Glasgow Corporation Waterworks
United Kingdom legislation
Glasgow Corporation Waterworks and its successors have provided a public water supply and sewerage and sewage treatment services to the Scottish city of Glasgow. There were several schemes in the early part of the 1800s, with the Glasgow Company which was established in 1806 pumping filtered water from the River Clyde into the city. The Gorbals Gravitation Water Company was established in 1846, and brought water from reservoirs to the south-west of the city. However, an outbreak of cholera in 1848/1849, in which 4,000 people died, concentrated the minds of Glasgow Council, and in 1855 a scheme to use water from Loch Katrine, 36 miles (58 km) to the north, was authorised. The work required at Loch Katrine was quite modest, and the major construction work was the building of an aqueduct to carry the water to the city by gravity.
The civil engineer John Frederick Bateman managed the contract, but the engineer for final section into the city was James Morris Gale, who became the Engineer in Chief for the Glasgow Water Commissioners when the project was completed in 1859. He oversaw the development of the system, with levels in Loch Katrine being raised and a second aqueduct being constructed, until he retired in 1902. Extra water was obtained from Loch Arklet in 1914, when a dam and tunnel into Loch Katrine were completed, but a similar scheme to impound water in Glen Finglas and feed it through a tunnel to Loch Katrine was delayed by the First World War, and was not implemented until 1965. A new treatment works at Milngavie costing £120 million was completed in 2008 and opened by Queen Elizabeth.
Glasgow also invested in sewerage, with sewage treatment works opening at Dalmarnock in 1894, Dalmuir in 1904 and Shieldhall in 1910.
“Glasgow Corporation Waterworks” enters the record as united Kingdom legislation. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Glasgow, Corporation and Waterworks can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“Glasgow Corporation Waterworks” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Glasgow, Corporation and Waterworks provides the most credible route into that argument.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q56281517. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1806, 1846, 1848 and 1849.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Glasgow Corporation Waterworks”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Glasgow Corporation Waterworks primary sources, Glasgow Corporation Waterworks archive and Glasgow research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Glasgow Corporation Waterworks”?
- What terminology or title could unlock a more precise catalogue search?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Glasgow Corporation Waterworks” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.