EVEN while the Napoleonic Wars were raging, Glasgow was still developing as a city, and one distinguished visitor left her own record of how the city was progressing.

Dorothy Wordsworth, sister of the poet William, is most famous for her travel writing, especially Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland AD 1803, which recounts the six weeks she spent travelling more than 600 miles around the country with her brother and their mutual friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

It is written as a diary and travelogue and she was not one to gild the lily: “The suburbs of Glasgow extend very far, houses on each side of the highway – all ugly, and the inhabitants dirty.

“The roads are very wide; and everything seems to tell of the neighbourhood of a large town.

“We were annoyed by carts and dirt, and the road was full of people, who all noticed our car in one way or other; the children often sent a hooting after us.”

The trio reached Glasgow and took lodgings at the famous Saracen Head Inn before traipsing through the city the following morning: “The Trongate, an old street, is very picturesque – high houses, with an intermixture of gable fronts towards the street.

“The New Town is built of fine stone, in the best style of the very best London streets at the West End of the town, but not being of brick, they are greatly superior.”

Dorothy Wordsworth was most taken with her experience of observing women washing and bleaching linen on the banks of the Clyde.

She wrote: “In the middle of the field is a wash-house, whither the inhabitants of this large town, rich and poor, send or carry their linen to be washed. There are two very large rooms, with each a cistern in the middle for hot water; and all around the rooms are benches for the women to set their tubs upon.

“Both the rooms were crowded with washers; there might be a hundred, or two, or even three; for it is not easy to form an accurate notion of so great a number; however, the rooms were large, and they were both full.

“It was amusing to see so many women, arms, head, and face all in motion, all busy in an ordinary household employment, in which we are accustomed to see, at the most, only three or four women employed in one place. The women were very civil.”

That description of activity by the Clyde brings me neatly to the extraordinary work of James Cleland (1770-1840) who was one of the most influential figures at the start of Glasgow’s boom in the 19th century, most notably extending and improving Glasgow Green near the Clyde.

He is most renowned by historians as a statistician and writer of historical tracts, but it was as a builder that Cleland first made his indelible mark on Glasgow.

He was born in the Trongate to a businessman who supplied wooden packing cases to the merchants of the city.

The family were respectable but not wealthy, though his father ensured James received a solid education and sent him to London to learn more about trade and business.

It obviously benefited Cleland because when he returned from London at the age of 21, he became his father’s business partner and soon made their firm the best and biggest packaging manufacturer in Glasgow.

Cleland first showed his flair for figures with his pamphlet entitled Tables for Showing the Price of Packing-Boxes of Sundry Dimensions and Thicknesses, which became the standard work of those involved in the trade.

Moving into property development, Cleland quickly made his mark and at just 24 he was elected “collector” to the Incorporation of Wrights and two years later, he was elected Deacon of the same craft.

All the while prospering in business, Cleland was a member of the Town Council by 1800, became chief magistrate of the Gorbals by 1804, the same year as his plan for a new church, St George’s, was accepted by the council and in 1806 he became a bailie and was authorised to superintend the building of a new tollhouse.

The following year the council adopted his plan for a new grammar school, and for the next few years there was hardly a building in Glasgow that was not created without his scrutiny.

Cleland was only just getting going, however, and in 1814 he was unanimously elected to the office of Superintendent of Public Works, a position he held for 20 years.

According to the Statistical Accounts of Scotland, his own projects included the Cattle Market, the Candleriggs Bazaar, the Broomielaw Bridge, the rebuilding of the Ramshorn and St Enoch’s churches, and the formation of Parliamentary Road.

It was with Glasgow Green that Cleland made his biggest mark on Glasgow.

With unemployment growing among weavers in particular – their story will be told over the next fortnight – Cleland came up with the idea of using unemployed men to greatly improve the Green, and then carried out his plan of making sewers and a parapet wall in front of Monteith Row, covering the Camlachie Burn, and draining and levelling Calton Green and part of the High Green.

This work resulted in the addition of several acres of grass land to the city’s own public park, among the first in Europe to be so

designated.

All the time Cleland was writing treatises on statistics, especially details of the population of Glasgow – he was in charge of three censuses which became the template for census-taking across the UK and parts of Europe. He also wrote Annals of Glasgow in 1816 and The Rise and Progress of the City of Glasgow in 1820, which are invaluable sources for anyone interested in the city’s history.

In 1826, in recognition of his fame as a statistician, Glasgow University conferred on him the honorary degree of LLD, and on his retiral from office in 1834, his fellow citizens presented him with the property at the corner of Buchanan Street and Sauchiehall Street, later known as The Cleland Testimonial for which a public subscription raised the huge sum of £4600.

James Cleland died in 1840 after a year-long illness, and perhaps ironically, his final published work was A Historical Account of Bills of Mortality and Probability of Human Life in Glasgow and other Large Towns. Even as he was dying, his concern was for Glasgow and his fellow citizens.