As Glasgow marks its 850th anniversary, Tui Russell traces the history of St Rollox – from its infamous chemical works with its towering chimney, to the memories its legacy evokes today.
During the 19th century, monumental, smoke-bellowing towers dominated Glasgow’s skyline. The Tennant’s Stalk chimney at St Rollox in Sighthill was Glasgow’s most iconic industrial landmark. Yet it has virtually vanished from collective memory, appearing only fragmentarily in archives and paintings.
While working as an Assistant Curator, I first discovered St Rollox through a damaged painting by Glasgow artist, Muirhead Bone.
In his grandson Sylvester’s book, I found reference to an etched impression titled St Rollox, that helped me identify the painting’s distinctive tower in the left corner.
Bleach, Cotton and Empire
During the 18th century, demand for bleach was surging owing to the reliance on cotton, a key colonial export from slave-owning plantations across the British Empire. Glasgow – ‘the second city of the Empire’ – became an industrial powerhouse, involved in the processing and exporting of cotton products.
The traditional bleaching process moved painfully slowly: fabrics lay in designated fields for months, relying on sunlight alone.
John Knox’s Glasgow Green shows faint evidence of white cloth being laid out in the background.
By the late 18th century, chemists like Berthollet had developed chemical methods to dramatically accelerate this process.
However, it was Charles Tennant who revolutionised it completely.
A former weaver’s apprentice from rural Ayrshire, Tennant recognised the limitations of existing bleaching methods. In 1798, he and chemist Charles Macintosh established a bleaching works at St Rollox in eastern Glasgow (now Sighthill).
Rather than using Berthollet’s ‘bleaching liquor’ process, they adapted it. By absorbing chlorine into dry calcium hydroxide, they created a powder called ‘bleaching salt’ – cheaper, more effective and less damaging to fabrics. They then patented the innovation in 1799.
The impact was transformative. As the chemistry historian Liebig, a contemporary of Tennant’s, observed:
“but for this new bleaching process, it would scarcely have been possible for the cotton manufacture of Great Britain to have attained its present enormous extent…Now a single establishment near Glasgow bleaches 1400 pieces of cotton daily, throughout the year.”
Tennant’s invention didn’t just accelerate production. It fundamentally reshaped global cotton trade, cementing Glasgow’s position at the centre of Britain’s industrial empire.
Higher Ambitions, Rising Concern and The World’s Tallest Chimney
The Tennant process created a toxic chemical atmosphere that leached from the factory into the neighbourhoods of northeast Glasgow. From its inception, local residents complained intensely. Some reported feeling ‘inclined to vomit,’ whilst others watched yellow fumes destroy thousands of plants and hedges.
The company’s rapid growth – becoming Europe’s largest industrial factory within 50 years – intensified these problems. Public criticism mounted, eventually prompting legal challenges to the factory’s impact on public health.
In 1844, John Tennant commissioned an audacious solution to the public outcry. Inheriting the works after his father’s death, he built the tallest chimney ever constructed.
The Tennant’s Stalk rose 435.5 feet (132.7m) into the air. It was not merely the world’s tallest chimney – it was one of the tallest structures on Earth at the time. It was a monument to industrial ambition that would dominate Glasgow’s skyline for over a century.
Hell On Earth: Inside St Rollox’s Toxic Factory
The chimney and factory became a Glasgow landmark. It was visited by contemporary writers, poets and musicians who almost universally described the working conditions as hellish.
Writer Burn captured this in his reference to a ‘devil’s den’ where workers moved ‘like spirits in the fitful glare of the furnaces’ – but George Dodd’s 1875 account is the most vivid:
“The heaps of sulphur, lime, coal, and refuse; the intense heat of the scores of furnaces in which the processes are going on; the smoke and thick vapours which dim the air of most of the buildings; the swarthy and heated appearance of the men; acrid fumes of sulphur and of various acids which worry the eyes, and tickle the nose, and choke the throat; the danger which every bit of broad-cloth incurs of being bleached by something or burned by something else […] all form a series of notabilia not soon to be forgotten […] The buildings form an immense square, from which shoot up numerous chimneys. Many of these chimneys are equal to the largest in other towns; but they are mere satellites to the monster of the place— the chimney!”
Yet alongside this horror ran a strange fascination. Contemporary accounts reveal an undercurrent of awe at the sheer scale of industrial production – a paradox common throughout the Industrial Revolution, where relentless innovation transformed cities into unrecognisable places.
This tension is captured in George McCulloch’s 1853 etching The City of Glasgow. The smokestacks of St Rollox scar the Georgian cityscape.
The factory’s expansion also reflected an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ mentality towards pollution. This philosophy directly shaped John Tennant’s decision to build his monumental chimney. It aimed to disperse toxic fumes ‘down river’ and away from the city.
Yet this illusion of dispersal masked the true scale of chemical waste St Rollox was producing – waste that would soon become impossible to ignore.
Galligu and The 100-Acre Wasteland
As the factory expanded, the Tennants diversified into soda ash production – a key ingredient in soap, glassmaking and paper manufacturing. But soda ash created a different problem: for every ton produced, two tons of chemical residue remained. This waste was known as ‘Galligu’.
The scale was staggering. Over its 100-year lifespan, the factory produced around 10,000 tons of soda ash annually. Following the era’s ‘out of sight, out of mind’ philosophy, all Galligu was dumped just outside the factory walls, creating a toxic landscape that eventually sprawled across over 100 acres and reached 24 metres deep.
When mixed with rainwater, the waste produced hydrogen sulphide – a highly toxic gas. An 1865 report captured the consequences:
“There can I think, be no difference of opinion as to the impropriety of allowing this fluid to be discharged into the river. The sulphuretted hydrogen which it evolves is not only very offensive to the sense of smell, but is highly injurious to the health, and must affect the Sanitary condition of those living along the river bank, and on board the shipping in the Harbour.”
This contamination of air, soil and water reflected broader industrial indifference to environmental and human health.
Yet whilst St Rollox poisoned the landscape, it enriched its owners. In little more than a century, the Tennant family transformed from Ayrshire farmers into estate-owning industrialists embedded within Britain’s aristocratic circles.
Their wealth financed country estates, art collections and philanthropic ventures that cemented their place among the new manufacturing elite. By the late 19th century, they moved in the same social circles as titled nobility.
But this ascent came at a cost. Thousands of workers endured low pay, long hours and constant exposure to the toxic chemicals that built the Tennant fortune – a pattern that defined Victorian industrial capitalism.
The Stinky Ocean
By the time the factory shut down in 1962, Sighthill had transformed. Glasgow relocated families from run-down city-centre tenements to new satellite towns on the outskirts, where modern housing promised hot water taps and individual bathrooms. Highrise blocks sprouted around the old factory site, bringing new life to the barren industrial wasteland.
For local children, the waste heap became a playground with its own geography: ‘the stinky ocean’ was overlooked by the area’s tallest peak, crowned ‘Jacks Mountain’.
The memory of this survives through oral histories and Glasgow Facebook groups, where kids of the stinky ocean discuss their childhoods spent on the sulphurous planes.
Dipping into the comments online, it’s clear how much of their memory of the place is linked to the distinctive and seemingly unforgettable smell.
St Rollox stands as both a monument to Glasgow’s industrial might and a symbol of its post-industrial erasure.
Today, its memory feels curiously intangible, found not in grand monuments or celebrated artworks, but in faint recollections of a sulphurous smell, or in stories of the great clouds of smoke that once hung over the city.
Few Glaswegian artists depicted the reality of industrial life; most turned instead to idealised landscapes far removed from the factories and fumes.
However, as Glasgow marks its 850th anniversary, it feels vital to also remember the less comfortable parts of its past. These stories of pollution, inequality, and environmental damage are not historical recollections, but enduring lessons about the costs of progress.
They remind us of the consequences of unchecked industrial ambition and the lasting scars it leaves upon people and the landscape.
Co-curated by members from the Woodlands community, ‘Views of Glasgow’ at the Hunterian Art Gallery combines iconic paintings of the city with objects, artworks and archival material.
Muirhead Bone’s painting of St Rollox features as part of this exhibition, which invites you to consider: What does community mean to you today — and in the future?
There are more brilliant blogs stretching right across our collection for you to explore – covering art, coins, medals and much more!
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