Eddie’s extended family soon made the new flat the centre of their social life. ‘My grandmother was the matriarch of the family,’ he recalled. ‘She was like a Rose Kennedy kind of figure, and we had a big family. My grandmother had six daughters and a son and they’ve all got kids as well. And they all came there on a Saturday.’ This included a whole group of uncles who used the flat as a waiting room before the pubs opened. ‘The pubs used to shut in the afternoon, half-two and open at five, in the seventies. We’d be playing on the veranda, they’d be sitting in the kitchen playing cards, the women were in the living room, my grandmother would be making soup. It was like a Butlins!’
The veranda was one of the most startling aspects of the Queen Elizabeth flats. Rather than the poky individual balconies of Robert Matthew’s blocks, four flats shared a single large outside space – the area Spence had expected to see in ‘full sail’ on wash day. Eddie soon claimed this space for his own. ‘I learned to ride my bike on there – a racing bike! I used to take a snooker table out there, set it up. Used to take a couch out there – a settee – and have a party, have fun with the radio on. Way up, up in the sky. It more or less encompassed the whole skyline of Glasgow. We used to go out there and play football as well. And the only disappointment was when you shot, you kicked the ball over the veranda, you had to run down and get the ball. That was the killer!’ He laughed. ‘That’s where I learned to shoot, to keep the ball low.’
Fun for the kids wasn’t restricted to the verandas; the sharply angled stilts that held up the building fascinated them too. Eddie took advantage of the eddying gusts that swirled around the base of these huge blocks. ‘It was great when it was a windy day, ’cos they built these stilts into a kind of wind tunnel. You’d have your jacket on and it was like a hang glider. You’d see the kids all underneath it, you know? You’d maybe see older people struggling to get through, but when you came home from school you’d get blown away, it was great! You’d lean against it, it was like a sail, like a dhow. An Arabian dhow, that’s what it was with your parka.’
Slow to build, Basil Spence’s Queen Elizabeth flats became the most famous element of the rebuilding programme, due to their unconventional and monumental design. © Mitchell Library
The complexity of Spence’s designs slowed down the building of the Queenies, but down the road at Royston it took just eight months for Wimpey to erect three 20-storey blocks. As Miles Glendinning pointed out in his book Tower Block, although they were ‘commenced at the same time as Spence’s elaborate Hutchesontown slabs, which contained roughly the same number of flats, these were finished and let before even Spence’s foundations were complete!’23 It was like the Smithsons versus the Medds all over again. Wimpey used prefabricated elements to speed up the building process, but Queen Elizabeth Square was built with ‘in situ’ concrete, ‘the medium par excellence of the sculptor-architect and of the sculptor-engineer’.24 The mix was poured into giant moulds made of wooden shutters by the builders on site. The rough board-marked or ‘shuttered’ surfaces of the concrete that resulted were combined with an aggregate made from large pebbles, so that the estate bore either the imprint of wooden planks or was studded with thousands of smooth stones, like an abruptly upturned shingle beach.
Spence’s Area C was as different from Matthew’s Area B as it was possible to be. The startling design had none of that calm Scandinavian simplicity. There were no low rise blocks here to create a feeling of human scale or ‘townscape’; the bold visual statement created by this cliff face of ribbed concrete walls and sculpted balconies was everything. Today we’d call this ‘starchitecture’.
Spence’s unconventional design, his startling ‘ship in full sail’ and ‘hanging gardens’ imagery, his triumph at Coventry Cathedral and the added glamour of the Queen’s visit to the site made him a great deal more famous in the Gorbals than any of the other architects involved. The accounts of the redevelopment in the many memoirs by locals might lead you to think that Spence had planned and designed the lot, rather than just one of six schemes. Even so, he was scarcely a household name. ‘When we were younger,’ said Eddie, ‘we thought Basil Spence was a snooker player. We had no interest in who Sir Basil Spence was.’ These days, however, Eddie enjoys confronting the naysayers, people who had never lived in the Queenies but were ready to shoot their mouths off: ‘The thing I say is, “Who was the architect of your flats?” They don’t know. Everyone knows who did Queen Elizabeth.’
The Queen Elizabeth Square flats were eventually joined in 1969 by a shopping centre, the Cumberland Arcade, in a similar brutal concrete style. ‘The thing with the shopping centre was, I’d never seen a supermarket,’ said Eddie. ‘The tenements was corner shops, you know, like Coronation Street: The Kabin. You had a bank; you had Galbraith’s, that was like a supermarket; chip shops; a Chinese carry out; a Laundromat; a chemist; fruit shops; shoe shops. But when you’d come from that tenement you’d never seen that. You’d have to go up town to see that. And here it was, built in downtown Gorbals.’ As with pubs, the planned reduction in shops in the district was eye-watering: from 444 down to 57, but it was hoped that bigger and more central shops like those in the Cumberland Arcade would prove popular with the residents of the rebuilt areas.
The late arrival of the shopping centre was the story of new estates across Glasgow; in fact, Queen Elizabeth Square’s was a speedy affair in comparison. ‘In general, shops were not built till the housing was finished so that in the larger estates hundreds of people might spend years under semi-camp conditions,’ reported Pearl Jephcott’s sociological study. She cited two estates, with some 700 and 500 homes respectively, that illustrated the extent of the delay: ‘Though both had been occupied for over five years they still had no shops nor apparently any likelihood of them.’25
The Gorbals was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to high-rise blocks of flats in Glasgow. Thousands of former Gorbals residents were to be rehoused in other areas. ‘Some were deeply apprehensive about being moved to the housing estate of Castlemilk,’ recalls Colin MacFarlane in his memoir The Real Gorbals Story. ‘“There’s no even wan pub in Castlemilk. The place is a desert wi windaes. It’s worse than bein’ in jail. At least in Barlinnie ye’ve got a bit o’atmosphere.”’26 By the early sixties two influential figures were reacting against the ideas behind Abercrombie and Matthew’s 1946 plan to disperse the population. David Gibson, Glasgow’s housing convener, and local authority architect Sam Bunton were keen to rehouse as many people as possible within the city borders, rather than in the new towns of East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Livingstone, Irvine and Cumbernauld. Gibson’s ugly solution was to dot high-rise flats on every available gap site in the city in order to squeeze in as many homes as possible. This was putting two fingers up to the whole concept of ‘comprehensive planning’: the opportunistic plonking of blocks anywhere they would fit made it difficult to see how the ideals of creating open space for all, relieving overcrowding or rationalising roads could be realised. Nevertheless, Gibson got his way. ‘Over the next three years the skyline of Glasgow will become a more attractive one to me,’ he told colleagues in 1962, ‘because of the likely vision of multi-storey houses rising by the thousand … The prospect will be thrilling, I am certain, to the many thousands who are still yearning for a decent home.’27
Sam Bunton, Gibson’s brother-in-arms, was the biggest advocate of high-rise flats in the country. Glasgow had grown up as a cousin to the industrial U. S. cities of the nineteenth century; now it was time to bring it into the skyscraping present. Bunton and Gibson altered the skyline of Glasgow far more radically than the 1946 plan had anticipated, with huge high-rise estates and lone tower blocks rising all over the city. Between 1961 and 1968 high-rise blocks of flats accounted for three quarters of all housing completions in Glasgow.
Bunton’s greatest achievement would be pushing through the construction of the Red Road estate, which until the Barbican in London was finally completed, boasted the tallest residenti
al towers in Europe. I went to visit the estate some months before the demolition of the towers began. Standing between miles of suburban semis on one side and waste ground on the other, these colossal, pastel-coloured blocks were undoubtedly a striking sight, as well as a remarkable feat of engineering. Yet there was also something absurd about them, this huddle of slim forms straining to stand tall, like a gang of anxious meerkats scanning a plain.
Red Road was one of the estates studied by sociologist Pearl Jephcott in her 1971 book Homes in High Flats, and she found that, as predicted by those letter writers to the Herald in the late forties, nearly half the residents with a child under five were dissatisfied with tower block life. Far from the spacious verandas to be found in Queen Elizabeth Square, these more conventional blocks had tiny balconies with no space for children to run, bounce a ball or pedal a bike. A young mother with a one-year-old living on the nineteenth floor commented that ‘there are play areas for the children but they are all stone. Would be better with grass … I feel a playpark should have been enclosed in the scheme.’28 Perhaps most ominously, Jephcott found that ‘the areas where adults expect to be responsible for their children’s behaviour have not been firmly established either in the block or on the estate.’29 Earlier warnings, such as that from Sir Alexander MacGregor, the Medical Officer of Health, who declared in 1945 ‘that multi-storey flats were not the proper houses in which to bring up families of young children,’30 had been largely ignored in Gibson’s drive to install as many homes in as small a space as possible. Sam Bunton may have shared with Basil Spence an ambition to create iconic, transformative buildings, but the looming silhouette of Red Road became iconic in all the wrong ways, a symbol of all the negative stories associated with high-rise estates, from suicides to crime sprees. It stood there like a lighthouse, warning us to stay away.
The Red Road flats, designed by Sam Bunton.
There is no doubt that many were unhappy with the radical rebuilding of Glasgow. Colin MacFarlane remembers spotting some telling graffiti as the Hutchesontown estates were rising: ‘Someone had even spray painted a wall with giant letters asking “Who murdered the Gorbals?”’31 Yet for many others the slum clearances led to new and better lives. Though critical of many things, particularly Red Road, Jephcott’s study recorded many other appreciative comments about the new high-rise blocks in which they had been rehoused. ‘One tenant who felt just everything about the house and its situation satisfied her, quoted her husband as saying that he only started to live when they came here.’32 There was also the old man who loved to spend a couple of hours in the evening looking out at the city lights, or the many couples who admired the peace and quiet and the modern conveniences. ‘A mother pointed to her three-year-old who, accustomed to being washed in the sink, would splash about forever in this lovely shiny bath. They showed the snow-white toilet next to the bath, and some recalled the horrors they had known, maybe a murky, unlighted den off a stone passage outside the house.’33
And of all of the revolutionary tower blocks in Glasgow, Eddie McGonnell was in no doubt as to which was the best. ‘I’ve stayed in three lots of flats in the Gorbals,’ he explained. ‘I stayed in Queen Elizabeth till I was 18, then I moved to Sandiefield Road.’ This was area D of the Hutchesontown-Gorbals redevelopment, built in more conventional high-rise style by Gilbert Ash, an arm of the construction giant Wimpey who’d also built Britain’s first point block in Harlow. ‘And then these flats here,’ he points out of the window of the Waterfront Bar at the black-and-beige rough concrete façade of 1 Norfolk Court, the last remaining of four blocks built by Scottish contractors Crudens. This was the sixth and final comprehensive development area in the Gorbals, a district called Laurieston. ‘So I’ve stayed in three blocks, but none of them touch the Spence ones. They were just flats. I stayed in them, big deal.’
When I asked him to describe what it was about the Spence flats that made them so different, Eddie used words such as ‘iconic’ and ‘powerful’. There was real admiration and wonder in the way he described Queen Elizabeth Square, emotions that were quite absent in the way he spoke about the rest. ‘It was a mundane, stereotypical block of flats,’ he said, pointing up at 1 Norfolk Court. ‘Nothing going for it. You see a lot of flats over there,’ he waved a hand dismissively at Robert Matthew’s blocks in the distance, ‘they’re all bland looking – square and the same shape of windows and there’s nothing different.’ In contrast, Queen Elizabeth Square ‘was like a flying saucer taking you to Mars. It was life on Mars, that’s the way they seemed,’ he said, with a characteristic flourish. ‘He modelled them on a block of flats in Paris, was it?’
‘Marseille,’ I said, trainspotter-style. ‘Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation.’
Eddie nodded vigorously. ‘He modelled it on that one there, hanging gardens in the sky. We used to have on the veranda flower pots, and these people who were maybe green-fingered had shrubs – it was a hanging gardens of Babylon!’
Notes
1 Herald, 1/7/1961
2 Patrick Abercrombie and Robert Matthew, The Clyde Valley Regional Plan, HMSO, 1946, p341
3 Abercrombie and Matthew, p2
4 Miles Horsey, Tenements and Towers: Glasgow Working Class Housing 1890-1990, HMSO, 1990, p32
5 Herald, 21/11/1958, p6
6 Herald, 23/3/1961, p11
7 John Maclay, Secretary of State for Scotland, in the Herald, 9 Feb 1957, p5
8 Elizabeth Williamson, Anne Riches and Malcolm Higgs, The Buildings of Scotland, Penguin, 1990, p507
9 Herald, 11/9/1957, p9
10 Herald, 12/1/1946, p2
11 Letter from ‘Town and Country Planning’, Herald, 29/1/46, p2
12 Leader, Herald, 15/1/46 Jan 15, p2
13 Colin MacFarlane, The Real Gorbals Story, Mainstream, 2007, p228
14 Pearl Jephcott, Homes in High Flats, Oliver and Boyd, 1971, p64
15 Williamson et al, p518
16 Herald, 24/11/62, p7
17 Robert Matthew, The Times, ‘The Architect in Britain Today’ supplement, 3/7/61, pxxiv
18 Gorbals Riverside Newsletter, Spring 2006, Glasgow Community Health And Well-Being Research And Learning Programme, p4
19 Williamson et al, p519
20 Herald, 11/2/61
21 Horsey, p39
22 Glasgow Housing Committee Minutes for 19/12/58
23 Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block, Yale University Press, 1994, p224
24 W. A. Allen, The Times, ‘The Architect in Britain Today’ supplement, 3/7/61, pxv
25 Jephcott, p60
26 MacFarlane, p226
27 David Gibson, addressing the 1962 Annual Housing Inspection, in Horsey, p46
28 Jephcott, p59-60
29 Jephcott, p63
30 Leader, Herald, 15/1/46, p2
31 MacFarlane, p229
32 Jephcott, p48
33 Jephcott, p51
2. ‘A New Dimension Added to the Street’
SHEFFIELD AND STREETS IN THE SKY (1957–61)
Park Hill, the immense single-block housing estate that overlooks Sheffield city centre, was almost deserted when I wandered around taking photographs on a hot summer’s day in 2011. At that very moment in cities all over the country, including Croydon, riots were taking place. Park Hill’s quietness was almost eerie, but there was a simple explanation: the place was in mid transformation. Three iterations of the building now stood side by side on the hill. There was the ghostly central section, now mostly derelict, with boards, painted in a street art style, hammered across the doors and windows. To the left, behind temporary barriers, was the newly renovated part of the structure, looking less like one of Britain’s most daring social housing schemes than an office development in Barcelona. Its vivid wall panels, chosen by developers Urban Splash, were so bright that they all but precluded any sense of the building’s shape. Finally, to the right, there were those areas of the original estate that were still occupied, and whose black windows star
ed blankly out at me.
Often compared to a castle or a medieval walled city, Park Hill presented an invulnerable front, but once I was inside the many pathways, spaces and enclosures began to reveal themselves. A network of paths delineated by red railings led me through the estate. There was still a community here – by all accounts one that didn’t want to leave. Occasionally I glimpsed people wandering above me along one of the ‘streets in the sky’, or heard children playing in an adjacent courtyard. There was also the buzz of prowling helicopters, keeping a weather eye out for any sign of rioting. Yet this was noplace for spectacular, high-visibility wrongdoing. Instead, the many quiet nooks of the newly depopulated estate provided the perfect environment for low-profile sketchiness. Drug-dealing, mostly. Dealers go there because it’s quiet, and so handy – just a hop and a skip over the tramlines from the town centre.
Old and new Park Hill.
I’d walked through the estate in the late morning, and returned after lunch to photograph it from the outside. A man had been shot. A forensics guy decked out in the full regalia – overalls, latex gloves, plastic bags on his feet – stood loading evidence into the back of a police van, while behind him coppers with bundles of crime-scene tape emerged from the peaceful place I’d been wandering just two hours earlier.
The redevelopment of the 800 houses and 63 prefabs at the notoriously crime-ridden slums of Park Hill had been one of the top priorities of new city architect Lewis Womersley when he moved to Sheffield in 1952. ‘I climbed to the top of the roof of the library and looked down at the skyline,’ he recalled of the day he went for his interview, ‘and it seemed to me that it was a very, very exciting city; the topography excited me tremendously.’1 Womersley kept his eyes out for suitable talent to bring on board. And when he saw the brilliant plans drawn up by youthful Ivor Smith and Jack Lynn for flats in Rotherhithe, he snapped the recent graduates up for his department. Jack and Ivor had been students of the wily iconoclast Peter Smithson at the Architectural Association in London. Despite their inexperience they brought with them an intellectual brio reminiscent of their teacher.
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