What on Earth would AJ make of the relocation of the Children’s and Maternity/Neonatal Hospitals from the relatively bucolic site at Yorkhill to the sewage surrounded Shieldhall cesspit 101 years later? What novel would he write? ‘The Shitadel’?”

By Scunhur

A J Cronin, best selling novelist and doctor, lived at 29 Esmond St Yorkhill during his latter school years and throughout University studies which were interrupted by WW1 service.

Cowglen should have been the site of the new Glasgow Southside hospital campus but Cowglen is all lucrative housing now.

Here’s where it ended up:

My understanding is that Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL https://www.jll.com/en-uk/), a global real estate services company headquartered in Chicago but with offices in 80 countries, brokered a split-ownership sale between the National Savings Bank (NSB) and NHSGGC (the former Cowglen Hospital site) on one side and Persimmon Homes on the other in 2015 with sale completion in January 2016.

It was hard to get those details. The figure of £9,458,000 is touted but possibly for only one of the sale sites. https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/atos_scotland_delivery_locations.

It’s difficult to believe that protestors against site next to the huge sewage works in the (then) GGHB mock consultation on the issue in 2000 and subsequent GGHB/Lib-Lab decisions were told that the iconic NSB building could never be knocked down…until it was.

They were also told that the recently built M77 on/off ramps at Barrhead Road could never be reconstructed…until they were – for Silverburn.

Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL) are also responsible for the impending sale of The Queen Mother’s and RHSC Yorkhill, 22 acre site which is currently in ‘pre-sale’ marketing https://invest-glasgow.foleon.com/igpubs/glasgow-pitchbook/yorkhill-hospital-campus.

This might be on the market now. I’m not sure but it was not sold as of end October 2026. Ironically, the eastern border of the plot, where the main entrance and exit for the former hospital campus were, is Esmond Street, in the middle of which is the one-time family home of A J Cronin, himself a physician and author of ‘The Citadel’, a book said to have been part of the inspiration for the NHS and which excoriates medical hypocrisy and ‘private’ practice.

What does Cronin mean by ‘The Citadel?’

The entrenched medical establishment and system. The title also evokes the hidebound, resistant, and sometimes corrupt structures of early 20th-century British medicine—the “fortress” of traditionalism, professional privilege, and systemic inequities that Manson (and Cronin himself) criticizes. Cronin wrote that the book expressed “all I feel about the medical profession, its injustices, its hide-bound unscientific stubbornness, its humbug… This is not an attack against individuals, but against a system.”

The Sick Children’s Hospital moved from 45 Scott St. Garnethill to Yorkhill in 1914, the same year as AJ moved from his school at Garnethill to become a medical student at Glasgow University. What on Earth would AJ make of the relocation of the Children’s and Maternity/Neonatal Hospitals from the relatively bucolic site at Yorkhill to the sewage surrounded Shieldhall cesspit 101 years later? What novel would he write? ‘The Shitadel’?”

Scunhur