ON Hogmanay 1811, the activities of gangs of ‘ferocious banditti’ resulted in muggings and the death of a police officer in Edinburgh.2 The shock waves that reverberated through the City Chambers on New Year’s Day 1812 were the catalyst for a prompt response from the Town Council and Magistrates. They concluded that the ‘present system of police is totally inadequate’ and ‘a new bill [should be] brought into parliament, with every possible despatch’ to ensure ‘a more efficient police force’. Sixty-eight persons were arrested in conjunction with the murder; subsequently, three men were executed and five transported for their offences.
For the ruling elite of the capital, the episode captured the instability of an urban system, and no doubt many drew some personal comfort from their decision to quit the congested closes and wynds of the Old Town for the more spacious and regular streets of the first New Town, begun in 1767. If this pattern of social and residential segregation was most pronounced in Edinburgh, it was also evident in streets formed on Glasgow’s Blythswood estate and that of Bon Accord in Aberdeen. Elsewhere in Scotland, the reorientation of trade and industry in the eighteenth century towards the Atlantic and colonial trades reinvigorated the west of Scotland burghs, and Glasgow particularly. The pace of economic growth, although a generation behind that of England, assumed a sufficient momentum in the early nineteenth century to attract to the Scottish cities significant numbers of migrants from highland and lowland Scotland, as well as from Ulster and the southern Irish provinces.3 Consequently, the population of Glasgow quadrupled between 1801 and 1841; in Edinburgh, the increase in population in these four decades was itself greater than the entire city in 1800. Whereas in 1800, 20 per cent of Scots lived in towns of 5,000 or more inhabitants, 40 per cent did so by 1861, and 60 per cent by 1911. Though many smaller towns were also transformed by the influx of population, predictably it was the cities that were most affected. In 1851, one in five Scots lived in the four cities—Glasgow, Edinburgh, Dundee and Aberdeen—and by 1911 the ratio was one in three. By 1911, Scots were a more urbanized nation than any other in the world, except for England (Figures 24.1 and 24.2).
The unprecedented pace of expansion in the first half of the nineteenth century put the Scottish urban system under immense pressure as the cities and major burghs were fundamentally reshaped by the interrelated processes of mercantile and industrial growth. The Ordinance Survey maps for the late 1840s and 1890s reveal the remarkable spatial and functional changes in Scottish cities. Space became more specialized as home and work were decoupled under the advancing mode of factory production; the circulation of people and products required new thoroughfares; leisure and sport acquired areas exclusively dedicated to them; the department store and shopping arcade revised spaces of consumption; the reach of city governance became more widespread; and the physical extent of the city engulfed peripheral villages and small burghs as greenfield sites became the future brownfield sites. The city ingested neighbouring settlements for industrial and residential purposes, as well as for public utilities such as gasworks. Private-enterprise jute factories, chemical plants, rubber factories, shipyards, printers and publishers, railway workshops, marine engineering and boiler-making firms clearly needed larger sites, but so too did the numerous bakeries, foundries, and breweries as economies of scale were delivered by advancing technological change. Annexation, a topic in urgent need of further research, extended the urban area of the city appreciably, so that it was no longer possible to cross the built-up area on foot. The jurisdictional reach of the new city boundaries was extended, and the responsibility for the management and administration of the city increasingly resided with a few powerful elected committee chairmen and a salaried executive group of municipal professionals—the town clerk, burgh chamberlain, burgh engineer, burgh surveyor, and medical officer of health. Their administrative fiefdoms also merit further research.
FIGURE 24.1 The population of the four cities, 1801–2001 (in thousands).
Notes: i. Endinburgh includes leith; Glasgow includes environs later incorported. ii. Local government boundaries changed in 1975.
Source: B. R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract or British Historical Statics (Cambridge 1962)
FIGURE 24.2 Scottish urbanization in a European setting.
Source: J. de Vries, European Urbanisation 1500–1800 (London, 1984), 39–48.
Scale, mass, density, and complexity were key characteristics of urban change in the nineteenth-century Scottish city, and if, as the photographic record shows, the crowd was symbolic of the intense energy associated with the factory gate, sports fixtures, political meetings, and ceremonial events, this took place in an increasingly regulated environment. Social control was never far away from the actions of authority; disorder, instability, and uncertainty increased risk and were anathema to a middle class with considerable investments in property, public positions, and political power. Under conditions of rapid urbanization, not to manage urban space was to invite social disintegration, and the middle classes were not likely to accede to that when their hard-fought fortunes and family legacies were at stake. Managing the urban environment was central to their continuing prosperity.4
How, then, did the Scottish city of 1800 differ to that of 1900? To a resident of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, or Glasgow in 1800 who was miraculously resurrected in 1900, their city would have appeared fundamentally different. They might recognize the street layout and topographical features such as hills and harbours, though these, too, changed appreciably with new docks and quays, and even a makeover to the castle rock in Edinburgh.5 The skyline, with its new post-Disruption church building and numerous phallic industrial chimneys, also registered a fundamental change; derricks and gantries populated the quayside and railway yards of the cities; landmark public buildings, subsequently the subject of the heritage industry and the listing process, began to populate the Scottish Victorian city; and infrastructural investment in transport and utilities were among the most dramatic changes in the city townscape. The railway age with its stations and sidings, its cuttings and bridges, its hotels and concourses, changed the city, and they warrant further research. Approaching or leaving a station through the bowels of the earth or astride the silvery Tay were engineering feats destined to impress passengers.
The reality of the railway was its transformative impact on the city and its built environment as the companies displayed an insatiable hunger for land.6 By 1873, the Great North of Scotland and the Caledonian Railway were respectively the fifth and eighth largest landowners in Aberdeen; in Edinburgh, the North British was fourth largest; and in Glasgow, the Caledonian Railway was only just pushed into second place behind Glasgow Corporation as the largest landowner, while the North British was the third and the Glasgow Union Railway the eighth largest landowner.7 The companies defined the parameters of the land market and their activities affected the functioning of the city and its inhabitants. The spaghetti junctions of the nineteenth century were south Laurieston in Glasgow and Dalry in Edinburgh. Deep cuttings and highly visible viaducts were built to reach docksides and new industrial estates. Even before tenements were built, neighbourhoods were zoned, development was blighted, and future communities were already divided and stigmatized. For the resident the railway was noisy, dirty, and an obstruction on the way to work or worship; for the traveller within and between cities, however, it was liberating. These were fundamental and distinctive changes, and the urban impact was all the greater since earlier transport changes associated with canals were much less significant in the Scottish cities than in Birmingham, Manchester, or Leeds.
Railway engines and, more significantly, stationary steam engines produced another transformative impact on Scottish cities, namely, smoke pollution; as factory-based manufacturing production expanded exponentially, so did coal consumption.8 Soon the newly constructed, honey-coloured stone tenements of the Central Belt were soot-stained through industrial, and increasingly household, consumption of coal. By 1860, 67 per cent of the male workforce in Dundee was employed in manufacturing; in Glasgow, it was 56 per cent; among working women, 85 per cent in Dundee and 67 per cent in Glasgow worked in manufacturing.9 This reflected the growth both of the scale of production and technological complexity in mid-Victorian industry, as well as the contribution of the cities to Scottish industrial development. A unique survey of employers in the four cities and five other burghs—Greenock, Inverness, Leith, Paisley, and Perth—shows that the 35 largest firms employed on average 662 workers, and that firms with more than 75 people on their payroll constituted 3.2 per cent of all employers and 50 per cent of the total workforce.10 Dualism in the industrial structure of the Scottish cities—three-quarters of all firms employed fewer than ten workers—meant that small workshops and craft-based skills generally continued to be located in the older parts of the cities; new manufacturing giants found greenfield sites on the urban fringe suitable for the expanded scale of operations necessary to compete in national and world markets. This was the case at Parkhead and Springburn in Glasgow, or Fountainbridge in Edinburgh, or Lochee in Dundee, where Cox Brothers developed the largest jute factory in the world between 1849 and 1864, with its 282-foot chimney symbolizing the productive power of 820 power looms, 150 handlooms, and 5,000 employees.11
As the population and economic activity of the cities developed, pressure on land increased, encouraging the gentry to quit their homes and sell the modest estates that ringed the eighteenth-century cities. The inclination of landowners to part with all or some of their estates depended on the price offered, the position of their land in relation to the drift of development, the financial position of the family itself and their assessment of the long-term prospects for their property. This varied both within and between cities, though the concentration of ownership in relatively few hands (Table 24.1) meant a substantial amount of land might suddenly become available; alternatively, it might be ‘hoarded’ in the expectation of better returns in the future, thus limiting the supply of building land in the short term. Absenteeism often figured in the decision too. In Edinburgh, 18 per cent of the acreage of the city and 8 per cent of its annual rental value was in the hands of powerful figures such as Sir Thomas Dick Lauder and Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Learmonth, both of whom lived in London on the proceeds of, respectively, their 68 and 86 acres in Edinburgh.12
Table 24.1 Concentration of landownership in Scottish cities, 1872
The centrifugal expansion of the city and the emigration of the four-storey Scottish Victorian tenement form to new peripheral industrial settlements and middle-class suburbs was influenced by financial crises at home and abroad. First, the stock-market crash and the collapse of the English banking system (1825), then the City of Glasgow Bank failure (1878), and latterly the Baring crisis (1890), together with local factors concerning the maturity of loans, affected builders and rendered the building industry in the Scottish cities subject to fluctuations on a scale far more volatile than those in any other industry. Glasgow and Dundee house-builders were more susceptible to this instability than those in Edinburgh and Aberdeen.13
The pulse of construction activity left its mark in other ways. Building development crabbed its way outwards unevenly; rarely was this in a concentric pattern since the direction of expansion depended on landowners’ preferences and the proximity to nodes of industrial or residential development. Consequently, particular neighbourhoods were clothed in new building at the same time and the physical features reflected this as dormer or bay windows became fashionable and WCs essential. ‘Greek’ Thomson remained influential in Glasgow in contrast to the surge of neo-Gothic in Edinburgh; thus the tone and architectural texture of the cities differed.14 Similarly, red sandstone tenements in Glasgow featured prominently from the 1860s, but in Edinburgh this material was mainly confined to fin-de-siècle ornamentation.15 Swathes of Victorian tenements presented a degree of homogenization in their outward appearance because street after neighbouring street was built within the space of a few years and, as importantly, because basic no-frills building was all that a manual labouring class could afford. Monotony in the built environment was not the monopoly of the twentieth-century housing estate.
What the resurrected visitor of 1900 would have noticed was the loss of informality in the built environment. Improvement projects straightened out streets, removed courts and wynds, and rendered the interstices of the city redundant. The secret city of pends and vennels16 was gradually demolished or diminished either as part of the initiatives of city councils to improve surveillance by illuminating and thus regulating confined spaces within their jurisdictions, or to generate development opportunities as a means of enhancing the local taxation potential of dilapidated and insanitary sites. Gone were many of the informal stalls with their dues payable to the council; moved on or fined were the itinerant street-sellers. Newly created in the late nineteenth century were spaces for specialist wholesale markets for vegetables, meat, fish, and corn that required land-extensive premises, as did indoor retail spaces and arcades, arenas for exhibitions, meetings, and parades. Space became less promiscuous; increasingly it was dedicated to specific uses. Tax, an overlooked research topic, and tighter regulatory controls regarding public behaviour, were uppermost in municipal minds.
These initiatives in the public sphere developed first in Glasgow in 1800 through the introduction of a local police act and spread to Edinburgh in 1805.17 Initially concerned with amenities—mainly lighting, paving, and cleansing—and with public-order responsibilities that were beyond the scope of a voluntary constabulary, the police commissioners’ autonomy led them to embrace increasingly complex services. In the first half of the nineteenth century these included buildings in a dangerous state, street obstructions, and the loading and even parking of vehicles. Police powers defined the weights and measures applicable to sales of coal and grain; they fixed charges for hackney carriages, required the registration of dealers in second-hand goods, and of pawnbrokers. Where pollution either by smoke or where tar or acid leeched into water courses, the offending businesses were named and shamed and a schedule of fines applied; stricter controls were placed on slaughterhouses and meat quality, and on butter, meal and bread, fish and poultry; and gambling was discouraged in a system of regulation that required the Superintendent of Police to act ‘for the public Interest, for the removal of all nuisances within the Limits of Police’.18 As an example of the fine grain of Police Commission control, and of the public-interest principle, fines applied where flowerpots were precariously positioned on tenement windowsills. Micro-management is not a new creature of public administration.
What was new was that the cities forged a system of public administration between 1800 and 1850 based around the political dualism of elected police commissioners and town councillors. This evolving and complex system of Scottish urban administration was highly significant because the passage of so many local acts signalled the precedence of municipal interests over national legislation. Just as Edinburgh had aped Glasgow, as had Aberdeen, so Greenock, Port Glasgow, Dumfries, Leith, Paisley, Inverness, Kilmarnock, Perth, Kirkcaldy, Dunfermline, Peterhead, Airdrie, Alloa, Bathgate, Dingwall, and Dalkeith followed suit.19 These local regulatory powers were not a top-down innovation from Westminster. It was the experience of Police Commissions in the Scottish burghs that moulded the clauses in national legislation—the Burgh Police (Scotland) Acts of 1833 and 1848, and even that much-lauded act of 1862, the Lindsay Burgh Police (Scotland) Act.20 Indeed, the cities had little need of clauses in national statutes; they possessed them already, and only occasionally needed to adopt individual clauses in national legislation to avoid the expense of returning to Parliament for a revised local act. Ultimately, the dual system of civic administration in which Town Council and Police Commission participated was bureaucratic, expensive, and inefficient. Successively, in Glasgow (1846), Dundee (1851), Edinburgh, (1856), and Aberdeen (1871) the Police Commissions were disbanded as Town Councils reasserted their control over municipal affairs.
It is difficult to stress sufficiently the significance of the early nineteenth-century administrative machinery to the trajectory of city development in Scotland, and this warrants further investigation. The police commissioners acknowledged from the outset that the vulnerable in society were in need of protection, and that the actions of property owners legitimated public intervention in the private sphere. Property rights, then, were at the heart of public administration in nineteenth-century Scottish cities.
In 1818 the House of Lords delivered a watershed judgement that fundamentally influenced the character of city development and, indeed, that of all subsequent Scottish building.21 Lord Eldon’s judgement insisted that a feuing22 plan was not a sound basis on which to define property rights and thereafter all restrictions (burdens) pertaining to a property had to be included in the feu charter, i.e. at the time of conveyance. Thus, an individual could not change the use of his property and adversely affect the amenity of his neighbour. Another distinctive feature of Scottish urban tenure, sub-infeudation or feu-farming, was also boosted by the legal clarification given to property values in 1818. The way sub-infeudation worked to finance the building of Scottish cities was explained by James Gowans, an Edinburgh contractor in the 1860s and 1870s:
A builder looks forward to the town increasing, and he takes up a lot of land from the superior at £50 an acre, and then by re-feuing or building himself he works it up to £200 an acre. That has been done with this city and large fortunes have been made out of it.23
On a given footprint, piling properties high, storey upon storey, was a spatial device peculiar to Scotland that maximized feuing income, increased rentals, and improved rateable values and local taxation. In conjunction with the Scottish legal system, the tenement was a brilliant device that unlocked sums from small savers for assured returns. Consequently, as a Royal Commission in 1917 reported, tenements were:
to be found from Dumfries in the South to Lerwick on the far North … in small county burghs immediately surrounded by open fields … from county hamlet to the great cities.24
Changes in the law in the early nineteenth century served their purpose: Scottish urban development flourished and the tenement was instrumental in that process.
The downside was that with land and building costs higher in Scotland, affordable living space was diminished.25 City dwellers, and Scots generally, paid a high price for their housing, and not simply in monetary terms since overcrowding meant mortality and morbidity were higher in urban Scotland. This was a concern that even fractured the Church of Scotland in 1843. The triangle of poverty, housing, and health was central to medical thinking, as William Alison, Professor of Medical Jurisprudence at Edinburgh University, explained:
in the two greatest cities in Scotland, where the science and civilization of the country might be supposed to have attained their highest development, and where medical schools exist … the annual proportions of deaths to the population is not only much beyond the average in Britain, but very considerably greater than that of London.
Alison continued:
Let us look to the closes of Edinburgh, and the wynds of Glasgow, and thoroughly understand the character and habits, the diseases and mortality, of the unemployed poor, unprotected by the law … let us study the condition of the aged and disabled poor … so far from priding ourselves on the smallness of the sums which are applied to this purpose in Scotland we must honestly and candidly confess, that our parsimony in this particular is equally injurious to the poor and discreditable to the rich in Scotland.26
In fundamental opposition to this viewpoint, Dr Thomas Chalmers, evangelical minister and subsequent Free Church founder, was convinced that a reinvigorated parish system based on home visits and religious instruction was the most effective and compassionate way to improve the spiritual, moral, and material condition of the country in general and the cities in particular.27
The causes of deficient housing conditions were many. On the supply side, land, legal, and building costs were higher in Scotland than elsewhere in Britain. Rents were correspondingly higher, as was recognized in the twentieth century through rent-control arrangements. On the demand side, real wages were low, bouts of unemployment frequent, particularly in Glasgow and Dundee, and poor relief less generous than under the English system. Pound for pound, Scots’ real wages bought less space than those of their English relations.
City authorities faced deteriorating environmental health conditions until the 1870s. Until mid-century, the basis of local taxation was unclear and simple statistical data on births and deaths was crude before civil registration was established in 1855.28 Turf wars between the various committees and subcommittees of council, and between the multiple jurisdictions of the city, meant an issue such as defective drains might be registered as a nuisance but involve the deliberations of several council committees—finance, cleansing, works, and drainage, as well as the Dean of Guild court, the roads authority, and the parochial board.
Statistical evidence, in the form of civil registration in 1855 and the reform of local taxation in 1854, permitted a more robust city management to emerge from mid-century. Influential medical figures, Drs William Gairdner (Glasgow) and Henry Littlejohn (Edinburgh), provided knowledge of best practice in public hygiene, identified particular causes of ill-health in the city, and contributed thoughtfully to city policies on epidemics, occupational diseases, drainage arrangements, public cemeteries, and water supply and disposal. Both men were their city’s first medical officer of health, Gairdner from 1863 to 1872, and Littlejohn from 1862 to 1908, and their national reputations gave them influence at the city level, with Littlejohn’s meticulously researched Report on the Sanitary Condition of the City of Edinburgh (1865) universally praised.
In the last third of the nineteenth century, efforts to introduce piped water to the cities, build isolation hospitals, monitor food, air and water quality, and demolish insanitary housing each improved the city environment.29 Yet in 1911, despite the positive results of public-health policies, 8.7 per cent of the Scottish urban population still lived in one-room houses, and 39.2 per cent in two-room accommodation; in England, one- and two-roomed houses constituted 7.1 per cent of the housing stock.30 Using the English Registrar General’s definition of overcrowding, 55.7 per cent of Glasgow inhabitants were overcrowded, with Dundee 48.2 per cent, Aberdeen 37.8 per cent, and Edinburgh with 32.6 per cent overcrowded—approximately four to six times more densely packed than the average Englishman.31 On the eve of the First World War, mortality rates in one-room Glasgow flats were double those in four-room properties, and infant mortality was four times higher.32 One indicator above all others stands out in terms of amenities: shared toilets. In 1915, 62 per cent of inhabitants in Glasgow and 35 per cent in Edinburgh shared a toilet in two-room flats—the most common type.33
It mattered little what the indicators were—height, weight, skin condition, dental caries, skeletal deformities, or life expectancy—all pointed to the effects of adverse living conditions in a tenement world.34 Environmental deficiencies in Dundee, Glasgow, and Edinburgh were correlated with tenement life: ‘foul air to breathe, impure water to drink … cramped space and cradled in dirt’ meant that children ‘must grow up through sickly and unhappy adolescence into weak and stunted manhood’.35 Undoubtedly, over the course of several generations there was a complicated relationship between nature and nurture, but the undeniable conclusions of a study of 72,000 Glasgow schoolchildren was that living in a small house was injurious to health.
Living in congested space, in a room that was multifunctional, brought stresses and strains. Tall buildings, dark stairs, narrow closes, and box beds had adverse psychological effects, and the demands of fetching and carrying water, disposing of slops and human waste, cleaning and cooking, childbirth and child-minding were arduous everyday routines in a multi-storey tenement world. Space was far from private. The rituals of laying out the dead and giving birth were undertaken among the rhythms and routines of daily life. The communal life of the stair, the wash house, and drying green had some benefits to offset the humdrum of everyday city life for the manual working classes and their families, though it was the dramatic fall in prices between 1870 and 1914 that did more to improve the lot of working and middle classes, as food and commodity prices tumbled by an average of about 1 per cent per annum.
The noise, bustle, and smell contributed to the sensescape of the city. Brewery, bonded warehouse, jute and rubber mill, steam boilers, railway engines, fish processing, bonemeal, and catgut, and a host of deafening weaving, smelting, and forging activities each gave a recognizable odour and colour to individual Scottish cities. Sound, sight, and smell were each assaulted, and occasionally appeased.
A pleasurable aspect of the nineteenth-century Scottish city was the music and entertainment that filled the bandstands, parks, and public spaces. The detachments of army and navy personnel garrisoned in the city meant it was they who regularly played in city parks, and were also on parade when members of the royal family and foreign delegations visited. Indeed, the durability of the military in the modern city seems to have escaped notice. When the freedom of the city was conveyed upon political and industrial figures, and heads of state were awarded honorary degrees, a military pomp and circumstance accompanied these rituals. Similarly, civic ceremonies were increasingly evident with foundation stones laid and buildings opened by royalty and aristocracy with increasing frequency as the tentacles of the municipal mission reached ever outwards into the suburbs. Even a councillor’s funeral involved a deputation of fellow councillors in flowing robes and chains of office. So frequent were these late-Victorian civic occasions that Edinburgh councillors had to renew their robes and regalia.36 Ceremonies were invented and expanded: war memorials appeared; vessels were launched; the Church of Scotland ministers processed annually; and the Battle of the Boyne was recalled as it had been since 1690. International Exhibitions in Edinburgh (1886) and Glasgow (1888, 1901) provided the stage for thousands of visitors, and several national and international conferences of industrialists and scientists held their annual conferences in Scottish cities every year.
The city itself was part of the performative element of Scottish society. Royal occasions brought people, all classes of people, onto the streets, whether in public celebration or mourning. These were not exclusively events for the titled or officialdom. Judged by contemporary photographs and newspapers, the general public joined in as participants, cheering physical prowess and horsemanship, and enjoying public music, bell-ringing, and fireworks displays. There were highland games, fetes for children, coronation mugs, and, significantly, ‘dinners for poor persons’. Far from being in retreat before 1914, as claimed for English civic rituals,37 the Scottish city enjoyed a flowering of colourful pageant and ceremony.
Enquiries in Dundee, Edinburgh, and Glasgow (1904–7), a national investigation into Scottish land by the Liberal Party (1911), various Departmental Committees and a Royal Commission (the Bannatyne Commission 1911–17), each identified adverse living conditions associated with the physique of Scottish city dwellers. At the dawn of the twentieth century there was little sign that City Improvement Trusts, civic societies, company and philanthropic housing initiatives, the Charity Organisation Society, Social Union, cooperative workmen’s efforts, or early social housing were making an impact on housing quality. Living conditions needed more than palliative care. The First World War brought its own difficulties: escalating city rents in the wake of rapid price inflation; rent strikes on Clydeside and rent control; direct political action; and disequilibrium in land and property markets.38 The government’s pledge ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’ was adopted as an ‘insurance premium’ to counteract national strikes and anxiety over political stability.39 Council housing was the result. The landscape of the Scottish city was never the same again.
The nineteenth-century tenement with its communal stair, shared amenities, and social dramas was a design of the past. ‘Four-in-a-block’ maisonettes and two- or three-storey council housing mass-produced on an industrial scale on the periphery of the cities represented the future in the 1920s and 1930s. A new centrifugal impetus dominated the interwar years and altered the internal socio-economic structure of the Scottish cities. In parallel, bungalow development satisfied middle-class demand and ensured the permanence of the socially segregated twentieth-century city.
Whereas the concentration of the Victorian poor in central city districts provided access to casual labour markets, credit networks through pawnbrokers and shopkeepers, and family support systems through kinship links, these essential elements in the social fabric were jettisoned in the twentieth century—in favour of volume housing on peripheral estates lacking social facilities, frequent bus links, and the social capital of clubs and organizations that were critical to a functional civil society. At Kennyhill, Riddrie, and other Glasgow locations, 50,277 council houses were built between 1919 and 1939 on 4,735 acres; like others in Aberdeen, Dundee, and Edinburgh, these estates were labelled as ‘problematic’.40 Council-house designs, authorized by the Scottish Department of Home and Health and approved by the Treasury, came in pattern-books and, since 70 per cent of all interwar housing in Scotland was built by local authorities, added a further dimension to homogenization in the built environment.41 Monotonous, treeless estates for social housing and mass-produced bungalows for owner-occupiers reinforced social segregation and introduced a high degree of cloning in the physical fabric of the Scottish city.42
Yet more fundamental changes to city spaces were encountered as regional planning gained momentum after 1945. Housing policy was no longer considered in isolation to work, transport, public services, education, and communities. Integrated or comprehensive planning represented the way forward, as was evident after 1946 in the path-breaking Clyde Valley Regional Plan, and those for other Scottish cities.43 The Clyde Valley plan placed the revival of Glasgow in a regional setting; recommendation 34 stated: ‘In the City of Glasgow, additional peripheral growth … should be limited to 250,000.’ Another recommendation baldly stated that ‘three new towns are recommended’.44 This report established an enduring tension between region and city, between the Scottish Office, as the arm of government with its town-planning advisers, and the city councils as the representatives of local people. Intervention from government constrained local autonomy and reopened political sores.
The decision by the government to establish the East Kilbride Development Corporation in 1946 was taken against Glasgow’s wishes.45 Planners were less concerned with local issues and nurtured a grander vision of centrally directed reconstruction that relocated factories and workers from congested cities to New Towns conceived as economically and socially efficient. The planners’ vision was one of rationality, predicated on the basis of decentralization and the merits of a reduced city scale.
The political agenda was simple: to restrain the political power of Glasgow.46 Tom Johnston, Secretary of State for Scotland, appointed Patrick Abercrombie to draw up the Clyde Valley Regional Plan in the knowledge that the decentralizing principles of city management were enshrined in Abercrombie’s pre-war work and Garden City principles. Abercrombie’s regional framework was simple: to remove 500,000 tenement dwellers, rehouse half within a newly designated Green Belt that encroached on the existing city boundaries, and rehouse the other 250,000 ‘overspill’ in four New Towns. A further agency in this political power play was the Scottish Special Housing Association (SSHA), a government quango that built 100,000 houses in the period 1937 to 1987, and was used tactically by the Scottish Office to influence housing policy in Glasgow through Treasury support for overspill policies.47
Within this regional planning framework, Glasgow Corporation sought to develop its own policies and priorities through local plans. These centred on the demolition of 172,000 unfit houses, equivalent to 58 per cent of the housing stock, replaced by flats at lower densities. Work at Pollok, Drumchapel, and Easterhouse increased supply by about 6,000 units annually in four-storey tenements that were diametrically opposed in design and density to the proposals in the Clyde Valley Plan.48 Glasgow Council allocated flats on the basis of defined guidelines and sectarian quotas, and higher rents for SSHA and New Town accommodation resulted in a social filtering process by providing housing primarily for skilled workers and leaving the city centre with greater levels of social deprivation.
Another policy approach, based on twenty-nine Comprehensive Development Areas (CDAs) within Glasgow in 1957, involved substantial demolitions and rehousing on the peripheral estates. In one of the CDAs, Huthesontown-Gorbals (population 26,860; density 1,133 persons/acre), 91 per cent of the dwellings were considered incapable of improvement.49 The CDAs could not arrest the abrupt decline in manufacturing employment, though they were successful, in conjunction with Glasgow Corporation’s Department of Architecture and Planning, in building mixed developments along the lines of those by London County Council, where four-storey flats and maisonettes were interspersed with a number of sixteen-storey tower blocks.50 This was significant because through the experience of tower-block construction within the city, the Glasgow Housing Committee flexed its muscles and, in direct opposition to the regional plan, ‘unleashed the most concentrated multi-story building drive experienced by any British city, with high flats accounting for nearly three-quarters of all completions’ between 1961 and 1968.51 The city skyline changed fundamentally (Figures 24.3 and 24.4).
Though city land use altered fundamentally under local and regional planning decisions, structural changes in the Scottish economy were also at work. While the manufacturing base of the cities held up reasonably well until 1950, thereafter it went into a tailspin. In the 1950s, 53 per cent of all jobs in the four Scottish cities were in manufacturing; the percentage fell rapidly in the 1960s to 43 per cent in 1970, and then to 36 per cent in the early 1980s.52 More surprisingly, between 1981 and 1996 there was the almost identical loss of manufacturing employment in Edinburgh (–49 per cent) and Glasgow (–47 per cent).53 But whereas overall employment in Edinburgh increased by 10 per cent in these years due to rapid growth in tertiary-sector jobs, drastic reductions of about 35 per cent in unskilled and semi-skilled work in Glasgow were not offset by modest professional employment gains, and so total employment in Glasgow fell by about 15 per cent between 1981 and 1996. Though the outlook for Scottish manufacturing seemed bleak overall, there were bright spots, as with the biomedical and technological industries that migrated in the 1980s to Dundee and accounted for 10 per cent of the United Kingdom’s digital-entertainment industry in 2010, and petroleum and gas industries which sustained the Aberdeen economy from the 1970s.
FIGURE 24.3 Aerial view c.1950 of the Canongate, Holyrood Palace, Holyrood Park, and the sites of the Scottish Parliament building, Edinburgh, and showing the gasometers and a mixed industrial and residential use in part of the medieval city. © RCAHMS. Aerofilms Collection. Licensor www.rcahms.gov.uk DP 065085.
FIGURE 24.4 Aerial view (1991) of West Pilton and Muirhouse flats, Edinburgh. © Crown Copyright: RCAHMS. Licensor www.rcahms.gov.uk SC 418272.
Fundamental changes in manufacturing meant industrial sites lay vacant and buildings derelict. Prompted by the Thatcher Conservative government, the land holdings of nationalized industries were released as part of privatization and deregulation policies. Simultaneously, in the effort to restrain public expenditure, central government rate-capped local authorities, thus encouraging Scottish cities to release some of their property holdings to fund social and cultural activities. The relationship between council and developers remains unclear but it represented a nexus of power that deserves further investigation. City-centre land became relatively abundant for the first time in generations, and redevelopment followed as cities sought to increase their tax revenues by encouraging office developments, shopping malls, waterfront projects, and leisure parks. Private-enterprise initiatives materialized in the form of cinema complexes, nightclubs, wine bars, and coffee shops, as the city centre was transformed from a site of production to a centre of consumption. Encouraged by financial sweeteners and planning permissions, the multiples and multinationals invaded both high streets and ‘edge city’ malls. Moneylenders were welcomed into churches to finance conversions; student flats, loft-living, and apartments for ‘twinkies’ occupied the sites of former warehouses, some of which were refurbished, and others newly constructed on sites that had previously provided local employment. So where chimneys and warehouses once stood, glass, steel, and chrome replaced them with entirely new shapes and materials, and the navigational aids by which citizens had moved around the city for decades were demolished as one distinctive building after another conceded its footprint to glistening new offices and flats.54
The most conspicuous of the public-renewal initiatives was the Glasgow Eastern Area Renewal (GEAR) project (1976–90), which was responsible for the coordination of social, environmental, and industrial activity in an area of 1,600 hectares, or 8 per cent of the city.55 GEAR was significant in a national context by anticipating both the London and Merseyside Docklands initiatives and because up to 20 per cent of properties could be held in private ownership, thus heralding in 1980 another seismic change in Scottish cities with the ‘right-to-buy’ legislation introduced by the Conservative government under Thatcher. As GEAR came to a conclusion, the Scottish Office announced in 1988 ‘New Life for Urban Scotland’. Considered a ‘landmark in the history of urban regeneration in Scotland’,56 four peripheral housing estates—Castlemilk (Glasgow), Ferguslie Park (Paisley), Wester Hailes (Edinburgh), and Whitfield (Dundee)—were selected for new ten-year urban-regeneration partnerships coordinated through the Scottish Development Agency. These projects provided valuable lessons on how to tackle urban regeneration.
De-urbanization and its consequences remains an underexplored feature of urban Scotland in the late twentieth century.57 All four cities lost population in the 1960s and 1970s; Glasgow and Dundee continued to lose population, and only from the 1990s did Aberdeen rebound, as did Edinburgh in the 2000s (see Fig. 24.1). Whereas overspill and New Town Development were deliberate policies to decant Glaswegians, city shrinkage was the product of complex factors. The construction of improved dual-carriageway roads and prefabricated tin sheds as distribution centres and locations for light manufacturing around the periphery of each of Scotland’s cities contributed to a gradual but steady move of workers and families to small towns within commuting distance of the cities. Glitzy glass-fronted offices continued to recruit workers from beyond the city limits, and they added to the flow of daily commuters. High land values and property prices in the Scottish cities meant that commuting, lemming-like by car and packed public transport, was the travel-to-work experience for the majority. Demographics also played a part. The popularity of smaller satellite towns flourished due to cheaper housing costs, educational provisions, and the perception of a safer urban environment for families. For flat-sharing young adults, the city centre increasingly became a social space with an appealing night life, as it was for cut-price airline weekenders, and stag and hen parties.
Whereas Victorian industry could be found in the historic core of Scottish cities, by the end of the twentieth century the city had been turned inside out. The mobile city had arrived. Manufacturing and distribution had been dispatched to the periphery to take advantage of open space and road-transport connections; a major modern communications hub—the airport and its support activities—was outside the city limits, Dundee excepted; stone tenements had been torn down and turned into hard core for road developments; retail activities retained a toehold in the city centre but were also a dominant out-of-town activity; the corner shop and the local pub were fighting rearguard actions as their ‘regulars’ were relocated to fringe estates; moneylenders were anonymous distant institutions; and parish churches were no longer used exclusively for worship. A sense of continuity, of belonging to a locality, of community engagement and the accumulated social capital associated with it, could no longer be taken for granted in the late twentieth-century city. Social-networking websites, internet shopping, and electronic banking gained the ascendancy. The Scottish city had mutated, as it always had and always will, for better and for worse.
Abercrombie, P., and Plumstead, D., A Civic Survey and Plan for the City and Royal Burgh of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1949).
Blaikie, A., The Scots Imagination and Modern Memory (Edinburgh, 2010).
Fraser, W. H., and Lee, C. H., eds., Aberdeen 1800–2000: A New History (East Linton, 2000).
Fraser, W. H., and Maver, I., eds., Glasgow. Vol. 2, 1830 to 1912 (Manchester 1996).
Glendinning, M., MacInnes, R., and MacKechnie, A., A History of Scottish Architecture: From the Renaissance to the Present Day (Edinburgh, 1996).
Maver, I., Glasgow (Edinburgh, 2000).
Miskell, L., et al., eds., Victorian Dundee: Image and Realities (East Linton, 2000).
Rodger, R., The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land, Property and Trust in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2001).