"The visitor,
rumbling over the Clyde into Central Station, used to see fine buildings lining
the river on either side. Not any more. Right next to the railway, on the
corner of the Broomielaw and Jamaica Street, is a huge and -- to me -- deeply
shocking hole in the urban fabric. What has disappeared in the last few months
is a series of buildings of the sort that gives Glasgow its unique character.
How can such destruction still go on? This was the site of the old Paisley's
department store, long closed and derelict. Now I know that these buildings
were not just dilapidated but in a dangerous condition. They were victims of
the recession in that a scheme to rehabilitate them had foundered.
Nevertheless, they were special, and every effort should have been made to keep
them standing. Naively, I had assumed that these forlorn, grey-painted facades
would eventually be restored -- until the bulldozers suddenly moved in."
Gavin Stamp, Herald Scotland, 9 July 1994
There’s a certain sadness in taking the bus I took to school
each week for six years nowadays. Something about Eglinton Road feels
different.
Something that makes the nausea of non-recognition sweep through me.
Perhaps its a sign of getting older, as routes you recognize as part of your
childhood grow old with you.
Or perhaps...
Who put that there?
Now this is where I out myself as a bit of a stick in the
mud, and where I feel great affiliation with the peoples of Anderston and
Charing Cross who saw their communities torn apart by the building of the M8
right through them.
However, by Devon Street at least, all the buildings that
once were there still are (even if a looming new darkness decreases any
willingness to walk that way at night substantially). There’s just a flipping
motorway built on top of it. Back then,
the Bruce Report manifested itself in widespread destruction of entire streets,
and buildings ancient.
(A great example of creeping modernity there – the brand new
motorway looming next to the age-old print works, thankfully spared, unlike the
architectural dig on the opposite side of the road.)
The greater effects of the motorway so far, other than for
the motorists (who love it) and the locals (who protested greatly) is on poor
old Tradeston. I can barely stomach alighting from the tube at West Street, or
even glancing at the area on Google Maps, for the old industrial area was
almost entirely leveled to make way for this M74 extension. Ruins and the
derelict. The Crossrail Glasgow scheme, should it ever see the light of day,
plans to renovate West Street to turn it into a under/overground connection ala
Partick. I’m not holding my breath.
This is a great example, incidentally, of what Robert Hughes called The Shock of the New.
We need motorways though, despite my inner conservatism,
especially given the demise of the alternative. (On the count of 3...damn you
Beeching!) My sadness is not with the shock of the new – as jarring as it as –
as with the loss of the old.
For Tradeston takes us into the realm of derelict,
demolished and dismayed Glasgow. We can see it further more on that old 44 bus
route. I mean, you’d have been only a bus stop away from Bridge Street railway
station, when the bus would stop outside the Coliseum, Frank Matcham’s cinema
house which had stood since 1905. Not that it was a cinema in our day, as the
hoardes of older women arriving on the bus en masse from the Bingo day out
would attest. A big red looming red brick picture house.
Oh.
Done in by a mysterious fire, like so many landmarks in
Glasgow. A trend of unfortunate events is still the great
bugger coincidence, unless someone has evidence of the Great Building
Conspiracy...
In fact, let us refer to the Herald of July 1994:
“It seems, all too
often, as if the defeatist attitudes of the past, which led to so much
unnecessary destruction in the 1960s and 1970s, still prevail -- despite all
the legitimate claims for Glasgow being a ''City of Culture'' and a ''City of
Architecture and Design''. As any Glaswegian knows, decent buildings constantly
come down -- or just ''go on fire'' -- far more often than in any other city in
Britain, it seems to me. And what a curious local use of language that is:
buildings do not ''go on fire''; they are set on fire. And I suspect that many
fewer would go on fire if the penalties for arson and illegal demolition were
much tougher and the planning department had the powers it needs to make
Glasgow a magnificent city again.”
I for one don’t believe in conspiracy. I do believe in
neglect, which is worse.
It’s also widespread.
Robert Bruce’s two planning reports in 1945 paved the way
for the disregarding of historic buildings. The abandoned part of his plan
called for the demolition of Central Station, High Street, the City Chambers,
Kelvingrove Museum, and the Rennie Mackintosh Art School to name a few places
still standing. To quote the Glasgow Story: “Bruce
proposed to demolish almost everything in the city centre and rebuild from new,
removing, for example, the School of Art, the City Chambers, Central Station
and all the other period buildings which add so much character to the city
today. Slum tenements were to be replaced by commercial developments and the
inhabitants removed to high-density housing schemes on the outskirts (but
within the boundaries) of the city. Bruce's proposals were ultimately rejected
and less radical solutions sought.”
("Glasgow City Chambers and War Memorial" by Kim Traynor - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons - )
(Glasgow City Chambers - ripe for bulldozers if you asked Bruce!)
(© Copyright Chris Downer and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence)
(Bruce would have seen the 2014 School of Art fire as a great opportunity, and not one for restoration...)
Sounds like a great idea to me. Who needs history and
character? Let’s tear down the Lincoln Memorial, it’s had its run. Why keep the
Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal and the Empire State Buildings in their place, when
a nice identikit office block would suffice in the modern climate?
Let’s build a big motorway connection bridge
connecting Waterloo to the city centre! Course it will need the flattening of
Covent Garden and St Paul's, and the cutting into of the Strand and Oxford
Street, but hey, its all for the best.
If that sounds like madness to you, that’s what Bruce
suggested. And with the last one, that’s what we got.
The buildings I mentioned all survived the axe. Others
weren’t so lucky.
“''What Hitler failed to achieve in the 1940s, Glasgow
Corporation cheerfully carried out in the following decades in the name of
progress.''
Frank Worsdall
John McLeod’s Christian Institute building (1880-1980) was
either a monstrosity or a beauty, depending on your point of view. As one whose
mind is full of horror imagery, the idea of having Dracula’s castle practically
on the doorstep leaves the imagination open to all sorts of plots. It appears
briefly in Bertrand Taverniers 1980 film Death Watch. It was gone by the time
the film opened, to be replaced by an office block.
It may have had “no architectural value” as one book later
put it, but value is in the eye of the beholder, is it not? After all, the looming
tower at Anniesland was listed as soon as possible, and there was a poll on
architectural beauty, a number of years back, won by the Anderston Centre. The
Institute, inside, performed its task as a living Hieronymus Bosch painting,
with staircases and window levels not entirely level with each other, and rooms
appearing, as if conjured by Hogwarts. It was its own uniqueness that damned it
when the YMCA ran low on dosh.
(I direct you towards The Glasgow Story here, as there are no available photos under creative commons...)
(If you want to see where I was born, look about 2 storeys
up into the sky at this point.)
And then there’s Rottenrow Maternity Hospital, the finest in
Europe, where me and my sister were born. It had its meeting with the
bulldozers in 2001, with allegations of asbestos and the University of
Strathclyde buying the land to put a bit of greenery in its place. Cue the Scotsman: “Glasgow Royal Maternity
Hospital, or to many Glaswegians - The Rottenrow - was founded in 1834 and
demolished in 2001. The Victorian building had fallen into disrepair by the
time of its demolition and was deemed inadequate for modern requirements. A
replacement for The Rottenrow was built at Glasgow Royal Infirmary with the
building purchased by the University of Strathclyde and subsequently
demolished. The exit of the hospital,
where many Glaswegians first entered the world, was retained.”
Well, at least it’s not another office block.
(Not that I have prejudice against office blocks. We have
enough empty ones as it is. If you are going to have an empty building lying
around, it might as well be the older one.)
(Greenfield St school, to be used as some nice offices in the near future...)
Ah, but the Bruce Report got rid of the slums, people say.
Indeed!
(how people picture the Gorbals and Govan slums - Annan photo, 1860)
(What actually went instead! Queen's Park Terrace, 1960s)
Replaced them with Easterhouse and Castlemilk, or these
monsters:
("Red Road flats 1" by Nico Hogg from London, United Kingdom - Red Road, Balornock, Glasgow. Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Commons)
Now I don't want you to think I am in anyway biased against high rises, so here is some soothing music to listen to at this point...
That’s not dealing with deprivation!
That’s moving it out of
the way!
I am going to assume, to prevent the need for a book on the issue, that you have heard of Easterhouse at least.
The problem isn’t that there was no slums. Far from it,
there was some horrific poverty laden places, and I’ve no qualms about the
bulldozers moving in there.
However, what the planners did in the Gorbals, and
Govan, and many other places, was the equivalent of getting rid of the baby
with the bathwater. It wasn’t just the slums that got demolished: it was the
churches, the cinemas, the museums, the shops, the places of astounding beauty,
the town houses. Anything remotely savable was left to rot so it, too, could
go with the rest. One local I know who grew up in the area bemoaned that the
council had “done a Hiroshima” on the area they’d grown up in.
(Urban Glasgow poster Strepadeir took some lovely photos of the churches etc which were got rid of, which you can see here.)
Hindsight suggests, looking at the sole standing tenement in
the Gorbals, that the place would have been far better off in the long term had
those savable tenements been renovated, then the whole place torn down and
those ghastly high rises replace them. Especially given you can home more
people in a row of tenements than you can in the area denoted to a high rise.
“The old ideas which
led to the creation of the high rise living hell, the soulless peripheral
housing schemes and the destruction of the old communities, have changed.”
Malcolm Reid, 13 October 1989
This brings us the amusement of the Ibroxholm Oval
demolitions, which the Evening Times described as being “after extensive
consultation with the local community” yet as part of the “local community” at
the time the first we heard of it was from forums like Hidden Glasgow, and the
same was true for many in the immediate area. A similar, though anonymous for
reasons of personal information, event occurred within the last five years,
when those in charge of a controversial building project – which is still
causing issues, finished, hence the anonymity –
told locals that all of the Councillors had rubber stamped the
proposals, only for the local Councillor to announce that he hadn’t!
(Ibroxholm Oval, mostly deceased and amusing)
“Unfortunately, when I come along its all too often one jump
ahead of the demolishers.”
Frank Worsdall, Evening Times “Up the Close, OK: Glasgows Tenement Champion” 8
May 1979, David Gibson
The topic of
architectural conservation, and especially the Glaswegian sub-genre of this,
cannot be mentioned without reference to the late Frank Worsdall. For over
thirty-five years until his death in 1991, Worsdall was the one man Glasgow
Tenement Preservation Society, and his books (The City That Disappeared,
Victorian City, The Tenement: A Way of Life) are heartily recommended. His
campaign saw him at odds with both city fathers who opted for ostracizing, and
local vandals who opted for terror campaigns (“My work has gone to pieces since
this began” he told the Herald in April 1981). It was he who wrote: “'In the
great majority of cases, the demolition was unnecessary and could have been
avoided with a little foresight and imagination. These qualities, however, seem
to be in remarkably short supply in Glasgow.'' (City That Disappeared) Like
many of the buildings he fought to save, Worsdall’s life was to end in flames:
a house fire that took his life and destroyed many of the notes and photographs
he had so diligently tried to save.
“Frank Worsdall should have been encouraged. Instead, he was
marginalised by the various establishments which operate. He was awkward and
difficult, self-educated and without a degree, but he was the sort of
passionate, necessary eccentric that every great city seems to generate. From
what he wrote it is clear that he understood that any modern community which
wipes out the past is not civilised and that the best of old and new can and
must be integrated. This is not nostalgia but realism. He should have been awarded
an honorary degree by the university for all he had done in recording Glasgow's
urban history; we might then have had the benefit of his work. Instead, as he
watched the buildings he loved come down while those who should have known
better stood complacently by, he withdrew into himself and became odder and
odder and more and more paranoid, until the conflagration destroyed him and so
much of his work.”
Gavin Stamp
Gavin Stamp, whose article on Worsdall and Glasgow sabotage
I have referred to in three quotes, is himself an architectural historian who
publishes books on the things lost on a British wide scale. The Telegraph highly recommend Britains Lost
Cities and Lost Victorian Britain, two of his books on the subject.
“No one seems to realise that when you demolish an area, you
also destroy its spirit, its togetherness, its community. All that happens is
that occasional buildings are listed for preservation under what I regard as a
hopelessly haphazard system. Its an absurd process. The plan should have been
to preserve whole areas, and not individual buildings. And in preserving areas,
we would also have preserved the spirit of Glasgow.”
Frank Worsdall, Evening Times “Up the Close, OK: Glasgow’s
Tenement Champion”, David Gibson, May 8th 1979
I turn inevitably (and deftly avoid the cold grasp of my old
History teachers ghost for using that word) to St Enoch.
No, not the
underground station, useful as it is.
Nor the Shopping Centre, best known for
causing agoraphobia in the calmest mind at ten paces, and having all the few
interesting shops go out of business before you’ve even noticed them. A time
before that section of time was bestridden by a goliath glass carbuncle. Before
it was even a waste ground used for cheap car parking. I speak of St Enoch, the
railway station (and if you like, the hotel), which stood until demolition in
the 1970’s. From the 1880’s until 1966, it was one of the busiest and most
popular Glasgow railway stations.
("St Enoch railway station in 1879" by James Valentine - Saint Enoch's Station Hotel. Licensed under Public Domain via Commons )
However in January 8, 1966, the Glasgow Herald was able to
announce in its gloomy headline: “Railway Stations in Glasgow to Close”
announcing the end of not only St Enochs but Buchanan Street railway stations.
[I feel a bit bad for Buchanan Street station. Central and Queen Street are still
in use today, and St Enoch is mourned by many. Buchanan Street railway station,
where the Glasgow Caledonian University is now, roughly, feels a bit like the
Ringo Starr of the big four Glasgow termini...]
(© Copyright Ben Brooksbank and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.)
Pictured - Ringo Starr, Glasgow railway version
As early as February 1963, the
Herald (“St Enoch Station to Close? Part of Beeching Plan”) had warned of the
stations endangered status, Dr Beeching finding it “economic sense to close one
of two stations serving a similar area.” The Herald claimed “As services exist,
it is almost certain that the Central station could not deal with the extra
traffic from St Enoch, especially the suburban services in the morning and
evening.” Indeed, even with substantial cuts to the services, they struggled to
take the demand well into the last decade.
On July 7th 1958, for example, extra engines had
to be drafted in on top of the normal twenty two trains for the several
thousand commuters departing from St Enoch. All of those commuters, for summer
holidays A.B. (After Beeching), were expected to use Central. There was a
reason, unseen in the beans and pooh sticks used to count by these economists,
why Glasgow had the four terminus stations. As soon as 1975, complications had
led the Herald to note that Scottish Association for the Public Transport had
urged Strathclyde Regional Council to reuse St Enoch for the “base for a trans
Glasgow and main line services” as “60% of people in the region are entirely
dependent on public transport”.
Glasgow responded to this by reopening the Central lower
line – minus a few classic stations – in the late 1970’s. Though they wouldn’t
have needed to do this if, oh, I don’t know, they hadn’t shut the damned thing
in the first place! Still, at least on that topic they came to their senses before
they made the changes irreversible.
“A proposal to use St Enoch’s as a concert hall has been
reported [in the Herald].” Wrote William Forbes to that newspaper on October
24, 1966. “I suggest that it would be infinitely more sensible to use it again
as a railway station.”
“Glasgow will be a poorer place architecturely if the former
St Enoch Hotel is demolished” wrote the Herald, July 27th 1977. “At
present the official plan is for the hotel to be demolished in the site
clearance for the new Ministry of Defence office block. This project is part of
the scheme to transfer 6000 civil service jobs to Glasgow and it is certainly
vital that this is in no way hampered by the proposal to save the hotel.”
When
I first heard about the official reason for KOing the derelict St Enoch building
– this MOD thing – I assumed it was a Glasgow urban legend.
[The Hotel, despite
strenuous local protestations, ‘failed a safety check’, as buildings left to
crumble of their own devices are prone to, in the late 70’s and was thus pulled
down too.]
To find it reported in a reliable paper is astonishing. So St Enoch
station (and hotel) were removed entirely to make way for this MOD building,
which never came. Well, actually, it did. In Anderston, in a block considerably
smaller than the area the GDC had destroyed in preparation. And not quite
finding 6000 jobs either. So the City Council were left with a wide open space
which they were forced to hand over to retail, for a sizeable rent. [Kentigern
House, an anaesthetic 1980s tiered sandstone creation, is small enough that you
could, by scale, fit nearly five of them into the area taken up by the St
Enochs Centre...and indeed, as of November 2012, the government plan to move
many of the jobs back down to Bristol.]
Kentigern House - if you squint, it's sort of near the railway station a mile down the road
This after each reference to saving the
Hotel structure mentioned how the efforts “could prejudice the development [of
the jobs]” (Herald, July 27 1977) I’ve never been particularly fond of
emotional blackmail, and less so when the caveat blackmailed over failed to
materialize. It is the type of political approach best left to the current
Conservative front bench. Still, by a series of unfortunate incidents from
outside sources (Beeching, government ministers, the MOD, ‘safety’ advisors)
Glasgow District Council had removed the railway station, and in its place had
a large space of land ready for retail to buy.
Lucky I’m not a cynical person, really.
I am, however, pragmatic in my approach. If the Lion
Chambers are past their event horizon, then get rid of them as soon as
possible, they are a danger to the public.
But I can’t see the mass tenement
building in the Gorbals as anything more than a massive waste of money caused
by short termism. Likewise, the money spent on trying to keep Hutchesontown C
damp free, on “events” in Castlemilk and Easterhouse, the whole entire
accumulative effect...was far more expensive than restoration and renovation work
would have been in the first place. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
Still, there remains muted optimism. Nature abhors a vacuum,
and so do city fathers (unless, admittedly, they run North of Anderston along
the M8). The new Laurieston master-plan is currently hard at work replacing the
Stirlingfauld high rises with new social housing. I admit when I heard it was
to be done in the style of Greek Thomson, I nearly fainted with shock. Almost
sounds like an admission, forty years later, that the tenements ought to have
been renovated and made fit for use, rather than demolished en masse. Seems the
plan will bring South Portland Street back to life too. I watch interested.
And in 2015, money was pumped into Govan, to preserve its
historic buildings. It was a bittersweet moment, for one of the focal points of
campaigning before hand, the Broomloan Road schools, are no more after an
arsonist had their way.
Still, there are always achievements. The Fairfield building
is being converted into a museum, the Linen Bank is being transformed once more
into flats and shops. And there does seem to be the prevelant view that the
widespread dispersal of the 1960s and 1970s were, in retrospect, an error.
Still, it would been much worse if the Bruce Report had been carried out in full, and the city centre and High Street had meet its maker. There are limitations for what even modernizers can stomach.
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