Thread by @YourWullie

Thomas Annan (born Dairsie, Fife 1829) was a Scottish photographer, notable for being the first to record the bad housing conditions of the poor. In 1866 he was commissioned to make photographic records of the condemned streets and wynds of Glasgow.

Thomas Annan, ca 1855

In 1811 Glasgow had a population of approximately 100k by the mid 1840s this had almost tripled to just under 300k. Life expectancy in the slums plummeted, in the 1830s and 1840s it was 27: the lowest it had been since the Black Death.

Plate 1: Old vennel off High Street 1868.

Some agricultural workers from the Highlands forced off the land moved south to city to make a new life, Irish Immigrants too.

Plate 2: Broad Close, 167 High Street, Glasgow 1868

A local writer wrote of old Glasgow in 1858:

‘The landed aristocracy were permitted, just as now, to effect clearings – systematically starve and punish by tyranny, a peasantry with a right equal with their own to live by the soil’.

Plate 3: High Street, Glasgow, 1868.

The poverty-stricken people of Ireland fleeing famine, those who built British infrastructure made up almost 20% of the city’s population. In 1851 alone nearly 60,000 immigrants form Ireland arrived in Glasgow.

Plate 4: Close no 148, High Street, Glasgow, 1868.

September 1865 John Blackie, the Provost of Glasgow City Council proposed The City Improvement Trust. In 1866 the City Improvement Act was passed.

Plate 5: Close no 118, High Street, Glasgow 1868

The clean water supply to Glasgow from Loch Katrine aimed to improve the unsanitary conditions that led to several epidemics of cholera and typhoid mid–century was by then complete.

Plate 6: Close no 101, High Street, Glasgow 1868

Along with the support of John Carrick (city architect), and William Gairdner (Professor at the University, and Medical Officer for Glasgow), the slum demolition plan included the commission to make photographic records
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Plate 7: Close no 193, High Street, Glasgow 1868

Gairdner viewed the inhabitants of the slums as ‘parasitic’, profligate class (there were ongoing council debates about whether Irish immigrants, perceived as a drain on the public purse, should be returned to their homeland).

Plate 8: Close no 80, High Street, Glasgow 1868

Annan’s job was simply to photograph the Old Town of Glasgow before it was destroyed forever. He chose to go beyond his remit of creating a record of old buildings for posterity.

Plate 9: Close no 75, High Street, Glasgow 1868

Like many other religious and relatively wealthy people in Victorian society, Annan probably felt deeply uncomfortable about the huge inequalities in society.

Plate 10: Close no 37, High Street, Glasgow 1868

Annan had a strong urge to help those living in poverty. In the early 1850s he contemplated working as a teacher in the poor areas of Glasgow.

Plate 11: 17 - 27 High Street, Glasgow, 1868

Annan's photos not only highlighted the decrepit state of the area and the squalor people lived in, but also their determination to survive and to make the best of their circumstances.

Plate 12: Close no 29, Gallowgate, Glasgow, 1868

There were two types of working class housing in this area of Glasgow: what were known as 'made down houses' and the classic tenement. Each room in the Made down houses were being used as a separate house, subdivided by partitions.

Plate 13: Laigh Kirk Close, Glasgow, 1868

These houses became money spinners for landlords, as they crammed more and more people into them. Existing tenements became more over-crowded, earth floored cellars were pressed into service as additional living spaces.

Plate 14: Princes Street from King Street, Glasgow 1868

Tenements were thrown up wherever there was space, even in the back courts of existing tenements. This maze became the notorious 'Closes and Wynds' of Glasgow: damp, filthy, disease ridden warrens where the sun never shone.

Plate 15: Close no 28, Saltmarket, Glasgow 1868

The unspeakable living conditions moved Frederick Engel's to include a quotation on them in his famous Conditions of the Working Class in England of 1844:-

Plate 16: Closes 97 and 103 Saltmarket, Glasgow 1868

"I have seen human degradation in its worst phases, in England and abroad, but I did not believe, until I visited the wynds of Glasgow, that so large an amount of filth, crime, misery, and disease existed in one spot in any civilised country"

Plate 17: Main Street, Gorbals, 1868

Continued - "Up to 20 persons, of both sexes and all ages, sleep on the floor in different degrees of nakedness. These places are generally, as regards dirt, damp, and decay, such as no person of common humanity would stable his horse in."

Plate 18: Bridgegate, Glasgow, 1899

Annan gave us the earliest comprehensive series of photographs of an urban slum - the very slums which was considered to be the worst in Britain.

Plate 19: Saltmarket from Bridgegate, Glasgow 1868

Closes were dark and narrow, requiring him to use sensitive wet collodion process in order to create negatives of sufficient quality despite low light level conditions. The procedure to create even one negative was time and labour intensive

Plate 20: Close no 11, Bridgegate 1867

The Back Wynd, 1899.
This image was most likely taken by Annan's son, John. Incredibly, in the foreground he's captured a black girl with a tartan shawl around her shoulders sitting amid rubble. Providing evidence of an African/Caribbean presence in the working classes of Glasgow

The original albums of photographs made between 1868 and 1871 were collected together, and a few copies (around 4–8) of the 31 plates were produced for the City Improvement Trust in 1871.
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Close, No. 46 Saltmarket, Glasgow 1868

Tragically, Thomas Annan took his own life on the 14th December 1887 at his home in Lenzie. Before his death he had experienced a month-long period of "mental aberration".

He was a true pioneer, a giant in the field of photography. #RIP ❤

Lastly, a shout out to @22carrots who was part of the team who put together this incredible site dedicated to Annan's work.
digital.nls.uk/learning/thoma…