Demolition Porn: Glasgow

Away from the happy tales of lovely modernist things being lovely and modernist, many of the most powerful films of postwar buildings online are the demolition videos of tower blocks and estates. There are many reasons for these demolitions: some of the buildings have become neglected and are now too expensive to maintain; others have become too associated with social problems, often due to the right to buy policy's unwanted side-effect of concentrating the poorest families into the few remaining council-run dwellings in high rise estates, and pretty much abandoning them there; then there were structural failures latent in the building from the off; or there's the most common reason – it's a way to get money from developers so they can carpet the area with yet more poky boxes with tiny windows.

Whatever I think about these films, there's no denying that there's a bit of a thrill to watching big shit blowing up, even if the background message is one of such tragic failure. I've concentrated on films from Glasgow because for a long while it was the high rise capital of Britain, and in the last twenty years all sorts of experiments, from Basil Spence's extraordinary Queen Elizabeth flats in the Gorbals (where, during the famously disastrous demolition, a spectator was killed by flying masonry) to Sam Bunton's enormous and rather terrifying Red Road towers, have been razed. If big explosions are your thing, Glasgow has offered more than most.

Pollockshaws



Stirlingfauld Place, Gorbals



Red Road