Broad Street

Once a huddle of overcrowded tenements and Common Lodging Houses, shadowed by the grim tower of the Tolbooth, Broad Street - site of the weekly market and public punishments from the 12th-to-19th-centuries, has a dark history.

Two weavers, John Baird and Andrew Hardie, were amongst many poor people executed by the Mercat Cross, here – hanged and beheaded in 1820 as Traitors. Their crime? Asking for the right to vote.

It was also the unlikely site of a spate of mass haunting by the ‘Millhall Ghost’ – a white garbed figure which plagued the families of miners from the nearby Millhall Colliery, during the General Strike of 1926. Mobs of local people prowled the street, looking for the spook.

What they planned on doing if they actually caught the spook is anyone's guess!