moonbeam wrote:It was part of the east end "GEAR" renewal project. GEAR Glasgow East Area Renewal. Millions got pumped in of UK government money after Beardmores, Arrols etc closed and the east end of Glasgow was "tarted up" with lots of derelict sites cleared and cleaned up. Was it a waste of money? Could the money have been better spent? Are these urban renewal projects only 6 to 12 months of "get people off the dole for a wee while" projects. Maybe a usefull debate on this topic could ensue.There seems to have been a lot of money going to do up streets and houses in parts of Glasgow which as soon as the GHA took over were promptly flattened. I suspect the tax payer- you and me- will be paying off the costs of these projects for years to come. An example might be the Tabowie Street area in Anniesland/Knightswood or Netherton or whatever they call that area now.
I am revisiting this stuff at the moment because I am authoring a Wikipedia article on GEAR (surprised nobody ever created the article before...)
For my tuppenceworth given I am now a fortysomething who grew up in the East End in the 80s when GEAR was in its full flow, to say it was a failure or a waste of time is nonsense. One of the biggest things it did was show the rest of the city that tenements weren't that bad at all - and remembering that one of the biggest achievements of GEAR was the recognition that the mass demolitions and slum clearances of the 1950s and 1960s, and the Bruce Report inspired policy of Comprehensive Development had been both wasteful and expensive. Decades before "sustainability" became a trendy word, to save perfectly good houses that with a bit of work were turned into good homes - better than the concrete c**p that was built en masse just a few years before (and so much of it has been flattened since - yet the tenements have survived).
Then you get to the new public buildings that were built either directly by GEAR or in partnership with it - police stations and health centres in Bridgeton and Shettleston, my own high school - Eastbank Academy - in the mid 80s....the list goes on and these structures are all still in use today.
The playparks and landscaped areas where these stone obelisks were erected have long either been built upon or fell into dereliction, and yes I guess the success of the help for local enterprise might have been called into question but overall I think it left a great legacy - opinions?????