Govanhill and Victoria Road

Govanhill Baths

Edwardian baths occupied for 140 days in 2001, still shut for work inside.

These are the Govanhill Baths, opened in 1914 as a public bathhouse, so people in these tenements could wash and swim. The building is Edwardian, category B listed, and the architect was A.B. McDonald. The closure was announced in January 2001, and that spring the neighbourhood occupied it.

Campaigners stayed inside from 17 March to 7 August, 140 days, the longest continuous occupation of a public building in British history. Sheriff officers and mounted police cleared them out, and the windows and doors were sealed with steel. A picket line stayed outside for the next year, paid for by local donations. Ownership passed to the community in 2021, and the refurbishment began that March.

The roof, the stonework and the windows were finished in 2023, so the outside is sound. The pools, the Turkish suite and the gym still need money, and the doors stay shut with no reopening date. The trust born from the occupation still works from an office across Calder Street. Look along the frontage: this is what a neighbourhood holds on to.

Govanhill Park

Carnival ground where the parade and the neighbourhood land each August.

Govanhill Park is the ground the neighbourhood takes over every August. The Govanhill International Festival and Carnival started in 2016, partly as a response to racist attacks in the area, and it now runs across sixteen days. The parade forms up at the Queen's Park gates on Victoria Road and comes down Victoria Road, Allison Street, Cathcart Road and Calder Street with samba drummers, dancers, circus performers and puppets taller than the closes, then finishes here, with music and food on the grass. Recent parades have filled these streets with people. On any other week of the year this is a green space between tenements, and that is what makes it count: Govanhill has very little shared ground, and the park is where the neighbourhood throws its own party. The organisers sum it up in a line: different languages, different music, different histories, neighbours in this place as they have always been.

Allison Street

Grocers, sweet shops and curry houses in tenements built for mill workers.

Allison Street is one of Govanhill's longest, running from Aikenhead Road to Pollokshaws Road, and the tenements around you went up for people who worked in the mills and the ironworks. By the early 1900s it had tobacconists, off-sales, dairies and cafes, and trams ran along it from 1872 until 1962. In the 1960s the Glasgow Hebrew Burial Society opened an office here, and the street filled with kosher butchers and delicatessens. The writer Chaim Bermant remembered grocers in this part of Glasgow who kept barrels of herring in the doorway, because that smell meant home.

Now the same shops serve Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Eastern European families: Moroccan soft drinks, Syrian flatbread, Ukrainian pickles and dumplings on the shelves. The Glasgow Sweet Centre sells jalebi fresh from the fryer, and Desi Curry Palace at number 144 does biryanis and butter chicken. Different cooking, the same street, the same doorways.