West End Park is a place where Poor Things brings together Glasgow’s industrial environment, public leisure, and private reunion. Its paths lead Archibald McCandless to Bella Baxter and Godwin Baxter at more than one turning point, while the park’s fountain offers a small, carefully maintained pocket of freshness within a city otherwise clouded by smoke and effluent. The park is at once a real designed landscape, a stage for encounters, and a setting whose later history complicates the permanence of those scenes.

Setting and Design

The park’s steeply raked terraces were designed in the early 1850s by Joseph Paxton, also responsible for Queen’s Park and the Botanic Gardens. The slope later served a practical purpose for Percy Pilcher, who tested one of his gliders there; his experiments contributed to the development of the aeroplane, though Pilcher himself died in 1899. The park’s physical form thus belongs to more than civic recreation: its gradient became part of the history of flight.

A prominent fountain anchors the park’s public landscape. In McCandless’s account it is called the Loch Katrine Memorial Fountain, and its upward and falling jets bring a little freshness to the air. Another caption identifies the Stewart Memorial Fountain with Glasgow University on one side and Park Circus on the other. The fountain’s carved work, designed by James Sellars and erected by the Water Commissioners in 1872, includes a heron, otter, weasel, and owl associated with the islands of Loch Katrine. At its summit stands Helen, the Lady of the Lake, upright behind the prow of a boat, oar in hand. Its elaborate stone imagery turns a municipal water monument into a miniature landscape of Scottish literary and natural reference.

Pollution and the Fountain

The park first appears against the oppressive weather of a prolonged Glasgow summer. After a fortnight of hot, calm, cloudless days, industrial smoke and gases hang over the valley, producing a gritty haze that coats the surroundings and irritates the eyes and nostrils. Seeking exercise, McCandless walks beside a dull stretch of the Kelvin. At a weir, paper-mill effluent churns into heaps of filthy green froth, separated by crevices of opaque scum. The polluted flow passes through West End Park and conceals the river beneath it; McCandless imagines it continuing into the oil-fouled Clyde between Partick and Govan.

The fountain provides a pointed contrast rather than an escape from the city’s condition. Its moving water seems to freshen the air, while well-dressed adults and children parade around it. McCandless enters this public gathering but, as is usual for him in crowds, looks at the ground. His attention turns inward to Bella: he tries to recall her eye colour, but remembers instead the sound of her words. The park’s crowds and water frame a scene of solitary recollection, placing his private longing beside the polluted river’s public reality.

Meetings and Reunions

The fountain is also where memory becomes encounter. After a long separation, McCandless sees Bella again there, accompanied by Godwin Baxter. Bella stands out in vivid colour—crimson silk, sky-blue velvet, a purple toque, white gloves, and a yellow parasol with a green fringe—and eagerly holds out her hand. Baxter, bundled in his heavy cape and overcoat because his body loses heat quickly, appears profoundly diminished. His aghast expression seems to McCandless to register a vital absence, and the sight makes him fear that the need Baxter carries may not be something McCandless can satisfy. The reunion joins Bella’s apparent delight at seeing him to Baxter’s distress, making the park a meeting place where affection and apprehension arrive together.

A later scene returns the three figures to the fountain at sunset. As park-keepers blow their whistles before locking the gates, Baxter remains alone, slumped over the knob of a stout stick, his hands clasped and his chin resting on them. Bella and McCandless approach arm in arm. Though they stand close before him, Baxter initially seems not to see them. Bella breaks the stillness with a playful “Boo!” and asks whether he feels better. He manages to answer, “A little better.” The brief exchange changes the emotional charge of the scene: the isolated figure is not cured of his misery, but Bella’s return draws a small response from him.

The park recurs again in Bella’s retrospective account. After she and Godwin return to Glasgow from a world tour that included hospitals and medical lectures in fourteen capital cities, they meet McCandless while walking by the memorial fountain. The repeated setting links separate stages of their lives: the fountain is not merely a backdrop to one reunion, but a landmark to which the narrative returns when relationships have shifted and characters encounter one another anew.

Public Memory and Narrative Significance

The park also enters the book through a later newspaper reporter’s account of Dr. Victoria McCandless. Local children call her the Dog Lady because she walks around West End Park with dogs of many sizes, some bandaged. The reporter’s description places the park in the orbit of her medical work and public identity, without making it the site of her clinic: the clinic is reached from a back lane, and its rooms are described separately. This association gives the park another kind of life—as a familiar route in the memory of local children, attached to an eccentric and practical figure rather than only to the book’s romantic encounters.

Its afterlife is neither uniformly preserved nor purely picturesque. Around 1970 the authorities turned off the fountain and used the stonework as a children’s climbing frame; the sculptures were damaged. It was fully repaired and set flowing again in 1989 as Glasgow prepared to become European Cultural Capital, but by July 1992 it was waterless once more and enclosed by a high timber wall. The cycles of disuse, damage, repair, and renewed closure echo the novel’s contrast between vivid personal memory and unstable physical surroundings. West End Park holds scenes of reunion and recognition, yet even its most carefully carved monument can be silenced, altered, and remembered differently over time.