The Bruce Report & Slum Clearances: how Glasgow avoided architectural Armageddon
The slum clearances are a pivotal part of Glasgow’s history, which with hindsight is often subject to romanticised revisionism. The ideology of the controversial Bruce Report underpinned the clearances, and its effects still resonate in modern Glasgow.
The Bruce Report
The First Planning Report to the Highways and Planning Committee of the Corporation of the City of Glasgow, or The Bruce Report, was published in March 1945, and it documented the recommendation of large-scale regeneration and all-encompassing rebuilding of Glasgow and its surrounding areas. While in theory this idea, a complete regeneration of a major city, initially suggested cause for celebration, The Bruce Report and its ideas were not without criticism even at the time.
A rival report, the Clyde Valley Regional Plan (CVP), was published in 1949 by the Scottish Office and fundamentally disagreed with several important aspects of The Bruce Report such as the overspill policy. The CVP advocated an overspill policy which would see a sizeable portion of the densely populated city rehoused in new areas outside the Glasgow boundary. The Bruce Report maintained that rebuilding and subsequent rehousing should remain within the boundary.
Glasgow’s (Almost) Architectural Armageddon
Numerous controversial aspects comprised The Bruce Report, which if implemented would have resulted in a drastically different Glasgow today. It’s wide-reaching consequences would have affected political, economic, architectural, geographical and demographical spheres rendering the city as we know it today as completely alien.
A particularly controversial aspect of the report was the recommendation for wholesale demolition of a large part of the city, including most of the Victorian and Georgian architecture that Glasgow is so renowned for, in favour of a single wide-spread architectural design across the city. The city centre would have been the reserve of purely commercial developments, with any residential houses being moved to ‘zones’ which would have abolished the city’s Victorian grid plan of streets.
Unbelievably, the buildings listed for demolition comprise an absolute what’s-what of Glasgow’s most iconic architecture. Had the report been fully implemented, today we would be mourning the loss of Glasgow Central Station, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow City Chambers and Glasgow Royal Infirmary. The justification for this loss of cultural architecture was based solely on the notion that a uniform implementation of 1950s bland, formal architecture would result in a ‘healthy and beautiful city’. Thankfully, this is one aspect of the report that never came to fruition.
Slum Clearances
One aspect of the report however was implemented mostly entirely: the demolition of Glasgow’s slum housing, resulting in the slum clearances. Due to many factors, such as Irish and Highland immigration and the city’s limited scope for expansion due to the Campsie Hills and boggy ground surrounding it, Glasgow in the 1920s and ’30s had a higher level of slums of the worst kind and more overcrowding than anywhere else in Britain. The 1935 Housing (Scotland) Act directly addressed the question of urban congestion, not only by requiring concerted action on the part of local authorities but also by defining tolerable standards of accommodation.
A housing survey conducted in Glasgow in 1935 revealed that 29% of city houses were overcrowded, compared with 23% for Scotland and 3.8% for England. The Housing (Repairs and Rents) (Scotland) Act of 1954 forced local authorities to draw up plans for slum clearance. In the ten years following the passing of the Act 32,000 homes in Glasgow were demolished, though the 1961 census indicated that there were still 11,000 homes in Glasgow unfit for habitation.
The overarching moral principle of The Bruce Report’s idea is rightly commendable; the tenements constructed in the late 19th and early 20th century were unfit for purpose.
They had degraded into slums and the report envisaged rehousing the inhabitants to new areas on the city boundary, along with mass construction of high-rise flats. When it came to redevelopment however aspects of the CVP report were also implemented, notably housing citizens outside the Glasgow boundary. This resulted in Glasgow’s population falling from 1 million to 600,000, ultimately achieving The Bruce Report’s aim of a less densely populated city. However, the urban spread of Glasgow now sees the Greater Glasgow area comprising 1.8 million.
New Builds and New Hope or Theatres of Despair?
The Bruce Report is widely considered a failure, considering the grand claims of social engineering that underpinned it. Many of the new housing and new areas very quickly developed the same social problems that plagued the tenement slums and became synonymous with poverty-stricken, modern-day slums.
The reasons for this are numerous. Although many of those rehoused in new areas such as Drumchapel, Easterhouse, Pollok, and Castlemilk were excited at the prospect of leaving single-ends and communal toilets behind, this joy quickly dissipated.
Living on the periphery of Glasgow caused family, social, and employment problems. Isolation from previously multi-generation, anchored family bases, and poor employment prospects caused a breeding ground for discontent that quickly became an unseen malignant force in these areas. Lack of adequate shops necessitated the recently implemented, expensive, unreliable bus journey into the city centre as opposed to the previously quick walk to their local shop.
In what could have been a fresh start for the generation of the 1960s, the boredom and lack of amenities resulted in vandalism, hooliganism, and sectarianism, with gang warfare endemic and reaching levels not seen since the 1930s.
This was compounded by the fact that ‘good’ tenants were housed in the same areas as ‘bad,’ with the misguided notion that the ‘good’ would prove a positive influence. Predictably this was not the case, as ‘good’ tenants would be hounded out and whole schemes would become the domain of the anti-social, often severely afflicted with crime, unemployment, social deprivation, and sub-standard housing. This degradation and deterioration would continue to such an extent that a House Condition Survey in 1985, a mere 30 years since construction, the new builds of Pollok and Easterhouse were rated the worst in the city by Glasgow City Council.
The moral intentions of The Bruce Report and the amalgamated CVP’s overspill solution to Glasgow’s problems were designed to remove people from squalid living conditions and place them in spacious, fully equipped new townships. However due to poor strategic planning social problems that infected the slum tenements were simply carried over and continued to fester, resulting in a new form of squalor emerging, with the results still visible today.
Recent years have seen another attempt at rejuvenation and restoration of Glasgow, primarily sparked by the awarding of the hosting 2012 Commonwealth Games.
However, to end the cyclical pattern of false renaissance which continually fails and collapses; lessons must be learned from the original slum clearances and why it was such an abject failure to ensure a successful, sustained modern regeneration of Glasgow.
