The first clearances attacked the medieval city. The City Improvement Trust, created by Act in 1866, bought and demolished the wynds and closes around the High Street, Saltmarket and Gallowgate — the densest, deadliest housing in Britain, met in the Health pages — replacing them over decades with wider streets and model tenements. Before the hammers went in, the Trust commissioned the photographer Thomas Annan to record what would vanish: his images of the old closes, washing strung between crumbling gables, are among the most haunting urban photographs ever made, and the reason we can see what was destroyed and why the Victorians destroyed it.
The interwar wave moved the target from the ancient core to the industrial districts, clearing condemned tenements and decanting tenants to new corporation schemes — with an ugly wrinkle the city took decades to admit: ‘rehousing’ estates built cheap for cleared families, physically and socially marked off from the ‘ordinary’ schemes, stigmatised from their first tenancy. Slum clearance, it emerged early, could relocate a slum’s reputation more easily than end it.
The post-war wave dwarfed both. From 1957 the city designated twenty-nine Comprehensive Development Areas — the Gorbals’ story on the previous page multiplied across Cowcaddens, Townhead, Anderston, Bridgeton and more — within which perhaps a hundred thousand dwellings were demolished and whole districts replanned from zero, the motorway pages’ concrete arriving through several of them. The displaced went to the towers, the new towns — and above all to the Big Four peripheral schemes: Easterhouse, Drumchapel, Castlemilk and Pollok, instant towns of tens of thousands on the city’s edges, built as houses first and communities never — shops, pubs, halls and jobs arriving years late or not at all. Billy Connolly’s line — a desert wi’ windaes — was reportage.
The gains were real and must be said: the closes Annan photographed, and their twentieth-century successors, killed people — the bathless, crowded, damp-rotted houses of the clearance lists were not heritage, and the families who got inside toilets, gardens and bedrooms counted themselves blessed and said so. The losses were real and unpriced: networks of kin and neighbourhood — the survival economy of the poor — scattered across a county; granny two closes away become granny two bus fares away; and the schemes’ long struggles written up, unfairly, as the fault of the people sent there.
The reckoning came in the 1970s, when money ran out and confidence with it: clearance stopped, the community housing associations began rescuing tenements instead, and Glasgow started the repair of both stone and community that later pages of this site describe. The clearances’ monument is double — the absent streets that only Annan’s photographs remember, and the schemes on the horizon, forty years into making themselves the towns they were never built as.