Glasgow has, across the last three centuries, pioneered radical (and often controversial) strategies, perhaps disruptions, on its journey as a progressive city. The canal and Port Dundas surely the most visionary now on its second regeneration. All of them stops on the city’s evolution. The newly opened crossing between Govan and Partick and her bigger sister down river and nearing completion as a road crossing between Yoker and Renfrew may be the latest manifestations of that tradition, but such speculations have long been in Glasgow’s DNA.
The Alumni of University of Strathclyde celebrations acknowledging the opening of the Department of Architecture and Building Science (DABS) at 131Rottenrow in 1967 stimulated my reverie, sufficient to trawl through my archive both mental and physical. Two related results.
My essay Visions of Glasgow from 2008 published in Urban Realm magazine and the following images published at the time of the opening of DABS - Robert Matthew, Johnston Marshall and Partners 1967 Development Plan for the University of Strathclyde Campus– published two years after the 1965 Highway Plan for Glasgow yet designed on the assumption of the full implementation of the M8 ring-road.
These proposals which had lain in a drawer in 131 Rottenrow for almost half a century were rescued from the builders skip when a group of staff members, myself included, were removing all material from the Department out to the central archive, or to the bin, in preparation for the closure of the building prior to its adaptation and renovation by BDP. Coincidentally, one of the publications we came across was a copy of Raymond Youngs ground breaking thesis from circa 1972 on tenement rehabilitation which I refer to in the 2008 essay.
If the Highway Plan for Glasgow was visionary, Matthew’s plan, led by Tom Spaven, for the university was an equally brave and bold response. It deals with the area east of the Royal College of Science and Technology, through to the Cathedral Precinct incorporating the envisaged eastern flank of the M8. It is replicated today only in spirit, by a more thoughtful response – the route from Castle Street, High Street, Saltmarket and the Albert Bridge is currently the fastest way, car or cycle, by which the traveller can cross the city North to South.
The University’s expansion over that half century has been less radical that those images from 1967 yet perhaps more thoughtful in recognising the values of the grain and severe topography of Rottenrow, as well as the history of the city.
As I allude to in my Urban Realm essay, already sixteen years old, Visions are a central part of this city’s development but the problem with visions is they are static-the embodiment of thinking at a point in time. The Plan for the Kingston Bridge from the mid 1950’s integral to the 1965 Highway Plan was based on two assumptions - that ocean-going shipping to the Americas and South Africa would continue unabated and that the adjacent Kingston Dock would be required to accommodate it. By the opening of the bridge in 1970 the Kingston Dock had been filled in.
However, if we widen out our field of vision we can see it as a significant part of a bigger jigsaw responding to mobility and comprehensive transport demands and to the urgency of developing the crossing of the river including the Clyde Tunnel (1961) and the Erskine Bridge (1971):
All 1950’s initiatives completed by 1971. The new river crossings at Govan and Renfrew are not a conclusion only the latest phase of that evolution.
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