Townhead today includes the Cathedral, the Provand's Lordship and the nearby Barony Church on Castle Street, Strathclyde University, and Parson Street.

This part of Glasgow dates to the city's foundations by St Ninian, before the fifth century. St Mungo, patron of the Cathedral, arrived in Glasgow around 540 and was consecrated Bishop of Strathclyde by an Irish bishop. Today's cathedral, sited along the Molendinar Burn, is the fourth to be built on the site of Mungo's seventh century wooden church.

Mungo did not, according to tradition, select this site himself. Rather, stories say that he found St Fergus dying by the roadside and placed the old man gently in an oxcart. Mungo told the oxen to take the cart wherever God wanted. The oxen brought the cart to rest at the place blessed by St Ninian about 200 years before. There Mungo buried Fergus and built the church.

Near the Cathedral stands the Provand's Lordship, built in 1471 to house a hospital chaplain. Mary Queen of Scots may have visited in 1567 whilst arranging for her husband Darnley's transfer to Edinburgh during his illness with pox. Today the building survives as the oldest house in Glasgow and, with the Cathedral, comprises the only remnant of the City's medieval town. It serves as a museum of domestic furnishings.

By the 1820s, the only noteworthy building in the area of Parson Street was the Deaf and Dumb Institute, located where the St Mungo's Retreat now stands. But this changed quickly. Over the next 20 years, Glasgow industry expanded and offered employment to great influxes of workers: from the Highlands, after the clearances; from Ireland, to escape the famines; from throughout the British Isles.

Townhead's developing economic importance to the City may be seen in the Garnkirk & Glasgow Railway, which started operating in May, 1831. Track (4' 6") ran between Monklands coalfield and Townhead station, with steam and horse haulage (3). The area housed foundrymen, clay pipe makers, locomotive builders, potters, glassmakers, timber merchants, distillers, coopers, haulage contractors and railwaymen, workers in St Rollox Chemical Works, and all the folk who met the community's needs for food, drink, and clothing.

Generally, the area was one of Glasgow's poorer communities, but pockets of homes for professional people allowed an easy walk to the city centre. Over time, the area's economic activity diminished so that it was hardly taken into account during municipal studies of the 1960s.

Renewal of Townhead and construction of the motorway caused wholesale demolition of rundown tenements. A few remain, rebuilt in the aftermath of 1960s and 1970s projects.

Today the neighborhood is included with Area 9 Wards, which consist of Bridgeton, Dalmarnock, Dennistoun, Gorbals, and Townhead. The Area Officer, Matt Henderson, has an office at St Mungo's Academy, Crownpoint Road Glasgow G40 2RA. Phone 0141 551 9721 Fax 0141 554 3932 At present, the locality is grouped with the Merchant City (21) and is represented on the Council by Baillie Gordon Matheson, Labour.

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