Those were the days Bird’s-eye views of Glasgow, 1965 and 1978
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The Herald Picture Store
JAMES Bennett, the MP for Glasgow Bridgeton, and parliamentary secretary to the Scottish Secretary of State, got a towering view of the city in the summer of 1965.
He was opening (main image) the first multi-storey block of flats built in the Dalmarnock area. The 24-storey building stood more than 200ft high, and was the tallest that had so far been completed in Scotland.
During the Sixties, Glasgow, like many local authorities elsewhere, began erecting highrises, “because of the land shortage within the city and the speed with which they could be put up”, Joe Fisher notes in his Glasgow Encyclopedia.
As he did the honours in June 1965, Mr Bennett made the point that while Glasgow continued to be referred to as the worst-housed city in Europe, too little regard was being paid to the
“tremendous efforts” of the city council to provide good houses for its people.
The new multi-storey block was one of three on a 12-acre site in the Summerfield area of Dalmarnock, on the west bank of the Clyde. The builders, James Laidlaw and Sons, believed that for the first time efforts had been made to deal with the problem of loneliness for children in multistoreys. On the ground floor, as well as service apartments, there was a play-space, with a seven-foot high fence, for very young children.
Other areas had been set aside for youngsters of school age, for football and games, and paved areas had been provided for the elderly. All the houses were electrically floor-heated, and had recessed balconies. A Laidlaw spokesman said: “We can build a block in eight months now.”
By the end of the decade, Joe Fisher wrote, more than 160 multistorey tower blocks were in use across Glasgow.
The towers at Red Road – two 28-storey blocks and six 31-storey blocks – were built between 1964 and 1969. At one point, they were the tallest residential buildings in Europe.
High-rise flats were liked by many of their residents, but there were often serious problems too. Writing specifically of the Red Road development, in 2015, Alison Irvine, author of This Road is Red, observed: “... as early as the 70s, the flats’ reputation went downhill. Concerns about asbestos, antisocial neighbours, vandalism and too-small lifts that frequently broke down led many families to seek accommodation elsewhere.”
Mrs Elizabeth Kelly (pictured above, in 1978) had a striking view from her old flat in Roystonhill but, that November, she and her family were among the first to move into new-builds at Fairbairn Path, Bridgeton. The Fairbridge Tenants’ Management Co-operative, an innovative project built by the Scottish Special Housing Association, was described in the Evening Times as having the potential to be a “shining beacon in the dull tunnel of public authority housing”.