Council plan to demolish 4,000 tower block homes in
Glasgow marks end of living high-rise…
The end of living ‘high rise’, the announcement in the Daily
Record 1 and other media in Scotland that one the largest Council
landlord could demolish all if its tower blocks over the coming decades, including
the iconic Muirhouse Towers, pictured, in the southern part of Motherwell.
I remember five years ago, as one of the local Planning Officers,
conducting site visits in nearby Dalziel Park. Catching sight of the seven
eighteen storey point blocks, an initiative of an allied group of Council Housing
Convenors against the centralised and regional planning of the Scottish
Development Department, 2 rising from the misty parkland
spurred a strange reflection: had the contemporary city of Le Corbusier
descended from the historical ether to take root in West Central Scotland?
Before I become another misty eyed aficionada for the ghosts
of progress past, having never spent one night of my life in a tower block, let
me state that the verdict on this form of housing is still a very open one. The
various perspectives on tower life offered up by this recent announcement are
varied – there is many a case for saying towers have had their day, especially
considering the horrific lessons of this summer.
As time and lives move on, so must housing also. What the outcomes
of this process might be, let us not speculate, only hope that what is built to
replace the blocks is fit for the future and that 2077 does not greet the announcement
that the end of living in the currently vogue, ‘low rise, mixed use development’,
is at an end…
DAILYRECORD.CO.UK. 2017. Council plan to
demolish 4,000 tower block homes in Glasgow marks end of living high-ris.
Available: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/council-plan-demolish-4000-tower-11728799
[Accessed 21 December 2017].
GLENDINNING,
M. & MUTHESIUS, S. 1994. Tower block
: modern public housing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, New
Haven, Yale University Press.
Image: The copyright on this image is owned by Richard Webb and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
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