by escotregen » Mon Jun 06, 2011 9:17 pm
I was posting this topic elsewhere when I remembered this thread back in Hidden Glasgow. It’s not quite really ‘tunnels’ but it is something of the sort.
I was at today’s presentation on the Red Road demolition programme at the GHA Academy (really first class facility by the way). I discovered that under the Red Road flats there was/is a whacking great 1.000 seater bingo hall. From what I saw, it’s now in a long-abandoned and severely dilapidated state.
Nevertheless it’s also very apparent how much of its time it was; all railway carriage, cushioned, four four-by-four seat arrangements in patterned corporate blue and light blue steel; old Skol lager fonts visible etc.
Seems that it ‘wis the damp an rain watter’ that did for it. In one of the films footage a wee wummin described how you could smell the damp and sometimes the rainwater dripped on the tables. Another described the Tardis effect of being bussed in (bussed in – it was that big) to the small concrete entrance and walking in a hug ‘glittering’ palace.
SAFEDEM demolition experts found quite a challenge in-that the steel and steel structure are unique to the Red Road scheme. They found a gauge, and a variety of gauges, of steel that they had not come across before anywhere in the world – neither metric nor imperial! They traced the origins of the steel to the old Dalziel Works. That did bring home to me how Scotland no longer has the steel production capacity to meet the needs of even a single scheme like this one (and compare that to what’s going elsewhere on in a single city the likes of Shanghai today).
Seems that outside of the old USSR, the Red Road structures were the only such residential development with purely asbestos external cladding (why does that sound appropriate for the old Glasgow Corporation?).
Aside of the many technical construction matters, there was a quite superb presentation on GHA and Glasgow Life’s ‘Red Road Cultural Project’. I could go on and on. But instead, I recommend that you visit the various relevant websites like [url]this[/url] or [url]this[/url]