The counties around the city of Glasgow were the industrial heartland of Scotland and were pulling in population from other areas and from Ireland. The populations of Lanarkshire and Dunbartonshire each increased by more than 150 per cent in the half century to 1901. The three counties of Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and Dunbartonshire were home to nearly 40 per cent of the population of Scotland.

Lanarkshire

Airdrie, once noted as a linen-weaving centre, was, in the second half of the nineteenth century, developing into a centre of heavy engineering, with coalfields and shale-oil mines around it. Neighbouring Coatbridge was the site of some 60 blast furnaces in the 1850s and, from the 1870s, had at Gartsherrie Scotland's biggest ironworks. The area had a large, skilled working class and, significantly, Airdrie had been the first Scottish town by far to adopt the Free Libraries Act in 1853.

An Airdrie & Coatbridge Luminary and Old and New Monklands Advertiser, published by the Coatbridge printing firm of Baird & Bowskell, had a brief and erratic existence between 1847 and 1852. It campaigned for decent water supplies, particularly for those areas along the Monklands Canal where destitute squatters were living. It was relaunched in December 1851 as a weekly ‘devoted to the interests of the industrious classes’, but quickly disappeared. The Airdrie and Coatbridge Advertiser first appeared in March 1855. Bathgate and Wishaw was added to the title in 1858, and Linlithgowshire in 1883, before it settled down as the Airdrie & Coatbridge Advertiser in 1902. The founders were Archibald Lawson, a bookseller, and the printer, Robert Rae. The paper began as a monthly but was ready to move to weekly when the Stamp Act was repealed. Its appearance coincided with growing complaints against the secretive running of municipal affairs, with accusations that Airdrie was to all intents ‘a rotten burgh’ in the hands of a local coterie. The Advertiser's complaint against the existing Airdrie Herald was that it did not have enough of a local focus. The Advertiser was also strongly pro-temperance, with a zeal that the Airdrie Herald regarded as very intemperate. The Herald (a monthly, of which no copies seem to have survived), issued from the burgh council's normal printers, M. McCallum, rallied to the council's defence in 1856 but soon folded.