The Gorbals did not begin as a slum. It grew from the little village of Bridgend at the south end of the old bridge over the Clyde, passed from church land to a Glasgow merchant who built a tower house there, and by the late eighteenth century had become a respectable suburb of villas and handloom weavers. Industry changed everything: as the mills and works boomed, newcomers poured in, the district was absorbed into Glasgow in 1846, and its tenements were subdivided again and again.
The old Gorbals, south of the river, was the most famous slum in Britain, and a caricature of itself. Yes, it was staggeringly overcrowded: tens of thousands in a square mile of blackened tenements, closes and back-lands. But it was also one of the great arrival neighbourhoods of Europe, home in successive waves to Highland, Irish, Jewish (its story on that community’s page), Lithuanian and Italian newcomers, and dense with shops, synagogues, chapels, theatres and societies; the razor-gang notoriety fixed by the novel No Mean City told a truth about its worst corners and a libel about the rest. Its people wanted better housing; whether they wanted their world dissolved was a question nobody asked them.
The first redevelopment answered with total clearance. Designated for comprehensive development in 1957, the old Gorbals was erased almost entirely, population dispersed, street pattern and all, and replaced by the second Gorbals: slabs and towers in parkland, most famously Sir Basil Spence’s twenty-storey blocks at Queen Elizabeth Square, hailed at their 1965 opening as vertical garden-terraces, ‘hanging gardens’ for the workers. The optimism was real and the photographs are poignant: families posing on windswept decks that were about to fail them.
The Gorbals was the first part of Glasgow marked for comprehensive redevelopment, and Spence’s towers rose at Hutchesontown. The Queen came to see the new Gorbals going up in 1961, and many families were at first delighted: for the first time, they had homes with their own inside bathrooms.
Fail they did, faster than anywhere: damp that defeated every remedy, lifts and decks that bred fear, repairs that never caught up. Within twenty-five years the second Gorbals was more notorious than the first, and in 1993 Spence’s blocks were blown down before a vast crowd, an occasion that turned to tragedy when flying debris struck spectators and Helen Tinney, a local woman watching her old home fall, was killed. Even the Gorbals’ demolitions, the city grimly noted, claimed a victim.
The third Gorbals learned. The Crown Street Regeneration Project, master-planned in the 1990s, rebuilt on a heretical principle: streets. Tenement-scale blocks with front doors, back courts and corner shops; owners and renters mixed; the grain of the old neighbourhood recovered without its densities. And it worked, winning every award going and, more to the point, residents who stayed. Around it the New Gorbals has filled in for thirty years, garnished with public art and anchored by the surviving Citizens Theatre, the one great institution that never left.
No place in Britain has been rebuilt so completely twice. The Gorbals’ three lives (packed stone, failed concrete, recovered street) are the housing century in miniature, and the neighbourhood’s people, characteristically, supplied its epitaph and its motto in one: they never wanted paradise, just a decent close.
For the wider history of the district, from medieval village to the present day, read our page on the Gorbals.
Related questions
What happened to the Gorbals?
It has lived several lives. A Georgian suburb became one of the most overcrowded slums in Europe, was almost entirely demolished and rebuilt with high-rise flats from the late 1950s and, when those failed too, was rebuilt again from the 1990s as the New Gorbals, a regenerated residential district on the south bank of the Clyde.
Why was the Gorbals so famous?
For being one of the most overcrowded slums in Europe in the early twentieth century, an image fixed in the public mind by the novel No Mean City.
What replaced the Gorbals slums?
From the late 1950s the old tenements were cleared and replaced by concrete flats and high-rise tower blocks, including Sir Basil Spence’s famous Hutchesontown scheme.
What is the Gorbals like now?
Much of the failed post-war housing has itself been demolished, and the area has been rebuilt as the regenerated New Gorbals, with tenement-scale streets and its population rising once more.