Renaming Glasgow streets after famous women?

Glasgow Councillor Nina Baker has put forward a motion to be discussed this Thursday (February 16 Feb) that proposes renaming streets in Glasgow named after the city’s sugar barons and tobacco lords, whose businesses were built on slavery. She suggests that instead such streets should be named after women who fought for abolition or equality more broadly.

Inspired by the renaming of streets in Spanish towns and cities, which had been named after Franco,  to instead honour famous women, Councillor Baker states in an article in the Evening Times that:

“People walk down the streets named after these famous merchants who built their fortunes, and the city’s, off the back of slavery without really realising who these people were. My proposition is to rename streets like Ingram Street, Argyle Street and Cochrane Street after women who were part of abolition movements or the suffragettes. Women such as Mary Barbour, Lady Isabella Elder and Jean Roberts would be good examples of this. This would be extremely difficult to do but it’s something I would like to put in to the city’s public eye.”

  

Credit for images: Mary Barbour (Gallacher Memorial Library, Glasgow Caledonian University Special Collections and Archives); Isabella Elder and Jean Roberts (Glasgow Museums)

Sue John of Glasgow Women’s Library supports Councillor Baker’s proposal:

https://twitter.com/SueJohnGWL/status/831135413666508801

“When we look around our civic landscapes the celebration of Scotland’s great men is apparent through statues, buildings and street names in their honour. This isn’t so much the case with women whose achievements go largely unrecognised. So naming streets after some of Scotland’s heroines is a great idea. Part of the work of Glasgow Women’s Library, as the only accredited museum dedicated to women’s history in the UK, is to tell their forgotten stories and hidden histories.”

What do you think? Who would you rename Argyll Street, Cochrane Street or Ingram after?

2 thoughts on “Renaming Glasgow streets after famous women?”

  1. Hey, thanks for featuring my motion! I really appreciate this support, but to be brutally realistic, there is so much on the agenda for Thursday that it is vanishingly unlikely this motion will get heard let alone voted upon. I just hope that this publicity means that the idea will be planted and may re-emerge some time!

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