Photograph: Julian Schwanitz/Two Rivers Media/BBC Scotland
Let us reach back in time to Scotland in the 1970s, when Glasgow’s slums were being cleared, tenements demolished and the inhabitants relocated to purpose-built housing schemes on the outskirts of town. All of which was conceived and overseen by people who learned absolutely nothing from previous overhauls undertaken (particularly in the north of England) since the 30s.
As briskly outlined in the opening minutes of the two-part BBC documentary The Ice Cream Wars, the architects of Glasgow’s housing schemes hadn’t learned, for example, that people need shops. Or at the very least, bus routes to the city centre so they can go and buy the stuff they need to live.
