I found my favourite National Trust for Scotland property in this homely tenement gem
This destination is a real delight
I’m not averse to touring a castle or an estate.
It’s always interesting to see how the other half live, with their plundered treasures and vast dynasties of wiggy great-great-uncles and powdered bygone cousins.
However, I think I’ve found my favourite National Trust for Scotland property, and it does not have a drawbridge or a withdrawing room.
It’s Tenement House, and, though I lived in Glasgow for a while, and worked at the Glasgow School of Art, which is just nearby, I’d never been to this attraction.
Still, we were through for lunch, and, since the idea of the Barbie exhibition at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum wasn’t floating our boat, we thought we’d spend our morning here instead.
My husband pushed me up the steep Garnet Street, like he was a soigneur in the Tour de France. We checked in at our red sandstone destination at 145 Buccleuch Street.
There is not much to this attraction. You’ll find the Wally Dug cafe downstairs, a gift shop, and two rooms of explanatory material. This covers the history of Glasgow tenement living, from stair maintenance to steamies, not to mention leeries - aka the lamplighters. This ground floor area also tells us a bit about the focus of the exhibition - shorthand typist Agnes Toward (1886-1975).
She rented the upstairs flat from 1911 until 1965, with her mother for some of that time, before she went into hospital for the last ten years of her life.
Toward was a bit of a hoarder. Aren’t we all? I’ve never been one to consider a Swedish death cleanse.
In her will, she’d left a couple of chairs to her church, and, after her death, they were collected by their representative Sam Davidson and his niece Anna Davidson.
On this visit, Anna fell in love with the flat, which still had a hot water pig in the bed and washing on the pulley, and had remained relatively unchanged in the time that Toward stayed there. She eventually persuaded the owners to sell it to her, and she lived there for seven years as a custodian of sorts, before selling the flat to the National Trust for Scotland.
There’s not a lot to this home. There are just four rooms, but they’re magic. Everything is coothily lit by the gas lighting that the NTS installed to match what Toward would’ve had in her earlier years in the flat.
“Don’t worry about the smell,” a volunteer says, as we enter, but I enjoy the eau de gas.
There is so much pathos in here. It’s so intimate to see someone’s domestic detritus, as if they’d just popped out for the messages.
I nearly cried when I saw the raggedy and well-loved toy dog in Toward’s box bed, which is beside the original coal-fired range in the kitchen.
On the counter in this room, there are mixing bowls, a pastry brush and nutmeg kernels.
“Are these original nutmegs?” I want to ask the volunteer in this room, but I worry they won’t realise I’m joking. There are also a few of the former owner’s recipes, including one for coconut buns; gooseberry and mint, and another for something called pink pudding. It contains water, Farola - a durum wheat semolina - sugar and red jelly.
My other half recognises it, as his late granny used to make something identical, which her grandchildren called “pinky stuff”, or “stinky puff” if they were being cheeky.
Toward kept lots of recipes, and the NTS puts them out on rotation in her kitchen. She also kept notes, which details how well certain dishes had turned out.
This property reminds me of my own granny. She was born in 1901 and was a Glaswegian, who lived in a tenement flat with no bathroom. She’d go to the steamie once a week, though eventually she got a shower installed in her bedroom.
I know granny would’ve coveted Toward’s hat, which is on the dressing table, along with a bottle of White Musk perfume, in her peaceful net-curtained boudoir.
My dad’s mum was one of the last generation of hat lovers, and had about 50 bunnets, mainly berets or pillboxes, and my sister and I would do a full fashion show every time we visited her flat.
I also think of her whenever I use an eyeshadow palette. She had dozens of quarter-finished ones when she died at 94-years-old, and I have a similar weakness. All those seductively powdery jewel hues will outlive me.I’m sure granny also had a brass bedstead like the one at Tenement House, which is topped with a quilt and has a copy of Maid in Waiting by John Galsworthy on the bedside table.
However, she wasn’t quite as much of a hoarder as Toward.
At Tenement House, there are all sorts of remaining potions, including something called Zam-Buk Herbal Balm. There’s even a vintage Southall’s Sanitary Towel in a handy box, presumably for Toward’s holidays to the likes of Culzean Castle and Largs, and rolls of that horrible hard toilet paper called Izal. I’m glad that stuff went extinct.
I’m sure my granny used to have some of that, too. They were tough bottomed, that lot. None of Generation Z’s quilted bog rolls advertised by cartoon koalas.
I love details like the giant sponge in the wood-panelled bath, and the pumice stone. When did we stop using those things?
In the living room, there’s a table that’s set for tea, with a vase of honesty in the middle. There’s a score for Rock’d in the Cradle of the Deep propped on the piano, and another wee bed in a cupboard. I want to curl up there.
It’s wonderful to get a glimpse into an ordinary woman’s life. Not a queen.
There are no velvet ropes in this slice of social history.
It’s way better than a palace, and maybe even Barbies, too.
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