Life in a Tenement House

As many of you know we are in the UK for a few weeks, and are currently in Scotland. To be more specific we are in the city of Glasgow, the second largest city in Scotland, after the capital, Edinburgh. We were in Glasgow for only a couple of days, but we did a bunch of stuff. My second favorite thing we did was go and see an old Tenement house, which is sort of like the 1800’s version of an apartment building. Most people might think they were mostly for poor people, but actually it was primarily middle class people living in them. Many of them, including this one, even had running water and indoor toilets! The house was rented by Agnes Toward, who came to own the house after her mother died. She changed almost nothing about the house, only putting electric lights in in the 1960’s, when most of her neighbors had them by the 20’s!

The ground floor of the building has the gift shop, ticket counter, and two small rooms with information about the house. A very convenient thing is that Ms Toward was very tidy and kept copies of everything. Letters, receipts, catalogs, she kept them all, which allowed the museum to know what the house would have probably looked like when she was living there. When we first walked upstairs the first thing I was hit by was the smell. Ms. Toward had put electric lights in shortly before she went to a care home where she died ten years later, but the museum had changed the lights back to gas, rotten egg smell and all. The doorbell was very interesting to me, instead of a button it was a knob you pulled, which rang an actual bell. Not including the large front hall, the house had four rooms, a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, and parlor. I first went into the bathroom since it was immediately on my right. It had a multitude of chemical bottles on the window sill, although it never mentioned why. The room itself was quite large, with a good sized tub and no shower. The kitchen was the next room, and probably the largest. It had a bed hidden in a cupboard where Ms. Toward slept, and was where she likely spent most of her time. The bedroom was never actually used by Ms. Toward, which I thought was very confusing until Mom explained why. It was cheaper to not pay for heating it when she could sleep somewhere that she would pay for it anyway, and she may have even rented out the room. To me the parlor was the least interesting room. It had a closet bed like the kitchen, probably used as a guest room, but other than that not much was in the room that was of interest or significance to me.

The trip to see Ms. Agnes Toward’s house was interesting, and a great glimpse into how people lived in the 19th and early 20th Century’s. After going through I wonder if someday a child in the 22nd century will walk through where we used to live, and wonder how we got by with having to manually hit a light switch, or dealt with such small TVs. By far my favorite thing was seeing how she did laundry, with a washboard to wash them, and then two rollers to wring them out before hanging the clothes out on drying racks by the ceiling. It was an amazing and thoughtful experience which I’m sure everyone who goes there enjoys greatly.