page_title: Housing in Glasgow
section_title: Overview
hierarchical_section_title: Housing in Glasgow / Overview
caption_attribution_description: English: Red Road flats at Balornock. The Red Road development was approved in 1962, and comprised six, 31-storeyed tower blocks containing 720 flats, two 27-storeyed slab blocks and one three-storeyed block. They were designed by Sam Bunton &amp; Associates for Glasgow Corporation. They were gradually demolished between 2012 and 2015.
context_page_description: Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland
  , has several distinct styles of residential buildings, and since its population began to grow rapidly the 18th century has been at the forefront of some large-scale projects to deal with its housing issues, some of which have been assessed as being largely successful and others less so.
context_section_description: The city is known for its tenements. These were the most popular form of housing in 19th- and 20th-century Glasgow and remain the most common form of dwelling in Glasgow today. Tenements are commonly bought by a wide range of social types and are favoured for their large rooms, high ceilings and original period features. The Hyndland area of Glasgow is the only tenement conservation area in the UK and includes some tenement houses with as many as six bedrooms.
  Like many cities in the UK, Glasgow witnessed the construction of high-rise housing in tower blocks in the 1960s. These were built to replace the decaying tenement buildings originally constructed in the 1800s for workers who migrated from the surrounding countryside, the Scottish Highlands, the rest of the United Kingdom, particularly Ireland,  and further afield (Italy, Lithuania, Poland) to smaller degrees, in order to feed the local demand for labour during the Industrial Revolution which saw the city's population and importance increase rapidly to the extent that it became the 'second city of the Empire'. The massive demand outstripped new building and many, originally fine, tenements often became overcrowded and unsanitary. Parts of inner city areas like Anderston, Cowcaddens, the Garngad, Townhead and particularly the Gorbals, as well as parts of the industrialised East End (Bridgeton, the Calton, Camlachie, the Gallowgate) deteriorated into slums in which disease thrived. Efforts to improve this housing situation, most successfully with the City Improvement Trust, cleared the slums of the old town. Between the two World Wars, the area of Glasgow doubled in size.
  Subsequent urban renewal initiatives following World War II, such as those motivated by the Bruce Report, and the Abercrombie Plan, entailed the demolition of slum tenement areas, the development of new towns, the building of overspill estates on the periphery of the city, and the construction of tower blocks. Several districts of the city were designated 'Comprehensive Development Areas' with the intention to raze them and rebuild from scratch with entire communities dispersed. Although the new town option was accepted, with places such as East Kilbride and Cumbernauld being established, the need for thousands of new homes was becoming ever more pressing - almost half of the dwellings in the city had been judged as overcrowded in the 1951 census while in 1957, 97% of housing in the Gorbals was still described as 'unsatisfactory sanitorially' - and with the Glasgow Corporation keen for as many citizens to remain as taxpayers within their boundaries as possible despite limited space and funds available, the overspill and tower proposals were eagerly pursued, in contrast with the trend of lower-density housing which had been preferred prior to the war following the garden suburb model including a large proportion of cottage flats or 'four-in-a-block' housing with separate front doors (as at Balornock, Cardonald, Carntyne, Carnwadric, Croftfoot, Househillwood, Kelvindale, King's Park, Knightswood, Mosspark, Riddrie, Sandyhills) built by just a few firms, which were well-received and have largely survived to the present day, but were considered to take too long to build and use too much land in comparison with the urgent need to replace so much of the inner city.
  The four main peripheral developments (Castlemilk, Drumchapel, Easterhouse and Pollok) grew to become among the largest in Europe, while other smaller but substantial neighbourhoods (Arden, Barlanark, Barmulloch, Cranhill, Eastwood, Garthamlock, Merrylee, Milton, Toryglen, South Nitshill) were also constructed, largely consisting of tenement-style housing of three or four storeys. The city's initial multi-storey residential experiments in the 1950s at Crathie Court, Moss Heights and Prospecthill were largely successful (and have survived into the 21st century) but their scale of only 10 floors did not address the availability issue sufficiently, and in the next decade the number of towers commissioned by Glasgow and the height of the structures
caption: The now demolished Red Road estate came to symbolise the mistakes of the city's 1960s housing policy.
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