Glasgow Style

The best-known traditional art from Glasgow is the Glasgow Style, especially the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School. The signature piece is the Mackintosh rose: a stylised white rose in stained glass, stencil, embroidery, or furniture inlay.

It mattered because Glasgow was a shipbuilding and engineering city that also built a modern design language of its own. Mackintosh, Margaret Macdonald, and the Glasgow Girls took Celtic line, Japanese simplicity, and Art Nouveau and made something local. The rose, the tall ladder-back chair, and the stained-glass panels were not tourist ornaments. They appeared in tea rooms, houses, churches, and the Glasgow School of Art. They said the west of Scotland could be industrial and elegant at the same time.

Other living crafts in the same community are Paisley pattern shawls from nearby Paisley, decorative tenement close tiles, hand-made quaichs, and tartan weaving. The Mackintosh rose remains the piece most people still recognise as Glasgow’s own.