Mystery writer’s Gorbals musings
THERE was a decidedly pessimistic note scribbled on the back of this 1968 photograph of Gorbals children.
“Even when this particular spot is flattened,” an anonymous hand wrote, “other parts of Glasgow will stand for generations to come... no better than this, perhaps even worse.” Given the run-down state of the buildings, the author probably had a point. The kids look content enough, though.
There are many such photographs of the Gorbals and other such areas from around this time in the Herald and Evening Times’s photographic archive.
Not just ours, either: the great Harry Benson’s 2007 book, Harry Benson’s Glasgow, includes several photographs taken on the South Side in November 1971, with one shot depicting kids playing in rubble “as there was no park nearby and they had nowhere else to play.”
Another photograph showed a couple of young girls in front of graffiti reading, ‘Let Glasgow flourish in filth and slums’ – a play on the words in the city’s coat-of-arms.
The 1960s had however seen a wide-ranging housing redevelopment programme in the Gorbals, including high-rise flats designed by Sir Basil Spence. It would be interesting to know what the anonymous author of those words on the back of that 1968 photograph would make of today’s modern Glasgow. ANTI-apartheid demonstrators gather outside St George’s Tron Church in Glasgow in June 1986 as St George’s Place is re-named Nelson Mandela Place.
The small street, which housed the South African consulate, was named after Mandela by Glasgow District Council. The ceremony was FEBRUARY 1975, and the Scottish Arts Council is forging ahead with plans to brighten up “grimy old Glasgow,” to quote from a contemporary news report. The aim was to paint giant murals on tenement gable-ends.
One design was unveiled: a huge Celtic knot on one end of a tenement at 30 South Annandale carried out by Mr Essop Pahad, a London-based member of the African National Congress, who said the Mandela family would be delighted by the gesture.
More than 200 people attended the ceremony, though the Herald reported that the re-naming had not met with approval from all. Street, Govanhill. The one in the photograph was a 30ft high mural in Patrick’s Crawford Street – “a rose-cheeked boy sitting on a squashed sort of spotted dog and clutching a dove in his hand.”
The Patrick one was swiftly tagged with the following: “The artist’s work is all in vain. Tiny Patrick strikes again.”