Farewell to Red Road

In the 1990s I lived in Sighthill, a less than salubrious area of Glasgow, not far from the infamous Red Road.  I knew people who lived in Red Road and, now that the iconic flats have finally been demolished, have mixed feelings about their passing.  

By the 1990s it was quite clear that the social experiment had failed miserably.  The good intentions of 1960s town planners with their modernist ideals had been replaced with grinding poverty and deprivation.  An ambitious plan to regenerate and create new communities had given way to social alienation and disenfrachisement.  The Brave New World, based on a once forward-looking social consensus, had delivered a social problem on a scale almost as grand as that of the original project to house upwards of 5,000 people in a few square acres.

Red Road was a place that was incredibly difficult to like.  But many of the characters who lived there were indeed likable and some had spent their entire lives in the blocks, accustomed to a way of living that is now as antiquates as, I imagine, tenement living had become by the early 1960s.  I cannot mourn the destruction of misconceived housing developments that became symbolic of the poverty and social isolation they helped to perpetuate, but part of me feels regret at the passing of what was an inescapable part of Glasgow's recent history.  No-one can dispute that the Red Road flats were icons, representative of a stage in social engineering and a decisive landmark in the city's evolution.

And, while ultimately the experiment failed, there were those who spent their entire lives in these blocks and for whom Red Road will always be a place which is central to their own identities.  The place they knew is now gone forever; the awesome development obliterated in a few seconds on Sunday.  

At least the character of the flats and those who lived in them will be kept alive in the 2004 film, Red Road.  It is unsurprising that it was these high-rise blocks that were chosen as a theatre for the film; they have symbolised a way of life in the same way they have dominated the Glasgow skyline for the last fifty years.  And now the flats have gone, it will be interesting to see how housing policy learns from the experience of Red Road.  Certainly, however misguided the intention, at least the planners of fifty years ago recognised the need to create communities rather than build houses.



All photographs taken in April 2010.