Immediately post-Second World War Glasgow was faced with a major housing crisis. There was an acute shortage of accommodation, and much of what was there was rundown tenements. In 1947 a delegation from Glasgow visited Marseilles to see the new “tower blocks” designed by the French architect Le Corbusier, and a high-rise policy was hastily introduced to Glasgow. However, the planners failed to realise that this style was not suitable for all environments and people. Very quickly many high-rise developments deteriorated into dingy, ill-kempt dwellings with resulting problems of social exclusion and despair for the occupants.
As the high-rise flats went up, the old stone tenements came down, victims of the wreckers’ ball in an ill-co-ordinated policy of slum clearance,and damaging local communities in the process. For example, the old Gorbals, captured in the evocative photographs of Oscar Marzaroli, might have been impoverished and rundown, but Marzaroli’s snaps show children playing, neighbours talking on the pavement, and women “hingin oot the windae”. For all the material poverty there was a genuine local pride and community spirit.
Contrast the Gorbals “New Town” of the 1960s and 70s, epitomised by the Sir Basil Spence designed Queen Elizabeth flats, an eyesore for miles around until their demolition in the 1990s. Springburn, too, declared a comprehensive development area in 1973, was effectively divided into two isolated segments by the construction of a by-pass.
Communities were also dispersed by wholesale population moves into post-war schemes like Drumchapel, Easterhouse, and Castlemilk, and into customised new town overspill developments, principally East Kilbride (1947), Cumbernauld (1950), and Livingston (1967).
Eventually the tenement demolition policy was recognised for its short-sightedness; and since the 1980s many of Glasgow’s old tenements have been refurbished into highly desirable accommodation. The high-rises, too, have been largely replaced with more human-scale urban housing.
The pattern of housing tenure has changed dramatically in the past century. At the outset of the 20th century the majority of Glaswegian households rented a dwelling from a private landlord; by 1970, most were tenants of the local authority. By the start of the 21st century , a radical housing plan, involving the wholesale transfer of the 80,000 plus council houses to the Glasgow Housing Association (GHA), a not-for-profit social landlord, heralds a new, tenant-led beginning for a new century. (See Regeneration, The New Millenium)