbals.

This A-Z map of Glasgow is a full colour, paperback street atlas featuring 168 pages of continuous street mapping which includes coverage of: *Hamilton *Motherwell *Paisley *Clydebank *Coatbridge *Airdrie *Renfrew *Kirkintilloch *Dumbarton *Milngavie *Cumbernauld *Johnstone *Barrhead *East Kilbride *Larkhall *Carluke

A warm welcome or a blade in the guts - it's the contradiction that makes Glasgow unique. Tourists and natives alike love Glasgow's people, the social scene, the music. Millions of visitors come to the city every year and most feel safe. Yet you're twice as likely to be murdered in Glasgow as you are in London and more likely to die violently there than in Belfast, Paris or Berlin. In Murder Capital, Reg McKay, who loves the city and knows about crime from the inside, offers up forty modern murder cases. This collection of tales, all bloody, all violent and all true, graphically explores how the city has earned its unenviable title of Murder Capital of Europe. Faces with names like 'The Birdman', 'The Iceman' and 'The Equaliser' populate Glasgow's gangland - some do the killing, others are on the receiving end. In 'Kissing Cousins', two men play football with a decapitated head. 'Two Up' features the tough, lesbian prostitute who took on too much. There are deadly honey traps, a politician whose daughter is doped and slain, bodies disposed of in council incinerators, deaths that have been treated as suicides in the full knowledge that they are in fact murder victims, neighbours whose trivial squabbles erupt into death, kids in the playground who target disabled women, drunken and drug-fuelled fights that end in murder - the sordid depravity seems to know no bounds. Some of the names of those involved will be familiar but many will come as a surprise. Murder Capital highlights some of the most sickening murders to be committed anywhere in the world and presents new information pertaining to them. Murder is a very real part of everyday urban life and, if we fail to understand who kills and why, we fail to understand life. Nowhere is this more true than in Glasgow - Murder Capital of Europe.

For more than a century and a half the real story of Scotlands connections to transatlantic slavery has been lost to history and shrouded in myth. There was even denial that the Scots unlike the English had any significant involvement in slavery .Scotland saw itself as a pioneering abolitionist nation untainted by a slavery past.This book is the first detailed attempt to challenge these beliefs.Written by the foremost scholars in the field , with findings based on sustained archival research, the volume systematically peels away the mythology and radically revises the traditional picture.In doing so the contributors come to a number of surprising conclusions. Topics covered include national amnesia and slavery,the impact of profits from slavery on Scotland, Scots in the Caribbean sugar islands ,compensation paid to Scottish owners when slavery was abolished,domestic controversies on the slave trade,the role of Scots in slave trading from English ports and much else. The book is a major contribution to Scottish history,to studies of the Scots global diaspora and to the history of slavery within the British Empire.It will have wide appeal not only to scholars and students but to all readers interested in discovering an untold aspect of Scotlands past.

It is the summer of 1965 and things are looking up for ten-year-old Johnboy Taylor in the Townhead district of Glasgow. Not only has he made two new pals, but their dream of owning their own pigeon loft or 'dookit' and competing with the city's grown-up 'doo-men' in the sport they love, could soon become a reality. The only problem is that The Mankys don't have the dosh to pay for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Lady Luck begins to shine down on them when Pay Molloy, aka The Big Man, one of Glasgow's top heavies askes them to do him a wee favour. The Mankys are soon embroiled in an adult world of gangsters, police corruption, violence and crime.

In the wake of Glasgow’s transformation in the nineteenth-century into an industrial powerhouse — the "Second City of the Empire" — a substantial part of the old town of Adam Smith degenerated into an overcrowded and disease-ridden slum. The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow, Thomas Annan’s photographic record of this central section of the city prior to its demolition in accordance with the City of Glasgow Improvements Act of 1866, is widely recognized as a classic of nineteenth-century documentary photography. Annan’s achievement as a photographer of paintings, portraits and landscapes is less widely known. Thomas Annan of Glasgow: Pioneer of the Documentary Photograph offers a handy, comprehensive and copiously illustrated overview of the full range of the photographer’s work. The book opens with a brief account of the immediate context of Annan’s career as a photographer: the astonishing florescence of photography in Victorian Scotland. Successive chapters deal with each of the main fields of his activity, touching along the way on issues such as the nineteenth-century debate over the status of photography — a mechanical practice or an artistic one? — and the still ongoing controversies surrounding the documentary photograph in particular. While the text itself is intended for the general reader, extensive endnotes amplify particular themes and offer guidance to readers interested in pursuing them further.

'People of the streets... you become aware of them, and wonder who and what they are... what kind of lives they have, and what living them means...' First published in 1968, People of the Streets was Tony Parker's sixth book, for which he spent a year approaching and interviewing people in London who were living their daily lives on street corners, along gutters or in subways. With his usual skill he coaxed them out of their natural reticence, born of solitude, into an unfamiliar but hugely illuminating spontaneity. 'In [Parker's] books the strength lies in the interpretive mind of the writer... He is a sociologist studying single cases in some depth and shows qualities of imagination shared by the historian and the biographer - a mixture of intelligence, sympathy and empathy.' TLS