The Tolbooth Steeple is one of the oldest structures still standing in Glasgow, and for the better part of three centuries it was also one of the most feared, sitting at the heart of the city's system of justice and punishment at Glasgow Cross. Completed in 1634 to a design by John Boyd, the full Tolbooth building combined civic administration with imprisonment in a single structure: the Town Clerk's Office and Council Halls occupied part of the building, while the city jail filled the rest, an arrangement that put the machinery of Glasgow's local government and the machinery of its punishment under one roof.
That jail held more than ordinary criminals. Women and men accused of witchcraft were imprisoned in cells within the Tolbooth's own clocktower while awaiting trial, kept in the same building where the clock that regulated the city's daily life ticked on above them. Executions of every kind — murderers, thieves, and those convicted of witchcraft alike — were carried out publicly outside the Tolbooth's doors, a punishment witnessed by whatever crowd the city's population and appetite for spectacle could draw on any given hanging day.
The building's civic and judicial functions eventually moved elsewhere as Glasgow grew, and the main Tolbooth structure was finally demolished in 1921, a casualty of the same wave of Victorian and early twentieth-century redevelopment that reshaped so much of the city centre. What survived was the steeple alone, tall and narrow, still standing today at Glasgow Cross as one of the most recognisable fragments of the city's older self, a lone tower marking the site of a building that no longer exists but whose grimmer purposes are still remembered in local history. A replica of Glasgow's historic mercat cross was added nearby in 1929, restoring at least a symbolic sense of the crossroads' original civic centrepiece.
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