Messrs Muirhead and Dunmore were mid-to-late-eighteenth century Glasgow merchants. Muirhead was a member of the short-lived ‘Pig Club’ in Glasgow, a society for merchants in the sugar trade who derived their wealth from the estates and plantations in the West Indies. Robert Dunmore does not appear to have been a member of the Pig Club but he was also a major sugar merchant, as well as trading in tobacco and cotton. He owned a number of plantations in the West Indies, including the Hermon Hill, Rhodes Hall, and Caledonia Estates in Jamaica, and was the leading figure behind the establishment of the Ballindalloch Cotton Company in Stirlingshire. Dunmore became bankrupt in 1793 with assets of over £60,000 in stock trading, land and personal belongings.

In the eighteenth century, the city of Glasgow was expanding to the west across former marshland as the rise of trade in tobacco, sugar and cotton had led to a surge of merchants wanting to settle within the city. New roads were being laid out westwards from the medieval High Street, including Ingram Street which was developed from 1772. A formalised plan for a gridded expansion similar to that of Edinburgh’s New Town was proposed in 1772 and 1781, to designs by James Barry (or Barrie) to the area immediately north of Ingram Street and west of the High Street. The latter design was adopted by Glasgow’s Council in 1782 and included a grid of streets including John Street and what would later be called Cochrane Street.

The Adam office made a series of designs for a group of buildings facing onto Ingram, John and Campbell (now Cochrane) Street for Messrs Muirhead and Dunmore, with an internal mews court for stables and coach houses. Most of the surviving drawings date from November 1792, seven months after Robert Adam died, and are therefore attributed to James Adam. They comprise grand elevations for the frontages to John and Ingram Street and a plan showing eighteen shops along the three street fronts with staircases, and, in some cases, parlours and dressing rooms, to the rear.

The designs were not executed, and the streets were developed piecemeal into the nineteenth century, with Hutcheson's Hospital built on the corner of John and Ingram Street in 1802-5 to designs by David Hamilton.

Literature:
J. Strang, Glasgow and its Clubs: Or Glimpses of the Condition, Manners, Characters, and Oddities of the City, During the Past and Present Centuries, 1864, pp. 134-5, 214; A.T. Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Volume II, Index, 1922, pp. 14, 81; T. M. Devine, ‘An Eighteenth-Century Business élite: Glasgow-West India Merchants, c. 1750-1815’, The Scottish Historical Review, Vol. 57, Part 1, April 1978, pp. 40-67; Williamson, E (et. al) The Buildings of Scotland: Glasgow, 1990, p. 104; D. King, The Complete Works of Robert & James Adam and Unbuilt Adam, Volume 2, 2001, pp. 68, 75-6; UCL, Legacies of British Slavery Database, online [accessed 27 February 2024]

Louisa Catt, 2024

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