Date: 08 April 08
Author: by Dr Miles Glendinning
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In February 2008, nearly 40 years after its completion, the death-warrant for Glasgow’s infamous Red Road housing scheme seems finally to have been signed, with the Glasgow Housing Association’s announcement of a phased, seven-year demolition programme for all eight tower and slab blocks.
At first glance, this might seem to be just another phase in the city’s time-honoured tradition of radical, clean-sweep renewal of ‘bad housing’ – a ‘Hundred Years War’ pursued not by ‘enemy forces’ but by municipal reformists, which stretched back to the sweeping redevelopments of ‘slum housing’ in the late 19th century by the City Improvement Trust and their replacement by Baronial tenements, and was continued in the 1930s-60s by Glasgow Corporation’s Housing Committee. In those years, the Corporation turned the bulldozers against the now condemned 19th-century tenements, replacing them first by low-rise ‘modern tenements’ and then by serried ranks of multi-storey blocks – the spearheads of Housing Convener David Gibson’s ‘60s ‘housing crusade’ to ‘give the people homes’. (1)
This process of peacetime urban warfare left some parts of the city, such as the Gorbals, as veritable multi-layered ‘palimpsests’ of redevelopment. These became ‘memory landscapes’ uncannily similar to post-1945 German cities, raggedly scattered with the traces of successive attacks on the city’s ‘diseased’ fabric, including most recently the blowing-up of Basil Spence’s monumental Hutchesontown C slab blocks in 1993.
Is the liquidation of Glasgow’s highest blocks of multi-storey flats anything more than a continuation of this time-honoured civic culture of collective progress through mass destruction? But the mention of the 1993 Gorbals blowdown – the most spectacular and literally explosive assault on the city’s housing fabric – leads us on to an unexpected twist in the story. For since that showpiece public execution went spectacularly wrong, with a local pensioner killed by flying debris, Glasgow’s civic blood-lust has abated, with the result that today’s phase of housing policy in the city envisages only limited demolition of tower blocks – at any rate by comparison with the vast demolition sprees in some cities in England and Scotland, such as Liverpool, Sheffield or Dundee.
Maybe the strong place established by housing rehab in the 1980s, the years of ‘tenement revival’, is also partly behind this policy, but at any rate, contrary to the extremist threats of a 16,000 dwelling demolition programme made by the GHA when it was first established, redevelopment is actually likely to be cautious and gradual, with only several of the giant 20-storey Zeilenbau slab blocks, as well as a few blocks in the Gorbals, likely to join Red Road in the first phase of demolition. And the new housing programme associated with the demolitions – a mere 2,800 dwellings – is a fraction of the construction rate of the post-war housing drive. This equates to a mere 50% of the houses built by the Corporation in a single year during the mid 50s or 60s: whatever is done now is likely to have only a modest impact on the city’s skyline. Nor will even the present limited demolition targets be easily achievable or affordable, even within the extended, seven-year timetable: given the problems of potential contamination posed by Red Road’s composite steel frame and asbestos sheeting construction: dismantling 31-storey slab blocks piece by piece is a far more challenging and complex task than knocking down ‘badly built’ tenements of the 1850s or 1950s.
Assuming, though, that the Red Road blocks are eventually demolished - what then? Should a rolling, open-ended demolition programme of Glasgow towers be the next step?
At least, despite the increasing fashion for post-war Modernism in heritage circles, the GHA will be unlikely to meet any obstacle from conservationists. Glasgow’s only remaining high blocks of special architectural interest, Sir Robert Matthew’s Hutchesontown ‘B’ towers (north of Ballater Street), and the Scottish Special Housing Association’s Wyndford project (Maryhill Road), are fortunately not under any threat of demolition, whereas neither Red Road nor Sighthill, despite their gargantuan scale, are designs of particular architectural significance – the architect of Red Road, Sam Bunton, was a colourful character but no architectural giant, and even in sheer size, Red Road was far outstripped (contrary to local legend) at the time of its construction by London’s 45-storey Barbican towers for the title of ‘tallest public housing in Europe’.
What should, perhaps, give greater pause for thought, though, is the sheer wastefulness of totally wiping out such concentrations of homes, however great their letting and maintenance difficulties or their reputational blight. Generally speaking, Glasgow’s multi-storey blocks are solidly and economically built, with relatively little of the ‘large-panel’ concrete prefabrication dominant in some other cities (especially in the former USSR): blocks such as the ubiquitous George Wimpey ‘no fines concrete’ towers (as at Knightswood and Townhead ‘B’) are likely to be able to stand for centuries with only limited maintenance or alteration. To be sure, a large concentration of towers in low-status, remote locations, however designed or constructed, often becomes very difficult to let – as Dundee City Council discovered in areas such as Ardler and Whitfield. But perhaps, even in these areas, a better solution might be to retain a few, isolated towers for specialist purposes – for example at Red Road, maybe keeping the YMCA-leased point-block at the extreme west end of the site, and also perhaps the isolated ‘Block 8’ at the opposite (far eastern) end.
Is there any other way around the problems of such blocks? Interestingly, although two of Scotland’s three other largest cities, Edinburgh and Dundee, have matched and even outstripped Glasgow in tower demolitions, a very different pattern has been systematically pursued in the city of Aberdeen, bastion of civic pride and municipal prudence, and careful owner of a large multi-storey housing stock, ranging from inner city slab blocks to clusters of towers in peripheral communities such as Seaton and Cornhill-Stockethill. Aberdeen’s approach is a very simple one: not mass demolition but minimum demolition - preferably none at all - coupled with careful management.
In thrifty Aberdeen, where the prime mover in the post-war housing drive was, significantly, the City Treasurer, Robert Lennox, multi-storey blocks, with all their huge in-built investment in materials and labour, have never been seen as redundant liabilities to be run down and discarded on a whim (whether political, managerial or media-led), but as enduring assets to be husbanded with care, by managers and inhabitants, for the permanent benefit and social enhancement of the ‘Granite City’ and its future generations of citizens. Perhaps the new Scottish Government, in looking for fresh and more economical and ‘sustainable’ ways of tackling entrenched and apparently intractable housing problems, could do worse than ‘look north-east’??
© Miles Glendinning
Footnote:
(1) See M Glendinning and S Muthesius, Tower Block, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1994, Chapter 25.
Main Image: Evocative dusk view of the Red Road flats – still taken from the 2006 film ‘Red Road’, directed by Andrea Arnold.
© 2008 Verve Pictures Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Aerial View of the Red Road flats kindly provided by Glasgow Housing Association.
In parallel with the demolition of the Red Road flats, the GHA has announced that work is also currently underway on a £125 million programme of investment in 100 multi-storey properties.
More than 7,000 multi-storey tenants are set to benefit from the programme which will last for five years and includes £83 million investment on overcladding and a further £42 million on new kitchens, bathrooms and re-wiring. Overcladding work is already complete or nearing completion on 30 of the multi-storey blocks – comprising nearly 4000 tenants’ homes. Overcladding projects are still ongoing at a further 30 blocks and work will commence on 40 more during the financial year 2008/09
In addition to the £125 million improvement programme, GHA has already invested over £4 million to maintain lifts, pumps and tanks in multi-storeys and has committed to an £8 million rolling programme of lift renewal. Phased environmental work has also been undertaken at many of the blocks to improve the safety, security and appearance of properties through better lighting and access.
For further information click on the following link
http://www.gha.org.uk/content/default.asp?page=s4_1&newsid=964&newsType
