{Wee Scots}[23rd August 1990]

[Redbook7:230][19900823:1341]{Wee Scots}[23rd August 1990]

1341

I was amazed to discover the other day that the population of Glasgow is under one million – well under, in fact, at around 700,000. It’s not that it matters or makes any difference – it’s rather a good size for a city – it’s just that for as long as I can remember I had thought of Glasgow as a city of many millions, comparable to or larger than (say) Manchester at c.2½ millions* – which is about the population of the whole of the Scottish region of Strathclyde, including Glasgow.

Perhaps one automatically includes more-or-less adjacent areas such as Dumbarton(?) and Motherwell in one’s image of Glasgow; or perhaps it is a survival characteristic of the Scots to seem larger than life, more important than their relative numbers in Scotland might seem to justify (c. 5 million).

*(metropolitan county)

[Perhaps this was the equivalent of Strathclyde? Strathclyde however included extensive areas of open country, including parts of the Scottish Highlands and the Border uplands, with a number of detached towns and smaller settlements; whereas the Metropolitan County of Greater Manchester ‘roughly covers the territory of the Greater Manchester Built-up Area’, whose population in 2011 was 2,553,379 (Wikipedia). A better comparison might be with the Greater Glasgow conurbation, ‘consisting of all localities which are physically attached to the city of Glasgow, forming with it a single continuous urban area (or conurbation)’ (ibid), which in 2001 had a population of 1,199,629; or ‘the Greater Glasgow “settlement” (a chain of continuously populated postcodes) [whose population estimate] in mid-2016 was 985,290 – the reduced figure explained by the removal of Motherwell and Wishaw, Coatbridge & Airdrie, and Hamilton settlement areas east of the city due to small gaps between the populated postcodes’ (ibid).]

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