Bruce Report

This was authored by a team led by Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Robert H Matthew[2] and disagreed with the Bruce Report in a number of important areas.

The friction and debate between the supporters and spheres of influence for these two reports led to a series of initiatives designed to transform the city over the following fifty years.

Central to the Bruce Report's recommendations were a set of radical proposals which amounted to wholesale demolition of a large section of the city centre.

Part of this plan involved removing residential dwellings from the central area and replacing them with commercial developments that would house new service industries, while the city's Victorian grid plan of streets would almost be completely re-arranged into a structured series of "zones" containing distinct spaces for city functions such as housing, commerce, and education.

Although the proposals for the city centre were rejected, the later concept of the Comprehensive Development Area (CDA) can trace its roots directly to the Bruce Report.

In the 1950s, Glasgow Corporation designated CDAs as districts suffering from severe overcrowding and insanitary housing, where the only solution would be complete demolition and rebuilding.

Of the 20 CDAs which the Corporation identified, two of them – Anderston and Townhead – lay partially within the city centre and saw nearly total destruction to make way for roads, high-rise housing and concrete office buildings.

Although the Bruce Report in itself did not precisely specify the manner in which its housing proposals should be implemented, the city fathers would ultimately look to the ideas of the French architect Le Corbusier for their inspiration in how those goals should be achieved.

The end result was the mass construction of numerous high-rise tower block estates on green belt sites within the city boundaries.

[citation needed] In building the new towns, a significant portion of the city's population were moved outwith the jurisdiction of the Glasgow Corporation.

[citation needed] The 'social engineering' which underpinned the new housing schemes, has been largely concluded as being a failure by contemporary historians; since many of the planned suburbs quickly developed social problems and deteriorated into slums themselves by the 1980s.

Many of the new housing blocks and multi-storey towers were cheaply built using pre-fabricated concrete construction systems which were ill-suited to Glasgow's inclement climate, and as a result, suffered excruciating damp and severe structural problems which rendered them unfit for human habitation.

In 2005, the newly formed Glasgow Housing Association began a 15-year demolition programme of the worst of the tower blocks, which included many of the once flagship developments such as Red Road, Sighthill, Hutchesontown in the Gorbals, and the Bluevale/Whitevale estate in the East End.

However carving a motorway through long standing communities – much of Charing Cross and a swathe of Anderston were completely destroyed in its construction – caused such protest that the rest of the Inner Ring Road initiative was shelved.

The Stirling motorway became the present day M80 and its initial Glasgow section was openened in 1992 as the Stepps bypass, and the complete route through Cumbernauld was fully opened in 2011.

These plans were never implemented, and all four stations remained until the 1960s when the Beeching Axe reforms changed the shape of rail services across Scotland, England, and Wales.

Glasgow Central has recently undergone extensive, careful and sympathetic renovation and remains one of the city's architectural assets to this day.