Thursday, 21 December 2017

End of living 'high rise' in Scotland?



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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