55.8610° N, 4.2512° W
GLASGOW
Most Famous People Born in Glasgow, United Kingdom
- Notable people
- 3,305
- Peak decade
- 1950s
- Median birth year
- 1943
- Most distinctive
- Football 3.8×
A football city, almost unhealthily so. More than forty per cent of Glasgow's notables are footballers — Old Firm shaped a city's entire celebrity economy — and the next bench down is the actors and singers of a Scottish stage tradition that has produced James McAvoy, Robbie Coltrane, and Mark Knopfler. The 19th-century Clyde shipbuilding boom is the peak that most of the rest of the bench grew out of, and there is also an unusually deep comedy lineage from the working men's clubs that the strict statistical panel doesn't capture but that gave the world Billy Connolly.
One face per decade — the most globally famous figure born in Glasgow during each.
Notable Births by Decade
Click a decade to filter the list below. Peak: 1950s with 337 notable births.
What Glasgow Is Known For
Click any row to filter the list of people below.
Football is Glasgow's biggest profession — 42% of all notables (1,378).
Glasgow over-indexes on football — 3.8× the global rate.
Glasgow under-produces writer — only 0.6× the global rate.
Profession Mix Over Time
Each band shows a profession family's share of Glasgow's notable births by decade. Hover the chart for the breakdown at any decade.
- Sports
- Politics & Law
- Film & TV
- Writing
- Science
- Music
- Other
- Filtered to 1810s Clear ×
John A. Macdonald
1815 - 1891
Allan Pinkerton
1819 - 1884
William Muir
1819 - 1905
James Young (chemist)
1811 - 1883
Thomas Thomson (botanist)
1817 - 1878
Robert Angus Smith
1817 - 1884
Walter Hood Fitch
1817 - 1892
Arthur MacArthur Sr.
1815 - 1896
George Gardner (botanist)
1812 - 1849
Andrew Ramsay (geologist)
1814 - 1891
John Muir (indologist)
1810 - 1882
Archibald Smith
1813 - 1872
James McCulloch
1819 - 1893
Arthur Macalister
1818 - 1883
Marion Kirkland Reid
1815 - 1902
Walter Montgomerie Neilson
1819 - 1889
John Murdoch (literary evangelist)
1819 - 1904
Isaac Buchanan
1810 - 1883
Patric Park
1811 - 1855
William Miller (poet)
1810 - 1872
William Thompson Russell Smith
1812 - 1896
James Robertson Anderson
1811 - 1895
James Maclaren
1818 - 1892
James Swan (mayor of Brisbane)
1811 - 1891
William Cross Yuille
1819 - 1894
Jane Cross Simpson
1811 - 1886
William Taylor (Victorian politician)
1818 - 1903
Daniel Galbraith
1813 - 1879
Hugh McInnes
1815 - 1879
Robert Gibbons
1811 - 1898
William McGill (politician)
1814 - 1883
John MacFarlane (New South Wales politician)
1813 - 1873