Shameful countdown

WHOEVER first thought it would be a wonderful idea to crown the opening rites of Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games by blowing up five tower blocks that were once people’s homes, they have yet to own up to it.

But amid public anger and incredulity, the organisers remain cool and defiant about the ceremonial destruction of the Red Road flats.

Glasgow 2014 artistic director David Zolkwer enthuses: ‘In just a few seconds, the city’s skyline will be transformed forever. It’s a bold and confident statement that says “bring on the future”.’

Eileen Gallagher, who chairs the ‘ceremonies, culture and Queen’s baton relay committee’, is no less perky, insisting: ‘By sharing the final moments of the Red Road flats with the world, Glasgow is proving it is a city that is proud of its history but doesn’t stand still, a city that is constantly regenerating, renewing and reinventing itself.

‘Glasgow’s story is always one of its people – their tenacity, their genuine warmth, their ambitions. Marking the end of Red Road is very much a celebration of all of those things…’

On the contrary, such preposterous, distasteful performance art would celebrate nothing. It would serve only to make Glasgow – and, indeed, all Scotland – ridiculous before the gaze of a watching world. This is obvious to us. It is obvious to thousands and thousands of Glaswegians. It seems incredible it is not obvious to Mr Zolkwer and Miss Gallagher.

The reasons, one would have thought, are self-evident. We need not even touch on the embarrassing possibility that, come the hour and before the millions, the charges might stubbornly refuse to detonate – by no means impossible, if you remember the chaotic farce at the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games in 1986, or everything that went wrong with London’s Millennium celebrations, from the ferris wheel that refused to revolve to the river of fire that refused to ignite.

Then there is the real risk of injury, or worse. In this sort of thing, the Second City of the Empire has unfortunate form. The wildly successful Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988 was defiled by disaster on its closing night, when a mortar blew up during the fireworks display, 11 people were hurt and one man lost a leg.

Fatality

Still worse, in September 1993, Gorbals woman Helen Tinney, 61, was killed by a chunk of flying concrete when the Queen Elizabeth flats were exploded in a similar – and most carelessly supervised – public spectacle. Are maiming or fatality the kind of risks the Glasgow 2014 high-heid-yins really want to take?

But such hazards aside, the proposed public doom of the Red Road flats is an affront to general good t aste. The destruction on such a large scale of public housing, however obsolete and unloved, is offensive in a Scotland where there is an acute lack of affordable accommodation and so many people – indeed, entire families – are homeless.

For Glasgow 2014 to attempt to counter that by insisting the flats are ‘sub-standard’ or ‘unfit for habitation’ is no less foolish when one Red Road tower block is, for the time being, to be spared and is largely occupied by asylum-seekers.

Whatever you think of recent immigrants, the sight of neighbouring, identical buildings being blithely reduced to rubble as part of a night’s entertainment is scarcely likely to bolster their morale, or give the best global impression of Scottish hospitality. Yet Glasgow City Council leader Gordon Matheson has stoutly declared that demolition of the flats ‘will all but mark the end of high-rise living in the area, and is symbolic of the changing face of Glasgow’.

In which case, we might just as well celebrate the ‘end of high- rise living’ by getting Alastair McDonald onto the Commonwealth Games stage to sing The Jeely Piece Song... though the elf ’n’ safety brigade would no doubt deplore such a hymn to evil sugar.

The deeper problem in the proposed blast, evidently eluding even Mr Matheson’s profound intellect, is that it would pitilessly draw attention to a dark and dreadful period in Glasgow’s history. The Red Road flats are totemic of the years and years of callous urban planning.

In Glasgow, this involved wholesale demolition, the evictions of thousands of people from close-knit tenement communities on a scale unseen since the Highland Clearances, the rise of unattractive and illplanned ‘new towns’ and the parallel erection of such hideous ‘schemes’ as Drumchapel, Easterhouse and (in adjacent Paisley) Ferguslie Park.

At the same time Glasgow’s heart was raped by an expressway, the l oss of priceless architecture and – amidst all this – serious corruption, from unduly cosy links to the building trade to councillors demanding (and getting) cash bungs for offering a house to the likes of such charmers as Arthur Thompson, building a criminal empire on his notional trade in salvaged timber.

Even before we start on the social failure of the Red Road flats – for a failure they, and comparable projects across the Second City, assuredly were – there is much about 1960s Glasgow planning and the city fathers of the day that would not bear serious scrutiny by the world’s journalists… Chicago on the Clyde, without the crazy sense of fun.

Inadequacy

By the late 1970s, the inadequacy and soullessness of the new housing estates were evident. Most were extraordinarily ugly. Far too many were built on the cheap. Careless planning left many new areas without shops, pubs or any focus for neighbourly interaction.

The new social housing might have come with private balconies, family bathrooms and vertiginous views, but high flats were rapidly stigmatised as filing- cabinets for people. And their very nature fostered what French sociologist Emile Durkheim had defined, late in the 19th century, as ‘ anomie’ – the destruction of social identity in an environment that denied community, human interaction or moral guidance.

The particular evils and ills for which the worst parts of new-build Glasgow became notorious – family breakdown, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy and so on – need no detailing, yet we should remember that these estates and tower blocks were erected with the best of intentions.

They were created in the context of a genuine post-war housing crisis, and all have had plenty of good and honest residents making every endeavour to maintain decency – not everyone in Easterhouse was trying to score smack, and not everyone who came out of Ferguslie Park was disgraced banker Fred Goodwin.

Perhaps the greatest insensitivity of all in the proposed demolition fest is that, whatever these high-flats may be now, and whatever their flaws, they were for many years people’s homes. Therein, however poor or marginalised they might have been, families lived and loved and wept. They conceived their children, mourned their dead and – for the most part – did their best. Every wall has its memories, every corner its secrets.

It is good and right that the Red Road flats come down, and that the city continues to erect better, more human housing wherein everyone has the chance to live good and peaceable lives. But it is wrong – ill-conceived and insensitive – to flatten these buildings as a gloating, and indeed global, public spectacle.

We trust that Glasgow 2014, and its leadership, will fast retreat from a proposal so repugnant.