Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Mosspark: Homes Fit for Heroes?
- 3 Hamiltonhill: A Pioneering Slum-Clearance Scheme
- 4 West Drumoyne: Blue-Collarland
- 5 Blackhill: Out of the Slums
- 6 Craigbank: Amateur Dramatics?
- 7 South Pollok: ‘The Bundy’
- 8 Alarums and Excursions
- Appendix 1 Balloting for a Council House
- Appendix 2 Methodological Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 November 2019
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Mosspark: Homes Fit for Heroes?
- 3 Hamiltonhill: A Pioneering Slum-Clearance Scheme
- 4 West Drumoyne: Blue-Collarland
- 5 Blackhill: Out of the Slums
- 6 Craigbank: Amateur Dramatics?
- 7 South Pollok: ‘The Bundy’
- 8 Alarums and Excursions
- Appendix 1 Balloting for a Council House
- Appendix 2 Methodological Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
For all that Glasgow's radical council housing programme was internationally famous in both the interwar and post-Second World War years, its treatment by academics is underwhelming. While the basic economic, social administrative and constructional aspects of local housing policy in this period have been dealt with adequately, detailed housing history seems to have almost disappeared from the general area covered by the rubric of ‘Urban Studies’. Insofar as it has been retained, it has been left to architectural historians, which some might see as a fate worse than death given their propensity to talk only in design terms, use impenetrable jargon, and their apparent ignorance of the fact that a house is meant to constitute a home for human beings as opposed to Le Corbusier's bombastic ‘machine for living in’.
The controversial and politically important story of the development of Glasgow's council housing, particularly in the interwar years, has simply not been told systematically. In other words, that story has been depoliticised. But this will not do. The story of council housing in Glasgow is the story of class-struggle, and the intensity of that struggle, and its potential for disruption at the level of both the local and national state, can be gauged from the following apocalyptic quotation from a 1923 book. Although it is not unknown to serious students of Glasgow's interwar housing, it is worth repeating:
The Red Clyde, the smouldering danger of revolution in Glasgow, owing to the swift development of political affairs in Britain, has ceased to be a local anxiety, and become an interest and an alarm to the whole civilised world … There is something deeply wrong with the Clyde; the whole middle-class of England knows it, though hardly in detail; the motive is adequate, real, dangerous, that sends in repeated menace, to every successive Parliament, the same bitter group of extreme Left Members, irrespective of the changing political mood of the rest of the country, to kill with their fierce interruptions any restful optimism of the remainder of the House. The Red Clyde will remain the focus of English politics, until it has been cured, or definitely appeased; or until first Scotland, then industrial England becomes fully infected by it, with momentous effects on Britain, the British Empire, and the rest of the world. The mainspring of the trouble, the root grievance of the Clyde, is Housing …
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- Information
- SchemingA Social History of Glasgow Council Housing, 1919-1956, pp. xii - xviPublisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017