John Anderson FRSE FRS FSA(Scot) (26th September 1726 – 13th January 1796) was a Scottish natural philosopher and liberal educator at the forefront of the application of science to technology in the industrial revolution, and of the education and advancement of working men and women. He was a joint founder of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and was the posthumous founder of Anderson's College (later Anderson's Institution), which ultimately evolved into the University of Strathclyde. Anderson was born at Rosneath, but was orphaned at an early age and spent most of his youth living with an aunt in Stirling.

John Anderson was a contemporary of Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, James Boswell and Samuel Johnson, and was to make his name not as a philosopher, but as a pioneering educationalist. His passionate belief that working class people had the right to be better informed about the technology that was rapidly engulfing their lives informed all his actions, and indeed provided the guiding ethos for the creation of the city's second university - 'Knowledge of the laws would allow the processes to be improved, making the men more intelligent, therefore better workers and less of machines, and more of thinking human beings'. In this regard, his ideas are just as relevant today as the were in 200 years ago.

Lord Todd's Bar is now a friendly student bar situated in the heart of Strathclyde University's student village. The building is also home to the Village Office, a laundry, Santander bank and Aroma catering facility.

Barony Hall, also known as Barony Church, is a red sandstone Victorian Gothic church located on Castle Street in Glasgow, Scotland, near the Glasgow Cathedral and the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Together with the Glasgow Cathedral and oldest surviving house, Provand's Lordship, which are both near Glasgow's historical High Street, Barony Hall establishes its place as a city's heritage and a fine example of Gothic architecture. The Old Barony Church was built as a part of the Barony Parish in Glasgow by architect, James Adams. It opened in 1799 and served ceremonial and other congregational purposes. The replacement for the old building was designed by J.J. Burnet & J.A. Campbell and raised in 1889, and incorporated architectural artifacts from the old church and a number of other relics. The New Barony Church was acquired by the University of Strathclyde in 1986. It was restored to its former glory by 1989 and is now utilized as a ceremonial hall, as well as serving other university purposes, known as the Barony Hall.

Prometheus stands next to the John Anderson Building, named after the Scottish philosopher whose love of practical physics was at the forefront of applying science to technology in the Industrial Revolution. The building currently houses the Physics and Civil Engineering departments, as well as the Science Mechanical Workshop. Being placed within a University, Prometheus has unfortunately become the target of pranksters. The pointed hand is often found clutching a beer can, while one brave soul tried to place a pair of trousers on it. Sloan originally studied interior design at the Glasgow School of Art, and was employed by the BBC as a set designer in the 1970s. Since then he has been a lecturer on Art and Design, as well as having a number of public commissions, mainly for work on grilles and gates, such as those of the Lord Provost House St. Nicholas Gardens.

This listed building took nine years to complete, starting in 1903 when King Edward VII laid the foundation stone. It’s renaissance style reflects the civic pride of Glasgow at the time and once built, was the largest educational building built in the UK and possibly Europe. Despite being the oldest building on campus, the Science and Engineering departments based here have embraced new teaching styles with the first interactive classroom in the UK that used ‘who wants to be a millionaire’ keypads for students to get involved during their lectures and 3D prototyping facilities for students from the department of Design, Manufacture and Engineering Management.

John Maclean (14th August 1879 – 30th November 1923) was a Scottish schoolteacher and revolutionary socialist of the Red Clydeside era. He was notable for his outspoken opposition to the First World War, which caused his arrest under the Defence of the Realm Act and loss of his teaching post, after which he became a full-time Marxist lecturer and organiser. In April 1918 he was arrested for sedition, and his 75-minute speech from the dock became a celebrated text for Scottish left-wingers. He was sentenced to five years' penal servitude, but was released after the November armistice. Maclean believed that Scottish workers were especially fitted to lead the revolution, and talked of "Celtic communism", inspired by clan spirit. But his launch of a Scottish Workers Republican Party and a Scottish Communist Party were largely unsuccessful. Although he had been appointed Bolshevik representative in Scotland, he was not in harmony with the Communist Party of Great Britain, even though it had absorbed the British Socialist Party, to which he had belonged. In captivity, Maclean had been on hunger strike, and prolonged force-feeding had permanently affected his health. He collapsed during a speech and died of pneumonia, aged just forty-four years old.

The first ever wind-powered electrical generator, created by the Scottish engineer and physicist James Blyth (1839-1906). Blyth was the son of an innkeeper, but took advantage of a scholarship to gain a good education and an academic career. In 1887, while a professor at Anderson's College in Glasgow (an ancestor of the modern Strathclyde University), he constructed a windmill attached to a dynamo to light his cottage in his home village of Marykirk. He may have been inspired to use wind to generate electricity by negative comments on the subject by his fellow Glaswegian, the now more famous physicist William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin. He offered to allow his current to be used to light the main street of the village, but superstitious local residents reportedly considered the mysterious electric light to be "the work of the devil"! Blyth patented his windmill design, which had a vertical axle and cup-like structures to catch the wind, as GB19401 of 1891.

Anderson was an enthusiastic sympathiser with the French Revolution. He sent a prototype of his ingenious 'air-pump canon' to the French National Convention in Paris, where it was deployed in battle by the Republic.