The project uses three main sources of information on Glasgow entrepreneurs and their business locations.
- Post Office Directories
- Valuation Rolls
- Census
Post Office Directories
Post Office directories (PODs) provide a commercial listing of all business addresses in Glasgow, listed by business name. Since the Post Office needed to deliver mail to the right location, there was a strong incentive to update the information and record location accurately, and they were wholly revised and reprinted annually.
Post Office directories are available for other cities in Scotland and England, but the information and format varies. The Glasgow PODs contain particularly valuable information on individual business partners and street level microgeography of the city.
Valuation Rolls
Valuation Rolls name the tenants/occupiers and rental values of commercial, residential and mixed premises, listed by address. They were compiled annually and subject to scrutiny from rent payers. We see evidence of many adjustments made when occupiers successfully appealed an assessment. Rental values of commercial premises are indicative of entry costs to business. Used comparatively, they may also be used to gauge size and success of the business.
Censuses
The decennial population Censuses allows us to deduce demographic characteristics of the entrepreneurs who ran Glasgow’s businesses, including age, migration status, sex (useful where we have no forenames), and family circumstances. We use the I-CeM dataset transcription available through the UK Data Archive.
We also make use of declarations of workforce size extracted from the Census by the British Business Census of Entrepreneurs project. This enables us to gauge the size and success of some businesses in a different way.
