St Georges Mansions (Help)

[Ian C]

I have been searching for info on the St Georges Mansions (old photos ,history etc.)
but I am struggling big time !
I am hoping some of you guys might have some insight into the history of this place?
I am currently renovating one of the flats in this building and am uncovering hidden treasures every day and Im trying to get some understanding of the way people lived in these flats at the time they were built.

Ian.

[Mori]

You might get somthing here.

[ibtg]

Apologies if this has already been posted....

From ' The Buildings of Scotland - Glasgow' by Elizabeth Williamson, Anne Riches and Malcolm Higgs.

"St. George's Mansions (1900-1901) designed by Burnett and Boston for the City Improvement Trust, with two additional blocks facing Woodlands Road. They are substantial red sandstone tenements of spaciously planned flats over a cast-iron framed ground floor linked to the back court conceived as a saloon serving the shops."

Bound to be loads more stuff in the Mitchell, including the original plans, no doubt.

[Sunflower]

.... Im trying to get some understanding of the way people lived in these flats at the time they were built.

I got gripped by the same curiousity about the place I'm living. The Mitchell's set of old Post Office Directories proved very fruitful - the two main sections are indexed by street, and by surname, and the surname part includes the person's business, then you can look up the business address and see where they worked. And by to-ing and fro-ing between years you can see where they lived before they arrived in the address of interest, and where they went afterwards. Some of the directories have more of the back sections bound into them than others - in the full ones there's an amazing amount of detail of things like post offices, letter boxes, times of post collections, bus/tram times, what carters charged, public baths, schools......... some inkling of what life was like (still wish for a time machine though).

If anyone was living there in 1901 you can look up the census (the Mitchell people are very helpful), which helps sort out household, relationships, servants, otherwise you'll have to wait till next year for the 1911 one.

There's a book called Glasgow in 1901 by James Hamilton Muir (actually a pen name for three separate people if I remember rightly) that was republished as a facsimile in 2001 by White Cockade Publishing - it's a hoot - it describes the (then new) Kelvingrove Museum as 'architecture looking worried in a hundred different ways' - with stuff about the city fabric and the lives of people then. It's in the Mitchell reference section, and in most of the local libraries for borrowing (judging by the catalogue).

Though if you're tempted to dive in, be warned - can prove addictive!