Houses in Anderston

[purplekat]

Hi Reaybo

No. 41 would have been the number applied to all the 'flats' in the common stairway or 'close', (I use the term flat loosley, as already mentioned a flat in Glasgow could just be a room and kitchen and would probably been refered to locally as a 'house').  2 up would identify the actual front door.

Jean 

[purplekat]

Hi

My husband's just reminede me that sometimes downstairs flats might have different numbers from the ones above.  We lived in a close in Glasgow with eight flats, the two flats below had their own numbers while the rest of us lived at no. 39.  It a very confusing system! 

[Matt R]

Thankyou Jean, thats one more thing cleared up for me. I'm lucky to be able to talk to people with knowledge about tenement conditions etc...I have no clue whatsoever!

Do you know if houses were numbered odd side and even side like they are today??

[RJ_Paton]

Thankyou Jean, thats one more thing cleared up for me. I'm lucky to be able to talk to people with knowledge about tenement conditions etc...I have no clue whatsoever!

Do you know if houses were numbered odd side and even side like they are today??

Numbering the individual flats within a tenement is a relatively modern innovation, in a street, doors or close openings leading out to the street were those which were numbered . So you could have , for example, a shop at 37 ground floor flat at 39 close opening at 41 (with anything between 6 & 12 flats in the building) etc. In Glasgow, when numbering was made compulsory all streets were numbered odds to one side and evens to the other. The numbers were always started at the end of the street nearest to the City Centre.
In some areas (e.g. Paisley sometimes only the closes were numbered and the properties in between took the same numbers).

[purplekat]

Yes your right Falkryn, I wasn't very clear on specifying the different numbers were on the ground floor 

[RJ_Paton]

It's sometimes difficult to explain the concept of a tenement to someone unused to the idea - but Tenements (or in the modern vernacular apartment blocks) have been used in Scotland's cities for many centuries.

In many ways the overcrowding which blighted Glasgow and other cities created a very black picture of tenement living and wrongly associated it solely with poverty level living.

Granted, in the time period we are currently discussing overcrowding and a total lack of investment  by unscrupulous landlords created what we would now expect to see only in the very worst of third world slums.

[Mean_genie]

When we lived in Glasgow our address was 38 Cartside Street, along with several other families. The number was on the outside of the close, and everyone had a name-plate on their front door.

Mean_genie

[RJ_Paton]

everyone had a name-plate on their front door.

A posh close then 

Generally rather than a,b,c etc the flats would have been described as ground left, ground right, 1 up left (middle or right) etc with the determination as regards left right etc being made from outside the building

i.e. stand outside facing the closemouth and then mark the closes that way - very easy in theory but going up the stairs and the way they turned fairly gets you confused

[purplekat]

Some people were we lived put name plates on their front doors but I don't think this became part of the 'official' address.  It was very helpful though when, as Falkyrn says, you were inside the building and couldn't fathom which flat was on the left and which was on the right.

On the subject of using odd and even numbers, the places I know in Glasgow use this system BUT I don't know about old Anderston.  Try emailing the archive staff at the Mitchell Library I have found them excellent, very keen to help family historians.