Beyond the stigma
Phil Back considers a new book on housing in 20th-century Glasgow
Scheming: A Social History of Glasgow Council Housing, 1919-1956
Seán Damer
Edinburgh University Press, 2018 (paperback 2020)
208 pages
Paperback, £19.99
ISBN: 9781474440578
This review may seem belated, given that the book was published in hardback two years ago. However, the hardback price would have deterred all but the most determined reader. It is with the recent release in paperback that the book has become accessible to a general audience.
Scheming tells the story of Glasgow’s council housing between 1919, when new legislation provided local authorities with powers to build homes, through to 1956, when Glasgow’s housing focus shifted decisively away from lowrise estates to high-rise tower blocks. It thus complements more recent work by Lynn Abrams et al, which tells the story of the high-rise flats (reviewed on the
History Scotland website: http://scot. sh/abrams). Like Abrams’ book, it combines archival work with oral history and explores not only the policies the city pursued but also the lived experiences of the early occupants of the new homes, as collected by the author around
30 years ago. The result is a more contextualised and sociological history that looks at how policy decisions, and underlying administrative cultures and political ideologies, influenced both the developments and the lives of residents.
A thorough and informative introduction provides the legislative context for council housing, examining a series of housing acts passed between 1919 and 1935. Each act had a different emphasis and different subsidy regimes to support housing development. Glasgow’s housing needs were, of course, desperate; Damer notes that it had more slum housing, and worse slum housing, than any other British city. In 1919, there was a need for 57,000 new homes.
Damer then takes us through the origins of six different estates developed by the city. These are chosen to provide a chronological spread, but also to illustrate the different emphases in the evolving legislation and the different tenant groups being targeted. Over time, three different levels of council housing emerged, with very different composition and quality. Damer helpfully links each development to the relevant legislation and to the city’s changing priorities, providing insight into the visible differences between the estates and the socio-economic characteristics of their occupants.
The examples highlight these differences, contrasting the middleclass respectability of an ‘ordinary’ scheme like Mosspark (housing largely white-collar workers) with the bluecollar ‘intermediate’ scheme at West Drumoyne (largely skilled manual labourers), as well as the ‘rehousing’ schemes such as Blackhill, which were of lower quality and became notorious for unemployment, poverty and crime. There emerged a hierarchy of provision in terms of design and layout, linked to notions of class and perceived tenant merit. This is emphasised strongly in the final chapter of the book.
Other themes also emerge in Damer’s discussion. One is the lack of infrastructure planning for the more peripheral estates, which forced residents to develop their own solutions, from providing informal midwifery services to running an illegal bookmaker. Another is the paternalistic, moralistic attitude of the city towards its poorer tenants, leading to the appointment of staff to act as moral and sanitary guardians. A third is the political differences within the council over housing. But we also get a sense of the obvious pleasure many tenants took in securing a new home with facilities that we would now consider basic, but that were missing in the slums.The interviews included here do not suggest that tenants generally felt any great nostalgia for the life they left behind.
A further theme that emerges strongly is the idea of stigma, particularly as regards the ‘rehousing’ schemes where allocation criteria were less strict but moral enforcement was more so. Some estates acquired reputations that discouraged people from wanting to live there, or even made it difficult to get a doctor out to attend to a sick child. This stigma was partly derived from the visible behaviours of residents, but was also embodied in official perceptions of the
Over time, three different levels of council housing emerged, with very different composition and quality
‘undeserving’, which the author suggests formed part of the city’s ideology behind this type of housing: third-class housing for third-class citizens.
As Damer points out, once stigma is attached it becomes very problematic to remove. It also gets perpetuated in ‘poverty porn’ and wider media attitudes. Understanding more about the background to these localities, and hearing the voices of their residents, undermines unhelpful generalisations and provides much-needed nuance to views of Glasgow’s council housing. This book enables that, and is to be commended for it. Dr Phil Back is a landscape historian with a particular interest in the towns, cities and countryside of 20th-century Scotland.