Fourth article in a series about Strathbungo’s motor garages.

The Regent Park Motor Garage was founded in the earliest days of motoring and survived for nearly seventy years, and yet information is limited, photos extremely rare, and it has left almost no trace.

The garage was opposite Fenwick’s on Nithsdale Street. The early history of this plot of land is described in the recent post about 2 Nithsdale Street and Duncan Brown’s photograph of Robert Bryce’s plumbing business.

Junction of Pollokshaws Road and Nithsdale Street c 1895 by Duncan Brown. Robert Bryce’s plumbing business abuts the tenement gable end on the right. Source: Glasgow School of Art Archives

Bryce’s building was taken down around 1899, and a planning application was submitted that year to open a shopfront in the end gable of the adjacent tenement, and extend the shop over the railway line where it passes under Nithsdale Street.

Composite of existing (left) and proposed (right) elevations for the tenement at Pollokshaws Road and Nithsdale Street, 1899. Note the additional detail on the chimney breast, which is still visible. Source: Glasgow City Archives

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Second in a series about Strathbungo’s motor garages.

This is the story of the buildings at 39, 43 and 47 Nithsdale Street, of which the former survive, though not in their original form. No 47 was demolished in 2017.

Regent Park Dairy

Regent Park Dairy, Nithsdale Street, with passing fire appliance. Date and origin unknown

David Imrie ran a dairy and stables from the buildings, using 47 as his house. He was the fourth son, and fifth child, of Alexander Imrie and Janet Millar of Norriestown Farm, Thornhill, but grew up on Birkenshaw Farm (now buried beneath Eastwood Health Centre, near Williamwood Station). He married Barbara Mackie in Crossmyloof in 1865, and then lived in Strathbungo, at Lorne Cottage. However his dairy was in the Gorbals at that time, so we don’t know if that was a name for the house and dairy. The date and architect of the buildings are unknown, but they appear on Bartholomew’s map of 1876, and he was advertising for a dairymaid there in 1883.

Any dairymaids available? First reference to Regent Park Dairy, Glasgow Herald November 1883. Source: British Newspaper Archive

In the 1891 census he is listed at 47 Nithsdale Street with his wife, eight children, and five staff members (a dairymaid, servant, shop keeper and two van drivers). That’s a lot of people for a small house.

David died in 1909. His son Alexander became a dairyman in the Gorbals, but not at Strathbungo, and a David remains listed in the valuation roll until at least 1915, so it isn’t clear who ran the dairy after his death. It might be his second son David, who was a veterinary surgeon and hose shoer in Dennistoun in 1901.

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