00:00 Hello! So today we are off to visit the Tenement House, just on the verge of Glasgow's West End.
00:05 This is owned right now by the National Trust for Scotland. It used to be owned by a woman
00:11 named Agnes Towers who lived here from 1911 to 1965, a lot of the time with her mother. So the
00:18 tenement flat that she lives in is essentially being entirely preserved. She'd kept letters
00:23 that she'd written over the course of her entire life. All that shebang. Well let's take a look
00:28 inside. Agnes Towers moved into the flat 145 Butecliffe Street aged 25 in 1911 with her mother,
00:34 where she lived until 1965 when she was taken to hospital and died 10 years later.
00:39 Born in Renfrew Street, her father died when she was three and her two sisters died as infants.
00:44 Agnes never married or had any children so this flat and the contents inside is a good
00:49 representation of how independent women lived during this time, a group in history that is
00:54 often overlooked. It was powered entirely by coal and gas until 1960 when Agnes installed
00:59 electricity. Agnes didn't have any family to inherit her possessions but she did leave chairs
01:04 to her local church. When the church elder came to collect them in 1975 he brought along his niece
01:10 Anna. When Anna learned that the house was to be cleared and modernised she convinced the owners
01:14 to sell it to her, with all possessions kept, and she did her best to preserve it. She lived
01:19 there for seven years before selling it to the National Trust for Scotland who opened it as a
01:24 museum shortly after. There are letters written by Agnes addressed to her mother from as young as
01:28 six years old thanking her for birthday gifts. From these abundance of letters she wrote to
01:33 friends as well as a decor you can kind of piece together who she was. She was meticulous at keeping
01:38 things that most other people would throw away which is what allowed this museum to flourish.
01:44 There was homemade jam found from 1920. The top two floors are still on privately and people do
01:49 live in them while the bottom floor has been transformed into a reception and cafe. Tenements
01:55 are the traditional form of urban housing in Scotland, usually built with sandstone with two
01:59 or more floors and each floor having one or more separate residencies with a shared communal
02:04 entrance. These varied in size and appearance depending on the wealth of residents. Working
02:09 class tenements only had two rooms known as room and kitchen and these often housed large families
02:14 with up to eight people in one room and over 30 people sometimes sharing a toilet. This is actually
02:19 the kind of flat that I live in and there are still toilets in some of the communal cupboards.
02:23 Middle class tenements usually came with four or more rooms and had tile closets to signify the
02:29 wealth. Many of the larger houses are now occupied by students where a good few of them share one
02:34 flat. Tenements are so monumental to Glasgow's culture it's visually obvious the impact they've
02:39 had on architecture and the way we live even today but because of how common they are it's so easy to
02:44 forget this. The tenement house is open to the public Monday to Sunday between 10am and 5pm.
02:50 I found it to be a good accessible way to learn more about Glasgow's social history,
02:54 the reality that normal people lived pre, during and post world war two. It's also a great way to
03:00 to see how the city has evolved on a macro scale and how individual people played a role
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