Glasgow ca.1945 (Source: Glasgow Heritage)In Part 1 of ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars’ we saw how decades of neglect and torpor had resulted in a concentration of Victorian slums and a chronic housing crisis that Glasgow authorities coming out of World War 2 were forced to confront. This prompted the 1945 Bruce Report, proposing that what Glasgow needed to regenerate its overpopulated metropolis was a new approach which was in the words of its author Robert Bruce, ‘surgical’ and ‘bold’. While Bruce’s scheme emphasised slum clearance and a mega-sized re-building project within the city limits, other planners from outside Glasgow put forward a competing plan, one with a very different vision of Glasgow and its solution for the city’s problems.
Patrick Abercrombie (Source: alchetron.com) The alternative model: ”New Towns”
In 1949 the Scottish Office (in Edinburgh) presented the city of Glasgow with an alternate blueprint for improving living standards and renewing the city, the “Clyde Valley Regional Plan 1946” (CVRP), Advocacy of the CVRP model was spearheaded by English town planner Patrick Abercrombie〚𝔸〛, whose town planning CV included the City of London, Hong Kong and Addis Ababa. The Abercrombie Plan recommended rehousing much of the population outside the city largely in “New Towns” which would function as overspill areas for overcrowded central Glasgow…it proposed not Bruce’s skyscrapers but low-rise living, expanding out to spread the density beyond the city limits [‘Scotland from the Sky’, BBC One, Series 1, Episode 2, (TV documentary, 2018)]. Integral to the plan was the presence of green belts in unbuilt areas, establishing buffer zones between the city and the New Towns – an idea the CVRP got from the earlier Garden Cities Movement〚𝔹〛. The outcome of the authorities’ attempts to transform Glasgow’s urban landscape into New Towns and “Peripheral Housing Estates” will be outlined in detail in ‘Glasgow’s Postwar Planning Wars, Part 3’.
Scottish New Town (Source: Pinterest)New Towns phenomena
New Towns were not novel to Glasgow and Scotland, the new towns movement was an international one (from the 1950s on, spreading to developing and de-colonising countries in Africa, Middle East and Asia) [’New towns on the Cold War frontier’, (Michelle Provoost), Eurozone, 28-Jun-2006, www.eurozine.com]). Pioneered in Britain, the movement followed the passage of the 1946 New Towns Act—handing the UK government power to designate areas of land for new town development—kick-starting an ambitious program of new peripheral and outlying settlements across the Home Countries [‘New towns’, UK Parliament, www.parliament.uk].
Schism Over Glasgow: two distinct planning strategies
Academic Florian Urban sees the contest to shape postwar Glasgow as one of national ’planners’ versus local ’housers’. The Scottish Office’s CVRP was national policy, Westminster’s optimal regional fix for the poverty, overcrowding and unsanitary nature of Glasgow’s urban inner core. Bruce’s plan was to be the intended local fix, the solution to Glasgow Corporation’s objective of eradicating the city’s slums and ghettos. The first group was advocating dispersal away from the centre and the other containment in newly configured but in some cases even denser concentrations within the metropolis. The schism between the planning philosophies of the planners and the housers tapped into other existing tensions at the time – Tory national government (1951-55) versus Labour Glasgow City Council〚ℂ〛; ’refined’ Edinburgh versus “gritty industrial” Glasgow [‘Modernizing Glasgow – Tower Blocks, Motorways, and New Towns 1940-2010’, (Florian Urban), Glasgow School of Arts, www.radar.gsa.ac.uk]. The Corporation’s opposition to the Scottish Office’s interference (as it saw it) was couched in existential terms…loss of population was equated with the Glasgow authority’s loss of political prestige [‘Building and Cityscape Council Housing’, (Ranald McInnes), The Glasgow Story, www.theglasgowstory.com].
Photo: the sun.co.ukRegionalisation v Containment: the first as advocated by the Scottish Office and Abercrombie entailed first and foremost the creation of new towns (low-rise housing consisting of “detached, semi-detached or terraced houses surrounded by ample green space”)…contrasting with the containment approach of Bruce and the Glasgow City Council which sought to create “an architecture based on the principles of the existing city (3 to 4-storey modern tenements and corridor streets)” (Urban).
Image: Google EarthEven after Glasgow Corporation withdrew its approval of Bruce’s proposals (too radical, too expensive), it never formally adopted the Clyde Valley Plan in its place…it did however accept many of the CVRP’s principles. In 1954 the Corporation made key concessions to the planners, agreeing to the creation of green belts around the city and accepting the inevitability of decentralisation (the need for 100,000 new flats outside the metropolis to alleviate the centralised overcrowding). The planners’ objectives were aided by the appointment of Archibald Jury as city architect〚𝔻〛 who was fully on board with the goals of (British) national planning (Urban).
Photo: Architectsjournal.co.ukA mishmash of “divergent visions”
In the end the Corporation sat on the fence and opted for “two bob each way”…cherry-picking from both rival schemes — so that both modernist tower blocks and low-rise buildings got erected concurrently and haphazardly, oodles of high-rise and low-rise housing all mingled in together. This confused juggling of opposing plans by the Glasgow authorities led to construction delays and made for erratic even schizophrenic urban planning in the three decades after the late 1940s, contributing to high levels of dissatisfaction felt by many Glaswegians with their reassigned housing arrangements〚𝔼〛.
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〚𝔸〛 together with co-author Robert Matthew
〚𝔹〛 the New Towns movement can trace its British lineage to the “Garden cities movement” of the turn-of-the-Twentieth-century – to the pioneering experiments with Welwyn (later the first of the British New Towns), Letchworth and Cadbury’s Bournville
〚ℂ〛 Glasgow Corporation, still trading on its earlier status as an economic powerhouse within the British Empire, was staunchly committed to resist any attempt by Westminster to curtail its municipal powers (Urban)
〚𝔻〛 replacing Robert Bruce as Glasgow chief planner after he resigned in pique in 1951 following the rejection of his plan
〚𝔼〛 many of the residents removed (some forcibly) from inner Glasgow and relocated in the New Towns and the peripheral estates were sufficiently disenchanted with their new lot that they requested to be transferred to alternate accommodation
