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"Queen Victoria Drive divides this planned estate from the more heterogeneous area of Scotstounhill, which contains small
pockets of inventively designed late Victorian and Edwardian villas near Scotstounhill railway station [...] At the North
end, a row of four villas, distinguished by the unusual dormers on their wide hipped roofs, semicircular in plan on the
sides, semicircular in elevation on the front."
(Williamson, E. et al., The Buildings of Glasgow 1990: p.388).
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Title deeds relating to the villa at what is now 223 Queen Victoria Drive show that this was created on Oswald land feued
by way of Feu Disposition from James Gordon Oswald in favour of John Edwards, builder with the McIntosh Company,
dated 13 August 1886.
Edwards and his workers took just over a year and a half to complete the villa, using pale sandstone and intricate wooden
dormers, before selling to John Dugald Parker, a Glasgow tea merchant, for the sum of £560 on 14th March 1888.
Number 223 was cited as “Feu Plot III” during its formative years, and was more particularly described in the conveyancing
documents as “thirty-three poles of ground, bounded on the east by north by a road fifty feet wide leading from the Road
to Whiteinch in the Parish of Renfrew, part of the lands of, and estate of Scotstoun, Balshagray and others”
[a pole, deriving from the Latin and Anglo-Saxon terms for stake, is equal to 16.5 feet].
Note that prior to the boundary changes of 1912, Scotstoun was subsumed into the County of Renfrew. The name ‘Renfrew’ is
thought to derive from the Brythonic Rhyn (“a point of land”) and frew (“the flowing of the water”), and
refers to the junction of the River Cart and the Clyde. Boundaries changed several times to accommodate the construction
of new housing in these burgeoning areas. In his History of Ryegate, Vermont, published in 1913, Edward Miller
remarks that
"Renfrew is two miles north of Paisley and a royal burgh of great antiquity. The barony of Renfrew was the
first possession of the Stewart family in Scotland, and gives the title of Baron Renfrew to the Prince of Wales. In 1782,
it contained about 200 houses, most of which lay along a single street, with a few short lanes. In Renfrew are Yocker,
Scotstown and Gordonhill, which had very fertile soil in 1782."
(1913: p.47)
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In 1926, Yoker and that part of Scotstoun west of Queen Victoria Drive were annexed to Glasgow. At one stroke, over 6,000
Scotstoun and Yoker citizens became Glaswegian.
 
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