West end of Monteith Row from Greendyke St.
Like Abbotsford Place south of the river, and built around the same time, 1820-30, Monteith Row was a development aimed at professional people, and for several decades it was a desirable address, with many doctors taking up residence. When a main road leading east from the cross was being laid out the obvious line would have taken it along Monteith Row to Bridgeton, but pressure from the residents led to it being diverted to Great Hamilton St (now London Rd), and the resulting chicane is still there.
January 1976
Guy McCrone in Antimacassar City, writing of a time around 1870 (Mrs Barrowfield is a doctor's widow) -
At ten o'clock she was out on the pavement in front of Monteith Row, wondering which way she should take. There was bright winter sunshine now. The Green was white with hoar-frost. Windows here and there glittered in the sunlight. Mrs Barrowfield stood for a moment looking up and down the Row itself - that handsome block of flats and front-door houses - that had, when she was yet a growing girl, been built to be the most exclusive terrace of Regency Glasgow, overlooking Glasgow's Hyde Park. But now the prestige of the Row was sinking. The industrial princes had forsaken it twenty years ago, escaping into the prevailing west wind from the smoke of these, their own factory chimneys. And the famous Green itself, that had played so great a part in Glasgow's story, was sinking too. Covered with smuts, it was fast turning into a mere lung in the centre of an ever-growing mid-Victorian city.
But Monteith Row had not yet fallen to nothing. For middle-class people who liked a well-built place and were not too snobbish - for people like old Mrs Barrowfield, in short, who put comfort and convenience before an exclusive address, it was, at this stage in its history, just the right place.
