Gorbals

55.84861 -4.25222Coordinates: 55 ° 51 ′ N , 4 ° 15 ′ W

Old buildings next to the new high-rise after the renovation

The Gorbals are part of the Scottish city of Glasgow .

Beginnings

A first settlement in the Gorbal area, "Bridgend" , was mentioned in 1285 after a bridge was built over the Clyde . In 1350 there was a leper colony there . In 1579 the Elphinstone family acquired the area from the church, and in 1607 the Gorbals were given permission to set up merchants and manufacturers . In 1790 the area was divided between the City of Glasgow and Hutcheson Hospital. As a result, three new districts emerged: Laurieston and Hutchesontown in the area of the hospital and Tradeston in the area of the City of Glasgow. From then on Laurieston and Hutchesontown were considered "the Gorbals". The two places had about 3500 inhabitants at that time. Initially, the construction of houses for citizens and nobles was planned, the Elphinstone family had a residence in the Gorbals. After the opening of the mine Govan Colliery and the smelter Dixon's Blazes south of the area but the buildings were denser.

19th century until today

Children in the Gorbals, 1911

In the course of industrialization, a large number of migrants came to Glasgow. They often found their first apartment in the Gorbals. They came first from the Scottish Highlands and Ireland , later also from Italy , Lithuania and Russia , and there were many Jews among the Russian migrants . In 1901 5,000 Jews lived in the Gorbals, after 1933 there were refugees from Germany, and by 1939 their number rose to around 10,000. They published various pamphlets and newspapers, initially in Yiddish . In 1927 the English-language Jewish Echo appeared . Because Jews were not allowed to work in banks and public offices until the 1930s, many became self-employed, while others worked as tailors or in tobacco processing. Most of the Gorbals left after a few years for neighboring quarters. The city council of Glasgow organized rallies against the persecution of Jews in Russia in 1892 and boycotted German products in 1933 in protest against Hitler's anti-Semitism.

Eglinton Street block demolished in 1939

A travel guide mentioned the extensive development on Eglinton Street in Laurieston in 1870 and recommended a tour of the surrounding area. Due to the influx in the 19th century, however, its character changed. Previously spacious apartments were divided into small units; In addition, the City Improvement Trust has been building houses with small-scale rental apartments since 1870. The type of rental houses built here in Britain was unique to Scotland. The walls consisted of large stones, the entrances were cave-like, the stairwells were deep and dark and the streets were laid out regardless of the needs of the residents. There were no trees, no greenery, not a single garden, the houses were built around courtyards in which the garbage collected so that they looked like battlefields. The houses were of a very low standard when they were built, and the owners quickly let the substance deteriorate. The structural and social conditions were catastrophic. In 1930 about 90,000 people lived in the Gorbals, for which there were 100 shops and 130 pubs . The population density was 459 people per acre ; the average in a modern suburb is 30 people per acre. There was one toilet for every three apartments, most apartments only had one or two rooms that were often shared by eight or ten people. In 1951 there were still 50,000 people living in the Gorbals on an area of an average-sized cattle farm. This dense population set the Gorbals apart from other slums in British cities. In 1948 a Picture Post reporter wrote :

“THE air of calm that covers a multitude of horrors.
Nearly 40,000 people live in the Gorbals. They live four, six, eight to a room, often 30 to a lavatory, 40 to a tap. They live in Britain's most abandoned slum. ... It is not until you get inside the tenements that you realize the Gorbals is no ordinary poor place. It is, in fact, an area that provides a very special version of the slum problem. … People live huddled together 281 to the acre. They live in apartments that are mostly small, dark and dirty. They live five and six in a single room that is part of some great slattern of a tenement, with seven or eight people in the room next door, and maybe eight or 10 in the rooms above and below. The windows are often patched with cardboard. The stairs are narrow, dark at all times and befouled not only with mud and rain. Commonly, there is one lavatory for 30 people, and that with the door off. ... The Gorbals has no large industries, and few small ones, where residents may find work. … One of them, Mary, is 16. She works in a bakery. She has the fancies and foibles natural to a girl her age. She dreams of nice clothes, handsome suitors, happy times. But already her life is colored by her surroundings. Already futility and frustration stretch ahead. Already her dreams are losing their battle against reality. ... 'We're eight in one room. We go to bed in relays. My elder brothers walk round the court while we girls undress. Then they come back and kip down on the floor beside us. The cat sleeps with us. If a rat runs over the blankets, he springs out and has it. '… At midnight, if you stand on any of the four bridges that run across the Clyde into the Gorbals, you see the windows still lit; for when the gas goes down, the rats come out in strength. So the lights burn dimly all night ... "

“The silence that hides a multitude of horrors.
About 40,000 people live in the Gorbals. Four, six or eight people live in one room; there is often a washbasin for 30 people and only one tap for 40 people. You live in Britain's most forgotten slum. Only when you go into the apartment buildings do you see that the Gorbals are not a normal poor people area. They are an area that shows a very specific version of the slum problem. … 281 people live huddled together on one acre. They live in apartments that are mostly small, dark and dirty. Five or six live in a room that is part of an apartment building, with seven or eight people in the next room and eight or ten in the rooms above or below. The windows are often covered with cardboard. The stairs are narrow, always dark and not just dirty with mud and rain. Usually there is a washroom for 30 people, it has no door. ... The Gorbals have little industry and few small businesses where the residents can find work. One of them, Mary, is 16. She works in a bakery. She has the desires and dreams that are natural for a girl of her age. She dreams of beautiful clothes, loving admirers, happy times. But their lives are already influenced by their surroundings. Frustration and futility lie ahead of her. Your dreams are already losing the battle against reality. ... A girl says: 'There are eight of us in one room. We go to bed in shifts. My older brothers go out to the yard while we girls change. Then they come back and sleep next to us on the floor. The cat sleeps with us. When a rat runs across the covers, it jumps up and catches it. '... If you stand on one of the four bridges over the Clyde to the Gorbals at midnight, you can still see lights burning in the windows; because when the gas is turned off, tons of rats come. That's why the light is on every night ... "

- Al Lloyd : The Forgotten Gorbals , Picture Post , January 31, 1948

In the 1930s, the Gorbals were considered the stronghold of the Glasgow razor gangs (Glasgow razor bands), groups of criminals who got their name from their preferred weapon. Those who could afford it moved away, mostly Scottish and Irish unskilled workers remained. In the Warwick Street area, which has long been a comparatively well-off residential area, a large number of apartments have been divided up and sublet since the 1940s, mostly to immigrants from India , which increased overcrowding and deterioration of houses. The houses were partly in private or municipal ownership, many of the houses belonged to the LMS Railway , which was nationalized in 1947 . Rent was low, ten shillings a week for a room , or four pounds for an eight-room house. The cheap rents were one reason to stay in the Gorbals. Another was the desire for neighbors of the same nationality, especially among the Irish . There was no discrimination between Scots and Irish. There were two or three cinemas and a renowned dance hall as leisure activities.

The most important theater in West Scotland, the Citizens Theater , or Citz for short , is located on Gorbals Street. The building was built in 1878 for “Her Majesty's Theater”, at that time it was one of four theaters in the area. The program was based on variety , the panic of an elephant on stage during a performance led to unrest in the neighborhood. After the operator went bankrupt, the Royal Princess's Theater took over the building until it was rented to the Citizens Theater Company in 1945. The building is the second oldest theater in use in the United Kingdom and still uses Victorian-era machinery to this day . The neighboring Palace of Varieties was demolished in 1977 on a municipal order, and the theater crew managed to salvage parts of its Victorian interior, which are now on display in the theater's foyer.

The Gorbals were the first Scottish constituency to send a Labor MP to the House of Commons . That was George Nicoll Barnes in 1906. The constituency has had a stable Labor majority since then. The Communist Party of Great Britain enjoyed a high reputation and was well represented locally, but was unable to translate its reputation into votes, probably due to religious opposition. One of its prominent members, Harry McShane, nonetheless, along with Rev. Bill Smith, a Church of Scotland pastor, founded a committee after the Second World War that sought to improve living conditions with the support of doctors, lawyers and political pressure.

Refurbishment, demolition, high-rise construction, new demolition

Sketch of the Gorbals, the Comprehensive Development Area Laurieston is outlined in black

In order to improve the unsustainable conditions in the Gorbals and many other parts of Glasgow and to keep the residents in the city, the Bruce Report, written by an engineer from the city of Glasgow in 1946, recommended high-rise development. In contrast, the Abercrombie Plan favored by the London Scotland Office advocated settlement in “new cities” outside the city limits. The British government largely implemented the Abercrombie Plan, but at the same time the City of Glasgow continued to pursue the goals of the Bruce Report. It identified 29 Comprehensive Development Areas , the largest number in the UK. The Gorbals were divided into the redevelopment areas Hutchesontown-Gorbals , Polmadie-Hutchesontown and Laurieston-Gorbals . Work began in 1957 in the Hutchesontown-Gorbal area . The data on the housing stock in this sub-area was in 1957:

Total number of apartments	7605
Houses with one or two apartments	87%
Houses built together on the back	33%
Houses with bath	3%
Houses with indoor toilet	22%
Houses that are unacceptable to health	97%
Average number of people per room	1.89
Average number of people per acre	458.6

Industry played no role in the area. The plan was to completely demolish the old buildings and to rebuild initially with apartments, a hospital and shops, schools and a community center to follow later. The 444 existing shops were to be replaced by 57 and the number of pubs reduced from 48 to nine. The area was divided into five parts: Hutchesontown A was built with low duplex apartment buildings and completed in the late 1950s. Hutchesontown B, C, D and E were to be built with high-rise buildings.

In order to get an impression of the large-scale high-rise construction, a delegation from the Glasgow city administration traveled to Marseille in 1954 , visited a Unité d'Habitation built by Le Corbusier and discussed the transferability of this construction concept to Glasgow. Your report pointed to the much colder and more humid climate in Glasgow, and the coal heating common in Scotland was considered unsuitable for the new buildings. Furthermore, with 400 families living together in one house, great importance must be attached to the composition and selection of the tenants, otherwise conflicts are inevitable.

In the discussion about the planning, a Glaswegian architect emphasized that it was important to maintain local roots and the cohesion of the residents during the renovation. He pointed out that residents who had moved to other neighborhoods still drove to the Gorbals to meet their old friends, some even giving up their better-equipped new apartments.

The renovation was implemented, the old buildings completely demolished and replaced by high-rise buildings. The blocks built by Basil Spence in the Brutalist style in Queen Elizabeth Square in Hutchesontown C were best known . Because of their protruding balconies, they were nicknamed "The Hanging Gardens of the Gorbals". Spence said:

"On Tuesdays, when all the washing's out, it'll be like a great ship in full sail"

"If Tuesday is laundry day, the house will look like a big ship with full sails"

- Basil Spence : Sir Basil Spence Archive Project

The houses stood on stilts like the model in Marseille, but the shops, kindergartens, schools and social facilities in Marseille were missing. The concrete proved to be unable to withstand the weather in Glasgow, and the Glasgow city council could not afford the maintenance costs for the buildings. The houses quickly fell into disrepair and the residents nicknamed them " Alcatraz ". Around 10,000 migrants from Asia moved into the newly built houses in the 1970s, and in 1984 the central mosque of Glasgow was built in the area. However, the Asian migrants moved away when they could afford better housing.

City blocks in Queen Elizabeth Square blown up in 1993

The Spences 'houses were demolished in 1993 against the protest of the docomomo architects ' association . 61-year-old Helen Tinney was killed in the demolition due to an incorrect calculation of the safety area. Several other high-rise buildings in the former redevelopment area were also demolished, the houses in Hutchesontown E, which were built in Algerian design and had constant problems with moisture, as early as 1987. In the Laurieston area, high-rise buildings constructed in 1973 were also demolished in 2006, a process that continues today . The newly built low-rise housing development after the skyscrapers were demolished is more appealing, but mostly unaffordable for previous residents, with condominiums there costing at least £ 130,000. The new rental apartments are rented out at a mid-market rent , which is higher than the previous rent for social housing. The demolition has been criticized against the background of a growing housing shortage and over 5,000 homeless children in Scotland.

The policy of large-scale demolition and new construction, which began in Glasgow in the 1950s and continues with the demolition of the high-rise buildings built at the time, is a very controversial issue in Glasgow. In the opinion of residents and architecture critics, the reason for the rapid deterioration of the high-rise buildings is also the social degradation through deindustrialization and the exodus of qualified workers from the city, which has been forced by state and urban policy since the 1950s, in addition to the structural defects and lack of maintenance .

Cultural reception

Sculpture: Girl from the Gorbals

The book No Mean City , published in 1935 by Alexander McArthur and H. Kingsley Long, is a fictional account of life in the Gorbals in the 1930s with the dreaded razor gangs . The title song of the album No Mean City by the hard rock band Nazareth deals with the book . The composer Arthur Bliss wrote the ballet Miracle in the Gorbals in 1944 . The photographer Nick Hedges photographed the Gorbals in the 1960s for the housing organization Shelter . Even Oscar Marzaroli published images from the Gorbals from 1956 to 1987. The director David MacKane made the film The Gorbals Story in 1950 , in which he filmed the story of an artist who remembers his childhood and youth in the Gorbals in his mind's eye. The film is based on a play written by Robert McLeish in 1946 . The psychologist and economist Ralph Glasser , who grew up in the Gorbals, named the volumes of his autobiography Growing up in the Gorbals (1986), Gorbals Boy at Oxford (1988) and Gorbals Voices, Siren Songs (1990); in 2000 he called his last book Gorbals Legacy . The beginning of the 1980s for the Scottish Television film shot A Sense of Freedom (German title. " Life imprisonment - A nightmare behind bars ") portrays the life story of Jimmy Boyle , who grew up in the Gorbals. Boyle was first a gang leader , was wrongly convicted of the murder of a competitor in his opinion, married his psychologist in prison and developed into a sculptor and writer. Jeff Torrington's novella Swing Hammer Swing! (1992) plays in the Gorbals. the author was born there. Folk singer Matt McGinn organized an adventure playground in the Gorbals.

Famous pepole

Allan Pinkerton , founder of the detective agency of the same name
Sir Thomas Lipton , founder of Lipton's Tea
Benny Lynch , flyweight boxer, grew up in the Gorbals
Phil and Derek Shulman , founders of the band Gentle Giant , were born in the Gorbals
Ian Brady , the "Moor Murderer", was born and raised in the Gorbals
Jeff Torrington , writer, was born in the Gorbals in 1935
Jimmy Boyle , leader of a gang who became a sculptor and writer in prison, grew up in the Gorbals
Carol Ann Duffy , poet, was born in the Gorbals
George Buchanan , Labor Party politician and pension minister under Clement Attlee , had his constituency in the Gorbals
Harry McShane , a British communist politician who later left the party, was politically active in the Gorbals
Nicola Sturgeon , Scotland's First Minister, holds the Glasgow Southside direct constituency , which the Gorbals now belong to

literature

Alexander McArthur, H. Kingsley Long: No Mean City: A Story of the Glasgow Slums. 1935.
Jeff Torrington: Swing Hammer Swing! Mariner Books 1995, ISBN 0-15-600197-7 .
Colin Macfarlane: The Real Gorbals Story: True Tales from Glasgow's Meanest Streets. Mainstream Publishing 2007, ISBN 978-1-84596-207-4 .

Web links

Commons : Gorbals - collection of images, videos and audio files

Make life worth living , Nick Hedges' photographs for Shelter 1969–72, Shelter Scotland
Through a glass darkly , Leo Photophile, Fotoblog, Category Gorbals: Gorbals ladies , Step bairn , Gorbals spirit
The Forgotten Gorbals , AL Lloyd, text and Bert Hardy, photos, Picture Post, January 31, 1948, full text, with photos
Moving Image Archives , films about the Gorbals in the film archive of the National Library of Scotland

Individual evidence

^ ^A ^b Gorbals, Glasgow - Origins and History scotcities.com.

^ Glasgow (South) Glimpses of old Glasgow, Glasgow Digital Library, University of Strathclyde .

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Ian R. Mitchell: The Gorbals: A New Glasgow Suburb. In: Pat's Guide: Glasgow West End.

↑ ^a ^b ^c A Gorbals Tour, Glasgow , Glasgow Punter, FourFourTwo Magazine, March 15, 2015.

↑ The experience of immigrants in Scotland ( Memento of the original dated September 11, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Education Scotland / Foghlam Alba website @1@ 2

^ The Jewish community in Scotland , Education Scotland / Foghlam Alba website.

↑ Nick's account of photographing the people of Glasgow during the 1970’s , Nick Hedges, Make life worth living, Shelter Scotland.

^ ^A ^b Remembering the words and pictures that exposed Glasgow's slums in the 1940s , Daily Record, April 7, 2013

↑ ^a ^b ^c Norfolk Court demolition - the end of an era for Laurieston-Gorbals. Valerie Wright, Housing and Wellbeing in Glasgow, University of Glasgow , 13 May 2016.

↑ ^a ^b The Forgotten Gorbals , AL Lloyd, Text and Bert Hardy, Photos, Picture Post, January 31, 1948, on Hayes People History.

^ History , Citizens Theater, website of the theater.

↑ ^a ^b ^c Hutchesontown. In: Housing and Wellbeing in Glasgow, University of Glasgow.

↑ ^a ^b Lynn Abrams: Glasgow goes to Marseilles In: Housing and Wellbeing in Glasgow, University of Glasgow, March 2, 2015.

^ Hutchesontown C Development , Sir Basil Spence Archive Project.

^ Architecture Update: An asset for Glasgow , Amanda Baillieu, The Independent , April 28, 1993

^ Fury over Gorbals tribute to man who designed 'Alcatraz' , Evening Times, January 16, 2008

↑ Woman dies in demolition blast , Herald Scotland, September 13, 2013

^ High-rise in Glasgow's Gorbals to be demolished on Sunday , Peter Swindon, The Herald Scotland, May 7, 2016

^ Comparing the Slums of 1970s Glasgow to the Buildings That Stand There Today , Hope Whitmore, VICE , December 17, 2015

^ Mid-market rent , New Gorbals Housing Association

^ Worst housing crisis since end of WWII looms - MSP , Andrew Whittaker, The Scotsman , October 1, 2014

↑ 5000 Scots kids won't have a home this Christmas as lack of affordable housing hits crisis point , Sally Hind, Daily Record, November 2, 2015

^ The Gorbals Block debate , David Mingay, thejoyofconcrete.com, supporters and opponents of high-rise buildings have their say in the discussion

↑ Glasgow tower block residents reveal their thoughts on soon-to-be demolished flats , Daily Record, December 21, 2013

↑ History, politics and vulnerability: explaining excess mortality , David Walsh, Gerry McCartney, Chik Collins, Martin Taulbut, G David Batty, Glasgow Center of Population Health, May 2016; Summary of the report (PDF); Recommendations to politics (PDF)

^ Disappearing Glasgow: documenting the demolition of a city's troubled past , Chris Leslie, The Guardian, April 22, 2015

↑ In the Glasgow media the death of a high rise is marketed as progress , Mark Minkjan, failedarchitecture.com, interview with Chris Leslie on his exhibition The Glasgow Renaissance , September 9, 2013