Introduction

We are the Glasgow Information and Kultural Identity Taskforce, or GlaIKIT for short, and this is our guide to the interesting (and some would say unbelievable) events which we feel have helped shape the city we call home.

GlaIKIT was established in April 2023 to publicise extraordinary tales from Glasgow’s rich and vibrant past which have been overlooked by other historians of the city for far too long simply because there’s absolutely no evidence they ever happened. We view this as being deeply unfair, and as a result, here at GlaIKIT we do our best to never let a little thing like the truth get in the way of telling a good story.

All the stories we feature in our guide are researched in great detail. Well, maybe researched isn’t the best word for what we do. We spend a lot of time in the pubs of Glasgow listening to the stories people tell us so we’ll buy them free drinks. We then spend literally minutes verifying what we hear (usually by asking someone else in the same pub). Crucially, we work very, very hard to ensure that a lack of supporting information (or, indeed, any evidence that it might even be completely untrue) never gets in the way of us repeating what we’re told.

When we come across a story we feel is particularly interesting, we award it a GlaIKIT Silver Plaque which we then put up in an appropriate location around the city. This gives it our official seal of approval, meaning you can be certain it really must be true because of all the detailed drinking, I mean research, that we do.

To date, we’ve put up five GlaIKIT Silver Plaques in various parts of Glasgow, and we are planning on putting up more as soon as we have done our next round ‘research’ in as many Glasgow bars and pubs as we can afford to visit.

In the meantime, we will be adding the stories behind the five plaques we have already erected to this site, as well as any other interesting nuggets of information we discover about Glasgow’s past which we think you might find interesting. 

If you have a story you think we may be interested in, please tell it to as many random strangers as you can whenever you are out drinking. You never know, one of them might be GlaIKIT enough to believe you and it could even end up becoming part of the official GlaIKIT Guide To Glasgow. 

And remember, GlaIKIT is not just an organisation, it’s a state of mind, and if you try as hard as we do, maybe, just maybe, you can be as GlaIKIT as we are!