| Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third
most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is located on the
River Clyde in the country's west central lowlands.
From the 18th century, Glasgow became one of Europe's main hubs
of transatlantic trade with the Americas. With the Industrial
Revolution, the city and surrounding region grew rapidly to become
one of the world's leading centres of engineering and shipbuilding.
Today, the city is one of Europe's top twenty financial centres
and is home to many of Scotland's leading businesses.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the population of Glasgow
grew to over one million and was the fourth-largest city in Europe,
after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 1960s, large-scale relocation
to new towns and peripheral suburbs, followed by successive boundary
changes, have reduced the current population of the City of Glasgow
authority area to 580,690, with 1,199,629 people living in the
Greater Glasgow Urban Area. The entire region surrounding the
conurbation covers approximately 2.3 million people, 41% of Scotland's
population.
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