Glasgow
Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most
populous in the United Kingdom. Fully named as the City
of Glasgow, it is the most populous of Scotland's 32
unitary authority areas. The city is situated on the
River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands.
A person from Glasgow is known as a Glaswegian, which
is also the name of the local dialect.
Glasgow
grew from the medieval Bishopric of Glasgow and the
later establishment of the University of Glasgow, which
contributed to the Scottish Enlightenment. From the
18th century the city became one of Europe's main hubs
of transatlantic trade with the Americas. With the Industrial
Revolution, the city and surrounding region grew to
become one of the world's pre-eminent centres of engineering
and shipbuilding, constructing many revolutionary and
famous vessels. Glasgow was known as the "Second
City of the British Empire" in the Victorian era.
Today it is one of Europe's top twenty financial centres
and is home to many of Scotland's leading businesses.
In
the late 19th and early 20th centuries Glasgow grew
to a population of over one million, and was the fourth-largest
city in Europe, after London, Paris and Berlin. In the
1960s, large-scale relocation to new towns and peripheral
suburbs, followed by successive boundary changes, have
reduced the current population of the City of Glasgow
unitary authority area to 580,690. 1,750,500 people
live in the Greater Glasgow Urban Area based on the
2007 population Estimate. The entire region surrounding
the conurbation covers approximately 2.3 million people,
41% of Scotland's population.
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