Springfield Rd at the Gallowgate.
886 Springfield Rd. I had thought this little cottage, so incongruous among the tenement blocks, was worth recording, so I was pleased to find that it features in SCRAN: This was probably the last single-storeyed hand-loom weaver's cottage in the east end of Glasgow. Built in the late 18th or early 19th century, it probably owed its survival to its conversion into a shop. It probably originally contained two dwellings. It was of rubble construction, with a pantile roof, and apart from the insertion of shop windows, was little altered externally. The east end of Glasgow had a large population of hand-loom weavers until the 1820s and 1830s when power-loom factories supplanted them. Most of their houses appear to have been two-storeyed. Pantiles made from local clay were common in the area. I think the newsagent’s shop was still open in 1976, though in a diminished state compared with the 1967 John Hume photo, but sadly the cottage and the adjoining block have since been cleared and replaced with new housing (which I must say seems a very decent modern interpretation of the traditional Glasgow tenement).
The rear of the weaver’s cottage, with Newlands School across the road. Nepus gables are normally placed centrally, and the asymmetrical position of this one, coupled with the lack of symmetry in the front roofline, suggest that the cottage would originally have been almost twice as long,. ‘Single-storeyed’ isn’t quite accurate, as it obviously had one-and-a-half storeys. The tileless condition of the rear roof and the general dilapidation imply that this charming little cottage was not long for this world.
