Greater Glasgow

Greater Glasgow is an urban settlement in Scotland consisting of all localities which are physically attached to the city of Glasgow, forming with it a single contiguous urban area (or conurbation). It does not relate to municipal government boundaries and its territorial extent is defined by the General Register Office for Scotland, which determines settlements in Scotland for census and statistical purposes. Greater Glasgow had a population of 1,199,629 at the 2001 census making it the largest urban area in Scotland and the fifth largest in the United Kingdom.

In addition to being the name of this true conurbation, the term Greater Glasgow is informally (and confusingly) used to refer to the general area surrounding the City of Glasgow. Despite this, Greater Glasgow should not however be confused with the wider Glasgow City Region, which consists of Glasgow City Council and 7 surrounding local authorities in their entireties, thus including not only the Greater Glasgow urban settlement but also other settlements fully detached from it. This city-region is described as a metropolitan area by its own strategic planning authority, and is similar to the Glasgow metropolitan area identified by the European Union.

The City of Glasgow in the late 19th and early 20th centuries grew to having a population of over one million people and was the third city in Europe to reach one million, after London and Paris. The official population stayed well over one million for more than 50 years. However, in the 1960s large-scale relocation to new towns in the suburban area of the city and many boundary changes since then have reduced the population of the core City of Glasgow council area to 580,690 (August 2007).