Consolidation of the Old City but new Development at Random: the 1970s and 1980s

The 1970s brought a change in attitude towards the historical areas of the city, perhaps as a reaction to the failure of the CDAs and peripheral estates: the quality of the city centre and the old tenement and terraced areas with their rigorous block structure was rediscovered and newly appreciated. The conservation movement started tentatively in 1964 with the foundation of the New Glasgow Society, which was interested in the city’s environment and attempted to publicise Glasgow’s historical architecture. The society’s idea of

‘renewal through conservation’ did not, however, find support then. But soon the conservation movement became consolidated through a number of actions (see Martin, 1993, pp. 167–84):

4–24. Today’s city skyline, Glasgow (view from Kelvindale looking north-west)

• The Scottish Civic Trust was set up in 1967.

• The Civic Amenity Act was passed by Parliament in 1967 giving statutory force to the designation of conservation areas.

• The Glasgow Corporation’s Amenity Liaison Committee was set up in 1972 to establish a dialogue between the Corporation and amenity societies.

• The report Conservation in Glasgow by Lord Esher, published in 1971, recommended among other policies nine additional conservation areas. • The Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act of 1972 gave legal protection

to almost 800 buildings of special architectural or historic interest in Glasgow.

• The Planning Policy Report Conservation published by the Glasgow Corporation in 1974 introduced historic building grant aid and other conservation policies and proposals.

In parallel a programme of tenement rehabilitation was instigated. A storm in 1968 had caused serious damage to about 16,000 tenement properties, and the quickest way of providing habitable accommodation was to repair the existing building stock. In 1969 ASSIST, a research group at the University of Strathclyde’s Department of Architecture and Building Science, developed a tenement improvement programme for the installation of basic services, bathrooms and kitchens. In 1972 the first community-based housing association was established at central Govan. The Housing (Scotland) Act of 1974 enabled

housing associations registered with the Housing Corporation to obtain financial support for wholesale tenement rehabilitation programmes and introduced the concept of ‘action areas’. Between 1974 and 1990, Glaswegian housing associations renovated over 18,000 tenement flats (see Martin, 1993, pp. 184–6).

All this added up to an extensive programme of consolidation, repair and revitalisation of much of the remaining historical fabric in the central linear areas and some of the inner suburbs, and this in turn saved Glasgow’s image as an exceptional Victorian city. Next to the programme of the restoration of nineteenth-century tenements, the rehabilitation of the Merchant impressive as the quality and liveliness of the historical City and many other related projects are especially areas have much improved (Fig. 4.25a, b).

4–25. Consolidation of the historical areas of Glasgow that survived comprehensive development: (a) facade retention in the Merchant City; (b) tenement rehabilitation in Dennistoun

4–27. Out-of-town retail park development: (a) The Forge (aerial photo reproduced with kind permission of Glasgow Development Agency. © Scottish Enterprise); (b) Clydebank Shopping Centre

The consolidation of the historical fabric did not, however, coincide with a return to traditional planning and design principles for new development. There was no return to the grid structure and the perimeter block development principle, which both achieve the integration of disparate and incremental projects. Many new schemes, including important public buildings and flagship projects of the city, remain isolated events. There was no strategic plan, no design framework for the integration of individual projects, and many of them float in no man’s land and do not contribute to the activation of public streets and squares (Fig. 4.26).

Later, during the 1980s and as a consequence of the Thatcherite enterprise culture philosophy, strategic planning disappeared altogether from the vocabulary of urban development to make way for a laissez-faire attitude in which the city is shaped by market forces. The main argument was that control of market forces would not permit them to function effectively and would, therefore, stifle urban development (Hall, 1988, pp. 359ff). So they were frequently left to do whatever they wanted to do. In parallel, much retail moved out of urban districts into out-of-town or in-between-town parks (Fig. 4.27a, b) or, fighting to survive in the city centre, disappeared into introverted shopping malls (Fig. 4.28a, b) with dead service zones fronting public streets and squares. Many commercial and industrial enterprises moved into business and industrial parks, often in enterprise zones (Fig. 4.29) outside the city boundary, and people moved out as well. Even some university departments and related industries moved into science parks. The disentanglement of uses, separating out into individual isolated places even more radically than at previous stages of urban development, left many urban areas even less activated and generated even more need for transport. And as population densities shrank, the most suitable form of transport was frequently the car.

Housing too contributed to the dispersal of the city. The public sector had ceased to build new housing, the private sector generated semi-detached or terraced family housing around culs-de-sac, ‘lollipop’ housing of very low density and often at the very edge of the city, which as a result continued to sprawl (Fig. 4.30a, b).