Life & Work Magazine
Life & Work Magazine


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An important focal point

SERIES

THE development of the area south of Cathcart, as dormitory suburbs for people who worked in Glasgow, and who looked to the city centre for many of their communal needs, started with the opening of the Cathcart District Railway in 1886, extended in 1894 to form the Cathcart Circle.

Cathcart became a modest shopping and community centre, with the large engineering works of G and J Weir. To the south and west were dairy farms with a little village at Netherlee which in the 1850s had eight houses and a population of 56. In the mid-1890s the Lanarkshire and Ayrshire Railway was completed passing through this farmland, and in about 1903 a station on that line was opened at Muirend. Glasgow Corporation opened an electric tramway in about 1910 to a terminus termed ‘Netherlee (actually in ‘New Cathcart’). Further south was still rural, with scattered dairy farms.

After the First World War there was a serious unemployment problem, and Glasgow Corporation organised ‘jobcreation’ schemes, including extension of several tram routes, including the extension of the ‘Netherlee’ route to Clarkston, which involved widening an existing country road. The new tram service encouraged the construction of large numbers of red-sandstone terraces on the former farms, the materials for which came in by rail to Muirend Station.

This new suburb needed a church, for the nearest existing churches were in Cathcart and at Merrylee. According to the Jubilee History of Netherlee Parish Church ‘The provision of facilities for public worship had been under consideration for some years’ before discussions were held between the United Free Church of Scotland and the Church of Scotland ‘which resulted in the area (Netherlee) being assigned to the United Free Church’. The Church Extension Committee of that Church accordingly purchased a site at the corner of Ormonde Avenue and Ormonde Drive, and began to build a hall there in 1926, paid for from an insurance settlement following a fire in College and Kelvingrove United Free Church in Kelvingrove Street. A ‘minister in charge’, the Rev Thomas Currie was appointed, and visited all the houses in the district. The first permanent minister was appointed in September 1929. Two months later the United Free Church and the Church of Scotland were merged. The new charge was accordingly named Netherlee Church of Scotland, and a building fund was started.

By June 1932, despite a serious trade depression, enough money had been raised to start construction of the present church.

This was designed by Stewart and Paterson in ‘modern Scots Gothic’ style, and built of red Dumfriesshire sandstone.

In the later 1930s more than 2000 houses were built to the south and east of the church After the Second World War Stamperland church was built to serve the southern part of that development.

The Third Statistical Account of Renfrew and Bute commented in 1959 that the area was ‘predominantly clerical, professional and commercial, house-owning and house-proud, with a large proportion of children and young, who are well-looked after materially, socially and educationally’.

In this context it is hardly surprising that Netherlee Parish Church became an important focal point for its community.

Throughout its life the congregation has been a notably lively and energetic one.

The church is obviously held in much affection; one symbol of which is its collection of stained-glass windows by some of Scotland’s finest stained-glass artists, including Gordon Webster, William Wilson, Linda Cannon and Sadie McLennan.

It is very sad that today so many new housing developments are deprived of the spiritually and socially enlivening and enriching influence of church congregations and their buildings, places in which to offer hospitality to all.

This article appears in the August 2020 Issue of Life and Work

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This article appears in the August 2020 Issue of Life and Work