In January 1889 the City of Glasgow acquired the Gartloch Estate for the purpose of building a hospital.

[1] It accepted its first patients in 1896 and was officially opened as the Gartloch District Asylum in June 1897.

[2] It served as an emergency hospital using hutted accommodation during the Second World War and joined the National Health Service in 1948.

[2] Robin Farquharson was an inmate at the hospital at the time he joined the Scottish Union of Mental Patients in the early 1970s.

[4] In 1993, the hospital was used in the BBC television series Takin' Over the Asylum starring David Tennant and Ken Stott where its distinctive French Renaissance style architecture served as the exterior of the fictional St. Jude's Hospital.