The Gorbals as it existed before the clearances of the 1950s and 1960s was not a slum in the way that term implies somewhere with no social life, no culture, no community. It was overcrowded, often unsanitary, poorly maintained by landlords who extracted rents without investing in properties – these things were true. It was also one of the most densely woven urban communities in Europe, a place where waves of migrants had settled over a century and formed something that was recognisably its own.
Jewish families from Eastern Europe who fled the pogroms arrived from the 1880s onward. They brought the Gorbals its delicatessens, its tailoring workshops, its synagogues, the dense social infrastructure of a community that had no official support and built its own. Irish migrants came with the Famine and after it. Highlanders displaced by the Clearances of the previous century found the area alongside Italian families who arrived from the 1890s, initially as ice cream vendors and cafe owners.
The Streets
Crown Street, Eglinton Street, the Gorbals Cross – these were busy commercial streets with a density of shops and pubs and small businesses that would be extraordinary by modern standards. The tenements were genuinely overcrowded, sometimes badly so: a two-room flat shared by eight or nine people was not unusual. The shared toilets on the landings, the lack of indoor bathrooms, the dampness – these were real. But the streets were alive in a way that the replacement housing could not replicate, and the community networks that sustained people through poverty were embedded in the physical fabric of the neighbourhood.
Ralph Glasser’s memoir Growing Up in the Gorbals, published in 1986, documented what this life looked like from inside it – the son of a Jewish immigrant family, he described a poverty that was grinding and a community life that was genuinely sustaining. The book became the closest thing to a first-person record of the old Gorbals before its demolition.
The Clearance
Glasgow Corporation decided the Gorbals had to go. The official justification was the housing conditions, and the conditions were genuinely bad. But the approach chosen – clearance and replacement with tower blocks, rather than renovation and improvement – was driven as much by the modernist certainties of post-war urban planning as by any careful analysis of what would serve the community best.
The Hutchesontown schemes, designed in phases, replaced the tenement streets with tower blocks and low-rise deck-access housing. The population was dispersed to peripheral estates – Castlemilk, Pollok, Toryglen. The community networks dissolved. The synagogues closed. The Jewish community, which had been moving out to the suburbs since the 1930s, accelerated its departure. Within fifteen years of the clearances, the dense social world that had existed in the Gorbals for a century had effectively ceased to exist.
What Replaced It
The Hutchesontown tower blocks themselves were demolished in stages from the 1980s onward, most famously the Queen Elizabeth Square towers, dynamited in 1993 in a BBC broadcast. The area has since been rebuilt again, with mixed-tenure housing and some attempt to recreate street-level activity. The old Gorbals cannot be recovered. The question of whether it needed to be destroyed to be improved – the answer to which seems increasingly to be no – is one Glasgow has been living with ever since.
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