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 — Highland, Irish, Jewish (its story on that community’s page), Lithuanian, Italian in successive waves — 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.
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.