The idea came from the map. Sir Patrick Abercrombie’s Clyde Valley Plan of 1946 looked at post-war Glasgow — over a million people, half of them in housing scheduled for condemnation — and concluded the city simply could not rehouse itself within itself: hundreds of thousands should ‘overspill’ to planned new towns beyond a green belt. The Corporation hated it — exported citizens were exported ratepayers — and fought for years for high flats within the boundary instead; the eventual policy, characteristically, was both at once.
East Kilbride, designated 1947 on the moors south-east of the city, was Scotland’s first new town and became its largest — a success by most measures from early on: houses with gardens, landscaped neighbourhoods, and crucially jobs, as engineering firms and government establishments moved out with the people. Cumbernauld followed in 1955 with the programme’s boldest experiment: a dense hilltop town walkably planned around a single megastructure town centre — showered with international awards on opening, then serially voted Britain’s ugliest building by later generations; the town around it, its residents point out with some heat, works considerably better than its famous centre’s reputation. Glasgow overspill agreements also fed Livingston, Irvine and beyond.
For the families who went — and a quarter of a million people left Glasgow under overspill arrangements broadly defined — the move was mostly experienced as arrival: out of a room-and-kitchen up a black close into a house with a bathroom, a green view and a school across the grass. The new towns’ own histories are of young towns — prams everywhere, institutions self-built, the odd ache of nowhere old to stand in — maturing over two generations into ordinary, settled places with grandparents of their own.
Glasgow’s ledger reads harder. The city’s population fell from around 1.1 million at its 1950s peak toward 600,000 by the 1990s, and the overspill took disproportionately the young, skilled, waged families every community needs — a ‘skimming’ that left the sending districts, and the peripheral schemes of the previous page, poorer in every sense; the new towns’ industrial estates, critics added, competed directly for the investment the old city was losing. Whether Glasgow was relieved or bled by the programme is still argued; that it was transformed by it is not.
The programme closed formally in the 1990s when the development corporations wound up, their towns handed to ordinary local government — by then simply part of the region’s furniture, home to Glasgow’s cousins, retaining the city’s accent at twenty minutes’ distance. The dispersal era was over; the city, its population climbing again around a renewing centre, has spent the decades since learning to grow where it stands.