By the 1860s the medieval core of Glasgow was among the worst slums in the industrialised world. The closes and wynds running off the High Street and the Saltmarket had accumulated decades of industrial migration into spaces built for a fraction of the population they now held. Families of six, seven, eight people lived in single rooms. Cholera had swept through twice, in 1832 and 1848. The mortality rates in the densest streets were comparable to cities at war.
The Glasgow Improvement Act of 1866 was the city’s response. Parliament gave Glasgow Corporation powers that no British municipality had previously held: the authority to compulsorily purchase and demolish 88 acres of the old city centre, displace the population living there, and rebuild. The City Improvement Trust was established to carry out the work.
What Was Demolished
The back-to-back courts and timber-framed tenements of the medieval city were largely swept away over the following two decades. Streets that had existed since the twelfth century disappeared. The closes off the High Street – many of them documented in photographs taken in the 1860s by Thomas Annan, who was commissioned to record the slums before demolition – were pulled down. Annan’s photographs remain among the most important documents of Victorian urban poverty anywhere in Britain: narrow passageways, people standing in doorways, the walls close enough to touch from both sides.
What the demolitions exposed was a problem the Act had not fully solved. The 100,000 people living in the cleared area had to go somewhere. Some were rehoused in the new model lodging houses the Trust built. Most moved to adjacent areas – the Gorbals, Calton, Bridgeton – which promptly became more overcrowded than the slums that had just been cleared.
The Tenement Solution
The tenement became Glasgow’s answer to mass urban housing over the following half-century. Not the cramped single-end of the slum era but a more regularised form: three or four storeys of sandstone construction, common stairwells, two or three rooms per flat, built to bylaws that specified minimum room heights and ventilation. The red and blonde sandstone tenements that characterise the West End, the Southside and the inner-city neighbourhoods today mostly date from 1880 to 1914, the generation of rebuilding that the Improvement Act initiated.
They were not uniformly comfortable. Single-ends – one-room flats – persisted well into the twentieth century. The shared outside toilets on the landings remained standard in working-class tenements until well after the Second World War. But the tenement represented a significant improvement on what it replaced, and the form proved durable in ways the Trust could not have anticipated.
The Long Aftermath
The tenements were themselves cleared in the 1950s and 1960s by a council that regarded them as slums, replacing them with tower blocks and peripheral estates. This second wave of clearance – the Hutchesontown schemes in the Gorbals, the Castlemilk, Drumchapel and Easterhouse peripheral estates – proved far more damaging to communities than the 1866 Act had been. The tower blocks were demolished in turn, the estates remained.
The Victorian sandstone tenements that survived the 1950s clearances are now among Glasgow’s most sought-after residential addresses. The Improvement Act’s legacy is a city that has demolished and rebuilt its own fabric twice in 150 years, and is still living with the consequences of both decisions. Annan’s photographs of the closes are in the Mitchell Library. They are worth looking at.
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