Glasgow Today and Tomorrow (1949)
Here's a fascinating film of Glasgow from 1949, showing the state of the city, from homes to roads and the centre, and offering some radical solutions. What makes this film so interesting is that the solutions suggested in this film, and by the Bruce Report, which it illustrates, never came to pass.
Robert Bruce was Glasgow Corporation's powerful city engineer, and his plan very much represented the vested interests of the city fathers of the day – to reject decentralisation and the fashionable ideas of reducing the density of the city by building new towns, and to instead promote a new super-dense high-rise city, New York on the banks of the Clyde.
His 1945 plan began a war of competing ideologies, and it was one Bruce lost. The super-dense city was rejected by the government, who instead prefered the plan drawn up by Patrick Abercrombie and Robert Matthew, to introduce more green space, and move thousands of people out to a new town (East Kilbride) and new estates around the edge of the city, and to comprehensivey redevelop areas like the Gorbals.
What happened over time was the battle, seemingly lost, was engaged again by stealth, somewhat fittingly in the era of the Cold War. By the 1960s the city fathers had found ways to smuggle back in their plans for a super-dense high rise city, and so tower blocks began to be built in gap sites all over, rather than in the dispersed, planned fashion advocated by the government. And so the postwar Glasgow we know and love was constructed, a strange hybrid of competing ideas, with no overarching philosophy.
Future Ealing comedy Assistant Director Erica Masters' film perfectly captures the ambition of the Bruce plan and the vision of powerful city at a turing point in its history.
You can watch the film here.
Robert Bruce was Glasgow Corporation's powerful city engineer, and his plan very much represented the vested interests of the city fathers of the day – to reject decentralisation and the fashionable ideas of reducing the density of the city by building new towns, and to instead promote a new super-dense high-rise city, New York on the banks of the Clyde.
His 1945 plan began a war of competing ideologies, and it was one Bruce lost. The super-dense city was rejected by the government, who instead prefered the plan drawn up by Patrick Abercrombie and Robert Matthew, to introduce more green space, and move thousands of people out to a new town (East Kilbride) and new estates around the edge of the city, and to comprehensivey redevelop areas like the Gorbals.
What happened over time was the battle, seemingly lost, was engaged again by stealth, somewhat fittingly in the era of the Cold War. By the 1960s the city fathers had found ways to smuggle back in their plans for a super-dense high rise city, and so tower blocks began to be built in gap sites all over, rather than in the dispersed, planned fashion advocated by the government. And so the postwar Glasgow we know and love was constructed, a strange hybrid of competing ideas, with no overarching philosophy.
Future Ealing comedy Assistant Director Erica Masters' film perfectly captures the ambition of the Bruce plan and the vision of powerful city at a turing point in its history.
You can watch the film here.
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