Industry | 2010.03.13
Sky-high dreams that became a nightmare | Ian Jack
Joblessness, drugs and now deaths – the history of Glasgow\'s Red Road has been defined by decline
Just inside the reach of living memory, the Red Road was a rough, red-cinder track that led through the cabbage fields which once furrowed the high ground on Glasgow\'s northern outskirts. By the 1930s, the track had been widened, straightened and resurfaced by municipal planners who had their eye on the cabbage fields as sites for new housing. In the 1960s, this new housing rose up: the Red Road flats, announced proudly at the time as the tallest human habitations in Europe. This distinction, together with an alliterative name that suggested the Wizard of Oz (or of Omsk), made it an early favourite of sociologists and architectural students and later, when things had gone wrong, an attraction for writers and film-makers. Last week\'s triple suicide, if suicide is what it was, simply added an international paragraph to a long local narrative of disaster.
The project was proposed in 1960 and conceived in more detail by its architect, Sam Bunton, the next year. It is interesting to consider how Glasgow would have looked from the Red Road as Bunton worked at his drawing board. To the farther west, the cranes of Clyde shipyards stretched several miles downriver; to the closer west, the workshops of the North British Locomotive Company still exported engines to Africa and Asia; to the south, steam rose night and day from Parkhead\'s big iron forge; to the east, the chimneys of the Lanarkshire rolling mills and the conical waste heaps of collieries pricked the horizon.
Between these points, a dense pattern of blackened Victorian tenements lay blurred in the smoke. More than a million people lived in the city then, many in houses that were cramped and unsanitary. The city\'s plan was to give all of them better homes as quickly and as cheaply as planning regulations and budgets allowed. Bunton\'s part of it was to try to fit 1,356 dwellings for 4,700 people on a very tight site. He needed to build high: six 31-storey blocks and two 27-storey slabs went up, built controversially around steel frames rather than the traditional concrete and with the outer walls made of asbestos. The first was finished in 1966 and the last in 1969, but even by that time the view from Red Road had changed substantially. The air was much clearer and the chimneys and cranes sparser. Glasgow was ending its career as a premier manufacturing city and losing its industrial workers to factories elsewhere or to the dole queue. From the top floor of one of Bunton\'s blocks, nearly 300ft up, a tenant could see the peaks of Arran, and as the 1970s turned into the 1980s many tenants had plenty of time to study the view.
Patricia Ferguson, now a Labour MSP, moved into the first block as an eight-year-old in 1966. What she remembers is probably typical. In their old tenement, a family of four shared two rooms. Now they had three bedrooms, a lounge, a big kitchen and, for the first time, a bathroom. "We had lots of space and fabulous views," she said this week. "When people moved there, this was the future, this was hope." Her dad worked as monumental letter-cutter, inscribing tombstones. Neighbouring fathers and brothers left every morning to earn money as upholsterers, plumbers and fitters, or to clock on at the railway repair shops. But even before that way of life died, there were problems. Two lifts served 120 flats and each lift could carry only eight people. When they worked, which wasn\'t always, they caused physical struggles among peak-time crowds waiting at the bottom. They were too small to carry coffins horizontally – the dead needed to be put back on their feet. And the towers swayed in high winds – lounge carpets would puff up in the middle with interior gales that had got round the asbestos, and the water in the lavatory bowl would ripple and tilt.
Vandalism began, and then drugs. Ferguson\'s family moved out in 1977 after an empty flat two floors up was set on fire and a young boy died of asphyxiation. The Red Road blocks became harder to let, and as occupancy rates dropped so Glasgow council vetted new tenants far less strictly. (Ferguson recalled that before her own family was accepted for a Red Road flat, a municipal official had visited their old tenement home and checked their clean habits by looking under the beds.) In the 1980s, one block was turned over to student accommodation. Demolition faced others. A temporary salvation arrived 10 years ago when the UK government announced its decision to disperse asylum seekers from London and the south-east; and Glasgow, moved by either charity or financial opportunity or both, saw a way of filling up its more ill-favoured housing stock. The city now has the highest number of asylum seekers outside London – 2,485 according to the latest Home Office count, though that figure doesn\'t include those who have been finally accepted as refugees. Most of them live in the Red Road flats or smaller high-rises on the same northern edge of the city.
I went there on Wednesday to look at the place where three people had died. The comedian Frankie Boyle once remarked that life in his childhood home, a high-rise in south Glasgow, was so depressing that "they should have built diving boards on top". It was an unfortunate thought to remember and a difficult one to suppress. Each block rose storey by shabby storey into a cold blue sky. Some had windows patched by cardboard. Chicken-wire stretched across the tops of balconies to stop children falling out or pigeons getting in. As I stood looking at the flowers and the leaflets ("Jobs and houses for all – refugees are welcome here") which sympathetic demonstrators had left on the grass, a couple of women came up and talked me through the details as they understood them. First, the three dead had heaved a heavy wardrobe through the chicken-wire of their 21st-floor balcony, to make a hole, and then jumped 50 metres after it.
"It\'ll be all about them now," one of the women said, speaking of the dead and meaning by "them" the non-native. "But don\'t you fall for it! There\'ll be dead bodies all over the place if they think it\'ll work for them. These folk are coming over and jumping on the broo [benefits – in fact an asylum seeker gets £35 a week] and there are too many people here who canny get jobs." She wanted to get out of the flats to a new house, but the benefits office wouldn\'t accept that she lived separately from the father of her two children. "He\'s a depressive and I\'m an alcoholic on methadone. Nobody\'s perfect and that."
So many things are unknown. The suicide theory is untested and the dead have not been officially identified, though the Russian Serge Serykh\'s paranoid history was quickly and widely leaked, almost certainly to forestall speculation that government policies were to blame. Among the dead, we may never exactly know who did what to whom or why. Only the venue can be explained: how they came to be where they were. The answer is that there, 50 years ago, an architect and a local authority embraced a vision of modernity little understanding its drawbacks, or foreseeing that the old society and economy it was built to perpetuate more decently was about to crumble so quickly underfoot.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/20[...]3/glasgow-asylum-seeker-deaths
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