Glasgow in 1967 - a city in flux

One of the sub-themes in Tim’s narrative is that of flux, specifically the changes that affected working-class people during the post-war years.
One significant change was in housing, and this is discussed in the early part of the novel. The old Victorian slums were being demolished and replaced by outlying housing schemes or, in the case of the Gorbals, modern high-rise developments. This process was actually well underway by 1967, and the old Gorbals was by then a rapidly diminishing reality that was about to disappear forever.
This change provoked strong views at the time. Many people, notably activists in the Labour Party, were instrumental in making it come about. While their motivations were noble – to end the misery of overcrowded slum living, sadly much of the housing that replaced the old tenements was inadequate, and has all either been demolished, such as the notorious damp-ridded Hutcheson C flats which were inhabited for less than 30 years, or is earmarked for demolition. It is fashionable to knock the competence of the city fathers who drove this process; certainly in the case of the outlying schemes they were guilty of wildly over-optimistic socialist idealism, supposing that they could create brand-new, instantly functioning communities from scratch, but perhaps the scale of the problem they faced was simply too huge, and the monies realistically available to them inadequate. And remember what they were striving to replace: slums in which people, often youngsters, died from entirely preventable diseases due to poor sanitation and squalid living conditions. This in the middle of the twentieth century, with space exploration in full flow, was considered, quite rightly, as unacceptable. It is easy to be nostalgic for poverty, much harder to live amid it.
Yet the process was a controversial one. Some people, like Tim’s friend Mark, who still had to endure Gorbals living, couldn’t wait to get out. The promise of a spacious, clean apartment with an inside bathroom was too much to resist. Yet others, such as Tim (somewhat hypocritically considering he had moved out of the Gorbals a year before into such an apartment in nearby Toryglen) mourned the end to the vibrant, colourful Gorbals character, with its warmth, humour and strong sense of community spirit.
This debate has become something of a cliché in my hometown, but the impact of the slum clearances changed Glasgow forever, and it is worth considering what was lost, as well as what was gained. I was born in 1972, therefore more or less at the moment ‘old’ Glasgow – a place of smog and shipbuilding, shillings and half crowns, slums and steamies, trams and razor gangs, fish teas and dance halls – died. Yet the idea of that place, passed on by my parents’ generation, casts a long shadow. It lives on in the sharp patter of Glasgow’s inhabitants, which is in a way a memorial for a lost world; my generation possesses a strange, sentimental nostalgia for something we never really knew.
As Tim tells Mark on page 13: ‘Understand this. An entire era is about to end, auld Glasgow is about to slip over the horizon. And something precious will be lost forever.’