Miss Agnes Toward was a hoarder. For more than 50 years, she filed away old household bills, recipes, wartime leaflets, letters and personal papers. She also left her Glasgow tenement flat virtually untouched. Its original gas lighting was not replaced with an electric version until 1960, almost five decades after she began living there.
The magpie habits and decorative restraint of Toward have had remarkable consequences. Her apartment and its carefully preserved contents – period chairs and beds, old theatre programmes and perfume bottles – have been transformed into a residential time capsule. This is the Tenement House, part of a red sandstone block of flats that was built in the 1890s at 145 Buccleuch Street, where visitors can experience urban life in central Scotland a century ago.
