Castlehead - Latter 19th Century

Latter 19th Century

Then, in the 1850s, there was an unlikely coal mining enterprise on the lower slopes of the hill, roughly where Low Road stands today. This was short-lived and the developers and land speculators of the time began looking for other uses for a large area of land close to the centre of a Victorian boom town. Their solution was to gentrify the name to Castlehead and give the area a new image. As Paisley developed rapidly, the overcrowding and unhygienic conditions of what became known as “the dirtiest town in Scotland” drove the merchant classes outwards and upwards. Social pressures overcame the problems of an unsuitable building site and “upward mobility” came to Paisley a hundred years before the phrase was coined.

William Wotherspoon (or Witherspoon), the feudal superior, began breaking the land into feus in 1861. By 1863, the Paisley Herald noted that another family residence had been erected in the area and that more were being considered. The writer saw this as excellent news for the local building trades and urged townspeople to visit this scarcely known vantage point to admire the splendid views -- “the town lying like a panoramic picture at your left and from all directions”. He went on: “We would cordially recommend all who may find it convenient to do so to visit the ground, especially those who wish to erect a family residence”.

Paisley Museum and Art Gallery has a map dated 1860 on which Wotherspoon and his agents, Reid and Henderson, writers, extol the virtues of their new venture. The map shows Castlehead with the housing plots marked and conforming fairly accurately to the layout that has survived to the twenty-first century. A note in the bottom right corner states “The ground is beautifully situated, commands the finest views around Paisley, has fine southern and western exposures, is within a seven-minute drive of the railway station, and the soil is of the richest nature”.

A year later, the Paisley Herald reported that the area of Castlehead had been “tastefully mapped out into nearly 60 feus. Several villas in plain and ornate styles are being erected at prices varying from £1000 to £2000 and more are expected to follow.”

To what must have been the satisfaction of the newspaper, the development gave fully 20 years’ work to the Paisley building trades. Three of the main contractors endorsed the new development by choosing to live there – John F Baird at 9 High Road, William Taylor at 10 Low Road, and George G. Kirk at 34 Main Road. A map of 1896 shows the whole plot neatly laid out and all the 1940 houses in place.