Today is the Glorious 12th, when “Big Guns” from the south make a brief visit to Scotland, to give the local beasts both barrels … then retreat again, once they’ve had their sport.
As a result, I was intrigued to read John McAslan’s piece on regeneration on the Architecture Scotland website. His views, which (despite his protests) could easily have been delivered from a chaise longue south of the Tweed, are the views of the majority of media-literate architects, regardless of which side of the Border they practice on. He called for more quality, ambition and vision in riverside developments; he’s unlikely to hear any dissenting voices amongst his audience, the architect readers of the website.
No, the interesting aspect of his article – notionally about Glasgow’s waterfront – is the parallel McAslan draws with Dundee’s jute trade. Dundonians tend to look down on Glasgow – in the same way that Glaswegians deprecate Dundee. Both cities declined – but Glasgow came off worse. Far less is left of shipbuilding on the Upper Clyde (just Yarrows and Govan Shipbuilders), than of the textile industry on Tayside (J&D Wilkie, Sidlaw Group, Don & Low, Malcolm Ogilvie, Low & Bonar, WT Inglis and several others). Not only that, but regeneration has been more successful in Dundee: in fact, Glasgow could learn a great deal from its east coast cousin. Cue the sons of Kentigern choking on their Jaffa Cakes and Irn Bru …
Lets compare the specific areas in question – the ribbon of land called “Clydeside”, and the “Jute City” part of Dundee between Blackshade and Hawkhill. Both are symbolic of their respective citys’ past. Although John McAslan doesn’t say so, Glasgow’s industrial base – and future industrial heritage – was wrecked from the 1960’s onwards by its City Fathers and Central Government. Comprehensive Redevelopment Areas, and the nationalisation of shipbuilding, closed down then swiftly abandoned miles of buildings which demonstrated the very ambitious qualities which McAslan seeks in today’s waterfront housing. By contrast, the jute barons saw Board of Trade price controls dropped after the War, but diversified into man-made materials and non-woven textiles … and crucially many jute mills were left standing once they had outlived their usefulness to their owners. The reason is paradoxical: the land they sat on was so cheap that redevelopment wasn’t worthwhile.
John McAslan reaches the key point of his argument when he states that the boldness, sense of challenge and demonstration of ambition shown in Scottish industrial architecture is missing in the contemporary housing which replaces it – “My worship of, say, Louis Kahn, is fully matched by my obsessional regard for the industrial buildings of the Clyde, or the jute mills of Dundee: Cox’s Stack, the Camperdown Mill, the Verdant Works, the Tay Spinners Mill in Arbroath Road, the Ashton Works, requisitioned to manufacture ten million jerrycans during the second war. There was a boldness to these buildings, and their locales; a sense of challenge, and a demonstration of ambition to those outside Scotland.” He has unwittingly discovered that the aspirations and methods of industrialists differ from those of housing developers. The jute industry’s infrastructure was built by wealthy entrepreneurs with political clout, who had the ambition to create a world leading industry which delivered long term dividend growth: they built factories and mills to outlast themselves. Their works were living complexes into which continual investment was made: they were adapted, modernised and developed, not built and sold on by short-termists.
Taken literally, the qualities which McAslan seeks in new blocks of flats, are already found in the old jute mills which the textile industry left behind. Although the Cox, Gilroy, Low and Grimond dynasties didn’t build their enormous mills with the eventual aim of converting them into flats, the tall windows, high ceilings, thick stone walls, generous rooflights and imposing facades lend themselves to conversion. There are better examples of bold industrial development in the city than the mills which John McAslan chose: Camperdown was the largest jute mill in the world, but is land-locked in Lochee, whereas the quarter-mile long facade of Tay Works on West Marketgait is integral to the inner city. Taybank Mill (the “Tay Spinners mill”) was the first of the third generation mills, but Wallace Craigie and Lower Dens made bolder marks on the skyline when you view them from the city centre, or the docks.
In stark contrast, waterfront regenerations are usually thought up by politicians, who rarely look more than four years into the future, yet often control the derelict land. They’re constructed quickly and cheaply for maximum profit by developers seeking a speedy return on capital, and whose involvement ends when the units are sold – they have no ongoing stake in making these humane places with civic qualities. In fact, their only duty is to make the flats saleable, because that’s what their shareholders demand, and anything else would be contrary to the company's articles of association. Only Section 75 agreements imposed on them by the Planners force them to put something back into the community. The system might work better if regenerations were conceived by companies (who could assemble land more efficiently than public bodies do), but delivered by bodies with a stake in the community.
Anyhow, the result of involving large commercial developers in Glasgow’s waterfront redevelopments (such as Glasgow Harbour) is that land values were driven up dramatically. If Dundee’s jute mills survived because sites were cheap, Meadowside Granaries, the Queen’s Dock warehouses and Clark Kincaid in Greenock (Scotland’s last marine engine builder) were sacrificed because land became expensive. All were bold, ambitious buildings. The high value per hectare isn’t a result of economic success – nothing new was created – but rather a case of financial speculation. The machinations which McAslan perceives in big urban redevelopments come from deal-making and profit-taking in which architects play a limited role. He notes that Glasgow’s waterfront has no real engagement with people, or the city beyond it, and suggests that’s due to to the lack of architectural, urban and public realm quality, and also missing infrastructure; these results are due to commercial pressures.
You can draw a couple of conclusions – Glasgow and its developers lack ambition to create the kind of place that architects aspire to make; Dundee’s developers were just lucky that they had something left to work with. Yet McAslan’s final paragraphs betray a predicatable truth which holds us all back: his ambitions aren’t wholly altruistic. Architects find it difficult to write impartial criticism without crowing on their own dunghill. In this, his final words remind me of Alex Trocchi’s address to the Edinburgh Writers Festival in 1962. Although Trocchi’s sphere was Scots literature, but the sentiments he expressed are familiar, to the effect of – Almost all of it is cold, bible-clasping porridge. Anything of value in the past ten years, I have written myself. Of course, both article and address are polemical, but whereas Trocchi got an angry reaction from his target, Hugh McDiarmid – “cosmopolitan scum” – McAslan isn’t nearly specific enough in identifying where he thinks guilt lies for poor quality development. By stating that risk-takers and leaders are absent in Scotland, does he mean Politicians? Planners? Clients? He’s clear that the fault doesn’t lie with architects, but he doesn’t state who the people without ambition actually are.
As a result, it’s difficult to know what we should do to improve matters – but nonetheless John McAslan thinks he’s qualified to do it, and has let fly with both barrels.
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