Concretopia
Page 15
The story of Glasgow’s attempts to tackle its housing crisis is one of the more extreme episodes in the history of postwar rebuilding, and marks the start of a radical new wave of redevelopment. In the fifties, tenement life for people like Danny hadn’t changed much since the Industrial Revolution first gripped the Clyde valley: whole families still lived in single gas-lit rooms, side by side with a disturbing complement of bugs and rodents, with no hot running water (and often no cold water indoors), and a single outside toilet shared by several households.
Eddie McGonnell, another former Gorbals resident I met, is regularly invited by local schools to describe the reality of tenement life to the children. He clearly revels in the shocked reaction he gets.
‘It was an outside toilet; your mum was bathing you in the sink,’ he recalled. ‘It was like Steptoe and Son! You made sure the curtains were shut, the street was just outside – literally. And don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t criticise the old Gorbals because that was what people were used to. When you see programmes about Newcastle or whatever, these were the kinds of tenement dwellings people went into, you didn’t know any better. You look back now at the state of the backs where the bins were …’
Eddie made a face, shuddering at the memory. By the mid-twentieth century, the Gorbals had become the most overcrowded and impoverished area in western Europe. A succession of planners and politicians were clear about one thing: the patient was in need of radical surgery if it were to survive. Two opposing plans, both produced in 1946, were drawn up to tackle the problem. Robert Bruce, the City Engineer, proposed that the city’s entire population should be rehoused within its own boundaries, in modern high-rise flats. Meanwhile, two outsiders brought with them the fashionable garden city vogue for green belts, neighbourhood units and decentralisation. Naturally, Sir Patrick Abercrombie, the establishment’s favourite planner, was one of them, assisted this time by a young Robert Matthew, in the days before his triumphs at the LCC and the Festival Hall. In their Clyde Valley Regional Plan, the pair advocated ‘a general policy of housing decentralisation’2, noting that the area had ‘reached saturation point as regards population’.3 A substantial chunk of the city’s population should be (in the fashionably posh planning lingo of the day) ‘decanted’ to three new towns, at Cumbernauld, East Kilbride and Bishopton. The historian Miles Horsey claimed that ‘to cleanse the region of its Industrial Revolution legacy, it would be necessary not just to demolish the slums but also to reduce Glasgow’s population and political dominance’.4 This was to be engineering in the widest sense: not just of new buildings and towns, but of social and political reality.
Robert Bruce’s more modernist plan was sidelined, and Sir Patrick prevailed once again. The Clyde Valley Regional Plan estimated that some 250,000 Glaswegians would need rehousing beyond the borders of the city. It was not a popular recommendation among the local political classes. ‘The Glasgow view was that it would be unnecessary to lose any population or industry at all,’ recalled one of the proponents of the scheme many years later.5 Even so, the new town of East Kilbride was given the green light in 1947 – although not before facing the full fury of Glasgow City Council at the public enquiry. It was now that the planners’ most exciting new toy – the comprehensive development area, used so effectively in Blitzed cities such as Plymouth and London – came into play. In Glasgow, the mania for creating these radical CDAs reached a peak that was unmatched anywhere in Britain: an astonishing 29 were declared, as a prelude to the razing of thousands of acres of decrepit cityscape for the construction of a better future. As far as the planners were concerned, very little in Glasgow was worth preserving. Factories, for example, were a dangerous menace, dotted about as they were in the most densely populated areas. In 1961 a fire destroyed 50 tramcars and a sawmill. ‘When the fire was at its height, showers of sparks landed on tenements in London Road and Mauldslie Street and families were ordered to leave,’ the Herald reported. The provost of Stranraer, Mr R. E. Caughie, expressed his opinion that the perils of mingling heavy industry with housing were clear: ‘Again last night it was demonstrated that there could not be a fire in an industrial building in Glasgow without half of the population having to be evacuated.’6 John Maclay, Secretary of State for Scotland, backed Sir Patrick’s strategy to the hilt, seeing the benefits not just for the population but for business too: ‘I feel sure that Glasgow industry will follow the inevitable trend in London and other great cities and move out, with those workers, to the new sites with better surroundings.’7
The most comprehensive of the development areas was the Gorbals, a working-class Catholic and Jewish immigrant district that ran along the south bank of the Clyde near the city centre. It had a colourful and fearsome reputation, stoked by the 1935 novel No Mean City which had luridly mythologised its notorious ‘razor gang’ battles. The architectural guidebook The Buildings of Scotland noted that ‘the great development schemes of the 1950s and 1960s were aimed as much at rehabilitating the Gorbals’ reputation as at physically improving it.’8 So extensive was the Gorbals, and so large the problem, that six of Glasgow’s 29 CDAs were declared on this 2,000-acre area alone: Hutchesontown-Gorbals (split coolly into areas A, B, C and D), Hutchesontown-Polmadie (E) and Laurieston-Gorbals. This massive, ambitious project was to become one of the defining architectural stories of the era.
Hutchestontown-Gorbals A, the smallest area, would be tackled first by an in-house team of city planners and architects. Robert Matthew’s new firm, RMJM, was selected to tackle riverside area B, while area C, was given over to a rather more flamboyant character: Basil Spence. Attitudes to these first three schemes were mixed. The Herald reported that of the 26,000 or more people affected by the proposals, ‘56 percent would prefer to be rehoused there after the redevelopment of the area has been completed,’9 noting grimly that in fact only 38 percent would be. Rowland Nicholas, the city surveyor of Manchester, had prophesied back in 1946 that ‘many families, particularly where they had no young children, would prefer to accept flat accommodation in the area in which they had spent their lives.’10 But for the 16,000 Gorbals residents who were to be displaced, estates were being proposed further out, on the suburban fringes of the city.
By the late fifties, area A was complete. A low-rise estate largely consisting of pitched-roofed Scandinavian-influenced three-storey flats, it wouldn’t have looked out of place in any of the early new towns. But the need for high density in the city forced the planners to look for more innovative solutions than this form of polite modernism. As early as 1946 ideas of a more radical high-rise Glasgow had been in general circulation. The letters pages of the Herald were full of people vigorously arguing the pros and cons, few as vehemently as one garden city enthusiast who signed his or herself ‘Town and Country Planning’:
‘Fifteen storeys! Let us be practical. How many wirelesses, how many shouting youngsters? … After all, it is human beings who are expected to live in the multi-storey flats. … Human beings are not bees or ants. Why in the middle of the twentieth century should they be denied their simple wish for a little home of their own on God’s earth? Letchworth and Welwyn have shown what can be done.’11
Yet the editorial line of the paper mirrored the authority’s enthusiasm for high density living, enthusiastically endorsing high flats for all but those families with young children. ‘There are, in fact, many classes of tenant to whom a flat is not merely tolerable, but desirable,’ went one leader, offering the startling apologia that ‘planners have to reconcile so many claims, technical, economic, topographical, and aesthetic, in designing our new communities that they can hardly be blamed if there is a risk that the convenience, or even the comfort, of the ultimate householder may be lost sight of.’12
Both Robert Matthew and Basil Spence saw high-rise as an essential part of the schemes they were building in the Gorbals. For the residents, watching Matthews’ and Spence’s titans grow up in their midst was a memorable, if divisive sight. Danny Gill, a trainee build
er at the time, remembered the construction work: ‘When I was growing up, doing my apprenticeship, I could see all these tower blocks going up and I didn’t like it. I thought to myself, those poor people stuck up there, you know. It broke up generations of families that lived there. They all knew each other.’ The author Colin MacFarlane recalled his neighbour Mrs Carey pointing to the newly built blocks and saying ‘Look at them – how dae they expect people tae live there? They’re no real hooses, they’re boxes.’13 Yet others had a more hopeful view: ‘We watched the multis grow and each of us dreamed of occupying one some day.’14
Robert Matthew’s blocks under construction in Hutchesontown-Gorbals area B, 1961. © Glasgow City Archives
‘I’ve got an old photograph and it’s me leaning against a car,’ recalled former Gorbals kid Eddie McGonnell, ‘and I’m only about four or five years of age, and in the background you can see the construction of the flats. So my street was running right down onto where the new flats were built.’ He was one of the lucky 38 percent to be rehoused within the district. The scale of the changes was breathtaking. The Herald’s 22 September 1960 issue alone featured a list of compulsory purchase orders for Hutchesontown-Gorbals that ran to four broadsheet pages of closely-set notices, listing the imminent demolition of over 60 tenement buildings and hundreds of individual properties.
Recently refurbished, Robert Matthew’s blocks have been rebranded ‘Gorbals Riverside’.
One sunny summer afternoon I took a walk east along the south bank of the Clyde to see what remained of Robert Matthew’s Hutchesontown-Gorbals B estate, now quaintly renamed Gorbals Riverside. A lot of work has gone into cleaning up the dirty old river in the last decade, and there is little evidence of its industrial heritage. On my way I passed the mosque and City of Glasgow College, and as the path narrowed the riverbanks became thick with an immigrant weed, pink-flowering Himalayan Balsam, and the drooping branches of old trees. The rough concrete parapet was blotched with moss and lichen, like an old gravestone. I passed a heavy iron weir and ducked under a strange overgrown metal gangway, with the formal parkland of Glasgow Green on the opposite bank. With not a soul to be seen and the river as still as glass, it felt less like the setting of No Mean City than a sequel to Don’t Look Now. Then the path abruptly opened out and there it was: area B of the Gorbals comprehensive redevelopment, crowned by four sturdy 18-storey slab blocks turned at an angle to the path like flowers seeking the sun.
Robert Matthew, like Frederick Gibberd, was of the generation who’d been to Sweden and had seen first-hand those exciting ‘point blocks’. His take on the idea is one of the last bastions of this once new Gorbals. Renovated by Glasgow Housing Association in the late noughties, as part of a scheme that also included a glorious seaplane service from the Clyde to Oban and Tobermory, the once rough concrete and brick gables with their asymmetric windows have been re-clad in silver fibreglass – with surprisingly handsome results. All over the curiously irregular frontage, glossy glass screens have replaced wired glass balustrades, their complex pattern due to the mixed nature of the flats within. The Buildings of Scotland accurately describes the estate as ‘an undemonstrative, friendly-looking mixed development’.15 Mixed because between the blocks snake a variety of buildings: terraces of three-storey maisonettes, a few random shops, and a single-storey flat-roofed pub – The Riverside Tavern. It’s one of those slightly alarming pubs where everything apart from the battered doors has been bricked up. It’s hard to tell if it’s been armoured against the outside or from what lay within. I wasn’t tempted to find out. Still, after the eerie quiet of the walk up, it was a relief to see people everywhere, of all ages and races, on phones, pushing prams, jogging, lugging shopping, taking photographs for art school projects, doing precisely those things that architects are always so keen to show on their drawings. Amid all this bustle in the car parks, plazas and pathways, I spotted a number of gaunt old men making their way to the tavern. These were the relics of the old Gorbals, moving like ghosts through this regenerated landscape to a refuge that hadn’t changed for decades. The presence of two pubs on the new estate had initially been a source of controversy: some of the original residents due to be rehoused petitioned the council to ban every single one, while others were heartbroken to see the Gorbals’ 48 legendary pubs replaced by a measly nine.
These were the first tower blocks in the Gorbals. Michael Noble, Secretary of State for Scotland, opened them in November 1962 with the promise that ‘here the world is going to see the real “Miracle in the Gorbals.”’ His speech was followed by ‘a burst of applause from those watching, cheering when the interior lights were switched on and startled comments when a maroon-type rocket was fired with a loud report and a falling cluster of stars’.16
‘The techniques of building, through the imagination of the architect, point the way to a new level of human environment,’ wrote Robert Matthew in The Times. ‘This age-old business is taking another exciting leap forward.’17 Hutchesontown-Gorbals B was that leap. Among the first to move in were young married couple Joe and Mary Davie, and four decades later they were still in the same flat. Mary described her feelings when they arrived at their new home: ‘I was delighted to be moving into a brand-new house. We moved here from a room and kitchen, and I was very pleased with my new inside bathroom and fitted kitchen. Back then the rent was very high but I felt it was money well spent.’18 But the size and layout of the flat have become difficult for them to manage: ‘We have two sets of internal stairs in our flat,’ said Joe, ‘and you have to go up both to get from the living room to the front door. Mary, who is disabled, finds it very difficult to manage the stairs and get about the flat in general.’
Joe and Mary had witnessed the arrival of tacky pitched roofs, plonked incongruously onto this most flat-roofed of estates in the eighties. They have now been dispensed with. Also gone are the original high walkways: these days Gorbals Riverside is accessed only at ground level. I’d checked out the drawings for the estate in the library a few days before, and it looked to me that many of the horse chestnuts, maples, planes, elder and whitebeam originally planted here had been lost to new car parks. Yet despite all the work, the fabric of the estate has changed little since it was designed by John L. Paterson for RMJM in 1957. The angling of the blocks for maximum sunlight, the variety of homes on offer, the green spaces, the amenities, the nursery school and playgrounds – all these spoke of a compassionate and thoughtful vision, and one that remains surprisingly intact, considering the ups and downs of the Gorbals.
Despite cladding and some remodelling, John L. Paterson’s design for Robert Matthew in 1957 largely holds today.
Ups and downs certainly describes the fate of the Gorbals’ most famous postwar development, Hutchesontown-Gorbals C – also known as Queen Elizabeth Square; or, more poetically, as the Queenies; or, in the black humour that so characterises Glaswegians, as Alcatraz, Barlinnie and Sing-Sing. Nothing now remains of these extraordinary structures, once situated next to Robert Matthew’s estate, and described in The Buildings of Scotland as ‘the most complex of all the city’s multi-storey blocks, powerful in silhouette … elevation and detail but brutal as an environment, with dark and dramatic spaces between the strongly-curving concrete pylons at the level of the square’.19 They may be long-gone, but their shadow still falls on the area – as does that of their architect, Basil Spence. The Herald characterised this ‘sprucely bearded’ architect as ‘an Edinburgh man with a golden tongue, and a light, almost frivolous manner, which he uses as a sort of cloak’.20 Perhaps the most famous anecdote about Spence recounts his eccentric pitch to the housing committee for this job: ‘On Tuesdays, when all the washing’s out, it’ll be like a great ship in full sail!’ In the words of one of the corporation architects present, this was ‘a patter merchant if ever there was one!’ – but his ambitious plan was waved through.21 The minutes of the housing committee recorded the less-than-ringing endorsement from the Department of Health for Scotland, who had
decided not to raise any objections to the plans only ‘on the understanding that the scheme was an experimental one and would not create a precedent’.22
I met Eddie McGonnell, a former resident of Queen Elizabeth Square, one evening in the Waterfront Bar in Laurieston, the western end of Gorbals. The place had a vaguely Wild West atmosphere, which the barman fed by putting Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring of Fire’ on the jukebox three times in the space of an hour. Eddie was neat in his office clothes, and at first seemed reserved. He soon turned out to have the most colourful turn of phrase of anyone I interviewed, describing the flats at various points as Buckingham Palace, a flying saucer to Mars and the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
‘People decry them, but I’ve been in a lot of flats – high-rise, Gorbals and Glasgow, and to me, none of them touched this,’ he said, as I sipped my slightly-embarrassing-to-order-in-a-Gorbals-pub Diet Coke. ‘I stayed there from when I was five till when I was 18. I stayed in A Block, 2 Queen Elizabeth Square, 7-up.’ Because of the way the flats were arranged, this was actually the fourteenth floor. How had his family ended up there? ‘It was like a raffle ticket – your key and which floor. I actually picked it ’cos I was a young kid. Initially there was my grandmother, my mother, my mother’s two sisters and myself.’ With just two bedrooms things were still pretty tight for Eddie’s family, though he was quick to remind me that ‘the same five people had been staying in one room, effectively. It was like going into Buckingham Palace, bearing in mind where you’d come from. For us to go into those flats was a total transformation. And another thing as well, we had under-floor heating. Not a lot of the flats that were getting built at that time had that. This was like walking on hot coals, walking on it in bare feet. It was a great experience. I loved it.’