On a fine May day in 1765, James Watt, technician to Glasgow University, was out for a Sunday walk along Glasgow Green. He had been pondering steam engines, and how to make them efficient enough to really be practical. Suddenly, the idea came to him. He made prototypes, and after some initial difficulties, met English tycoon Matthew Boulton who financed Watt's engine in 1775.

The Industrial Revolution had begun.

At the same time Dr Samuel Johnson - author of the English language's first dictionary, a man who took great delight in ridiculing of the airs and graces of the Scots he met in London after the union of parliaments - made the tongue-in-cheek quote "The noblest sight a Scotsman sees is the high road to England." There was no doubt changes were happening. Scots were flooding into London, Scots were working with the English to build the British Empire, and the Age of Industry was about to stamp itself indelibly upon the landscape - most especially in the form of the city of Glasgow and its surrounding working towns.

It is northward along this 'noblest' road one must travel to reach Glasgow, through high moors, passing the small town of Lockerbie which will forever remember the crash of a jumbo jet onto the town near Christmas 1988, the result of a terrorist bomb, killing people in the town as well as everyone on board. Prior to this, Lockerbie had the dubious distinction of being the site of Britain's worst ever rail crash, although there are some positive transport links with the area: the inventor of the pedal bicycle, Kirkpatrick Macmillan, came from around here. The road rises over high moors before passing into the watershed of the River Clyde and descending to Glasgow. The countryside immediately south and east of Glasgow is possibly the least interesting in the whole of Scotland, an area of old mining villages in the moors where time has stood still since the closure of all the mines. Yet even here there are beautiful spots, such as the waterfalls on the Clyde and the UNESCO World Heritage site New Lanark. Aspiring football managers may fancy sampling the water, as this was the area that gave birth to Matt Busby, Jock Stein, Billy Shankly, and Alex Ferguson.

Glasgow. The biggest city in Scotland. The only real city in Scotland. A city which until recently bore an unenviable reputation for poverty, violence, sectarianism, and grimness, but which has reinvented itself, sandblasted the grime from its beautiful Victorian centre, and opened trendy shops and clubs - the world's first post-industrial city; although underneath the veneer of style, the majority of Scotland's social problems still seethe. You are more likely to have a laugh at a Glasgow funeral than an Edinburgh wedding, the saying goes, which is just as well - your chances of being murdered are higher than anywhere else in Western Europe. Although Edinburgh is Scotland's capital of law, politics and church, Glasgow is the business centre, the centre of music, arts and media, the centre of the national sport, football, and has a swagger and energy which is lacking in its east coast rival. A little bit New York to Edinburgh's Washington DC.

Glasgow started as a cathedral town, and for over 1000 years was a pleasant village with one main street at a ford in the River Clyde. It started to grow after the 1707 union of parliaments gave it access to England's colonies in America and the Carribean. Its position gave it an advantage over other west coast ports in England, and Glasgow merchants grew rich on the backs of African slaves in the cotton trade. The American War of Independence put an end to that, but the second, and far more spectacular, spurt of growth of the city was not far away.

Britain was the world's first industrialised nation, the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. It was a time of invention - not just James Watt's improved steam engine - and an agricultural revolution was taking place at the same time, replacing medieaval farming methods with scientific ones, enabling more food to be grown to feed the populations of the growing cities. Glasgow, lying on a navigable river with large coal deposits, grew rapidly first as a trading centre, but ultimately as a manufacturing centre, becoming famous for the production of ships and railways. At one time, one half of all the iron ships afloat in the world were built on the Clyde, and more than half the world's locomotives. This was the boom time for Glasgow, with merchants making vast fortunes and raising impressive buildings, and immigrant workers flooding in from the cleared Lowland farms, the oppressed Highlands, industrialising Ulster, and famine starved, Catholic Ireland. But times changed, and the Victorian heavy industries Glasgow was founded on - and still identifies with - went into a slow decline. Slum overcrowding was a national disgrace, and by the Second World War, plans were made to move large sections of the population. Glasgow, since the 19th century, has beeen a solidly socialist city - it is the birthplace of the British Labour party - and the city council thought in collectivist terms, making high-handed decisions for large numbers of people. New towns were built in the countryside around Glasgow, people were moved out to them, and new light industries encouraged to base themselves there rather than in Glasgow. Vast peripheral estates were also built, on a scale initially unknown in Europe outside of the Soviet Union. Part of the city centre was bulldozed to build a motorway. Incredibly, there were plans afoot to destroy every single old building in Glasgow, replacing everything with tower blocks as per the utopian, brutalist vision of postwar architecture - but the city simply ran out of money, to the relief of anyone who enjoys Glasgow's fine Victorian architecture. People were happy to move out of their overcrowded, unsanitary tenements to tower blocks with inside toilets, but Glasgow had run out of work and these shiny new estates became a symbol of failure. In recent times, right-wing politicians have tried to punish Glasgow's left-wing bias by cutting the city off from the tax base of its affluent suburbs in local government reorganisation.

With the new parliament in Edinburgh, and the continued shrinking of Glasgow's population, perhaps the axis of Scotland will return to the east coast where it was before the Industrial Revolution, Glasgow will once again be a small, green, pleasant city, and people will view the city with a population of over a million as an historical abberation. Yet Glasgow, battered by fate, manages to fight back, with a tough durability and a witty wisecrack. The creation of bold new buildings - like the recenty opened Glasgow Science Centre, unique in having the world's only fully rotating tower - shows that Glasgow is far from done yet. Glasgow reinvented itself in the 1980s as the first trendy post-industrial city, and if its people can continue to laugh and crack a joke at what life throws at them, it can face any future changes with impunity. Check out more on Glasgow from the city walks page.