From little acorns, Pollok aims for a rebirth

There is poverty here, to be sure. It can be detected in weathered faces and missing teeth; in cigarettes and teenage mothers and conversations that seem to drift inexorably back to sanctions. But the over-riding impression is of pride and a defensiveness born of being a byword for deprivation and failure.

"Pollok is one of the best places out," says one woman, her hair tied back in a pony tail. "People give it a bad name, but in my wee street everybody knows each other, everybody gets on."

Inside, Alice Mulholland, a member of the Pollok Art Group, is just as protective. "A retired policeman once said to me: 'Oh, you come from Pollok – it's full of junkies,'” she says. “I told him: 'It's no' full of junkies – there's a few. But the dealers a' live in Milngavie and Bearsden.'"

Dig a little deeper, however, and frustrations find a way through cracks in the bravado. "So much money has been poured into this area over the years, but what have we got to show for it?," says Donna Foote, who lives in Priesthill (part of Greater Pollok). "There's still housing issues; still families trapped in poverty.“

Greater Pollok, which also includes Househillwood, Nitshill and Arden, was the first of the four big peripheral housing estates built to accommodate the slum clearances of Glasgow – the other three being Drumchapel, Castlemilk and Easterhouse.

Next year marks the 80th anniversary of the sale of the land by the Stirling-Maxwell family to Glasgow Corporation. John Stirling-Maxwell – 10th Baronet of Pollok, philanthropist, art-lover and one-time chairman of the Forestry Commssion – had an ambitious vision of the communities that would flourish there and that he would help to design.

A devotee of the garden city movement, he dreamed of wide boulevards and low-density housing; of a mix of social backgrounds and wide open spaces where "children romped" amidst "sylvan beauties".

Traces of Stirling-Maxwell's influence are still visible. But after the war priorities changed; decades of poor social policies took their toll, transforming it from a prototype for better living into a template for sink estates across the UK.

Now David McDonald, the SNP councillor for Greater Pollok, has come up with a grand plan: an initiative he has christened 80/20. A big man brimming with boyish enthusiasm, he wants the anniversary to be a catalyst to celebrate the area's heritage, protect and enhance its green spaces and start a dialogue about the future so that – come its centenary – it will have something to celebrate.

His own ideas include the gathering together of a digital archive of memories and the creation of a trail connecting three patches of woodland, each with a separate theme: environmental education, arts and music and mental health.

But what McDonald really wants is for the community in which he grew up – a community used to having "solutions" imposed on it – to be allowed to take control of its own destiny.

With this in mind, he is pushing for community empowerment, community ownership and community decision-making, themes he says will be at the heart of the SNP's 2017 council election campaign.

"Harry Burns [the former chief medical officer] has told how he signed the death warrants of thousands of Glaswegian men confirming they succumbed to heart or liver disease, but what he wanted to write was that they died because they didn't have anything to live for; no self-respect or self-esteem," McDonald says. "I see those issues every day, of people existing in the community, but not really living in it.

"I believe the answer must lie here in Greater Pollok. If you are serious about improving lives, it has to be done with the consent and support of those who live here. You have to ask them what they want."

It's late July, the trees that line Braidcraft Road are in full foliage, and Gerry Mooney, an urban studies academic at the Open University, is giving me a guided tour.

At the moment, we are standing on Damshot Crescent, an attractive mix of Dutch-style cottages and semi-detached villas, in the heart of the pre-war estate. As we talk, a man mows a beautifully-tended lawn. Hanging baskets and trailing roses complete the suburban cliche.

Mooney grew up in post-war Pollok – a tenement on Dormanside Road and then a three-bedroomed semi on Templeland Road, which he shared with his mother, father, sister, grandmother and aunt.

He recalls the gangs of the sixties, the 21 Krew and the 50 Krew, which took their names from the bus terminuses they were closest to, and the way Pollok kids were bottom of the heap at Lourdes Secondary, Cardonald, but insists life was mostly fine, and in any case, he had nothing to compare it to.

"The road we are standing on now is old Pollok," he explains. "Stirling-Maxwell didn't want uniformity – so he got architects to come up with lots of different designs." Most of the homes in Damshot Crescent are now privately-owned, highly sought-after and less expensive than similar properties elsewhere.

After the war, though, houses were thrown up in order to accommodate as many people as quickly as possible. Mooney takes me to three-storey flats on Crookston Road from the late 1940s; they are long, soulless, flat-roofed blocks, although other buildings from the same period have more character.

To families used to a single end in Govan or the Gorbals, of course, any flat in Greater Pollok was something to aspire to. It wasn't until the shoddiness of some of the work became apparent that doubts began to permeate like damp.

In footage from a Glasgow Corporation Progress Report from 1948, an excited family can be seen boarding a removal van and travelling along Barrhead Road towards their new life. Mooney's aunt Rena McVey, who still lives in the house on Templeland Road, made the journey from Oatlands the following year when she was 12. "I think my mother and father were 18 years on the waiting list, but oh, it was fantastic to move," she says. "We came to a flat with a veranda, a back green, our own toilet, whereas in Oatlands we had to wash in a sink. It was night and day."

What was missing was the sense of community that grew from the forced intimacy of the slums; there were few amenities, no internal employment and poor transport links so men like McVey's father, who worked in a slaughterhouse and then as a clerk, had to make long journeys back and forth each day. "As kids we were lucky," says Alice Mulholland's husband Ian. "We joined the Boys' Brigade and played football. We didn't realise how isolated our parents were."

As the heavy industries died, the jobs went with them. Then in the 1970s, as research from the Glasgow Centre for Population Health revealed, the government's decision to focus on the new towns meant "the cream" of Glasgow – the skilled and young families – were "skimmed off", leaving the peripheral estates with "the old, the very poor and the almost unemployable".

"Whole populations were decanted lock, stock and barrel, and just sort of dumped," says Mooney. "Like Billy Connolly said about Drumchapel: it could feel like a 'desert wi' windaes'."

Back in the day, places of worship acted as a social glue. So important were they, a Church of Scotland church in the south side – now St James' Parish Church – was dismantled and rebuilt brick by brick (like the populations themselves, but with more regard for the original structure). McVey was there the day St Conval's Catholic Church opened: just a wee wooden hut heaving on Sundays. It was to this hut that her father was taken when he died of cancer at 53. The present-day church opened in 1956 and the wooden hut was used as a hall until it was set on fire. Now, St James' Parish Church has barbed wire around its walls and an empty bottle of Buckfast on its path. "There's nothing I couldn't tell you about St Conval's," says McVey. "Though not so many people go now.”

Modern-day Greater Pollok defies easy categorisation. Some of its housing is still impressive, some closer to the slums it was built to replace. Plenty of its offspring have gone on to become teachers, musicians and politicians; one of the Mulholland's sons is an artist, the other a professor. But the rapper Darren McGarvey – aka Loki – has written angry pieces about an upbringing blighted by addiction and there are families where unemployment runs generations-deep.

At its heart, Silverburn shopping centre rises up like a sphinx in a consumer wasteland. And like all sphinxes, Silverburn has a riddle: who and what is it for? While politicians speak as if it is invested with sacred powers, most residents eye it with suspicion. They believe its entrance, which faces towards the M77, and array of designer outlets prove it was always intended for the big spenders of Newton Mearns. As for the jobs, most are low paid and part time, with little prospect of advancement.

"I suppose the council thought Silverburn would end our problems, not realising most people who worked there would be in working poverty," says Foote, a community councillor, referring to wages that are only liveable when they are topped up with tax credits. "Silverburn increased employment, but not wealth."

Greater Pollok's fortunes were affected by Margaret Thatcher's right-to-to buy policy, which was finally scrapped last month. Purchasing a council house made sense because it was cheaper than paying the rent, but maintenance bills put pressure on limited budgets. On many streets, housing association homes flaunt new roofs and pebble-dashed walls at their dowdy owner-occupied neighbours.

Right to buy also led to a decline in council housing stock, which caused overcrowding. This is why Foote is sharing her three-bedroomed home with seven others (her partner, her two grown-up sons, her daughter, her daughter's partner and their two children). "It's chaotic – we're all on top of each other," she says.

Just as pressing is the number of buy-to-let landlords who fail to maintain their properties. At the notorious "Barratt circle" in Priesthill, the lack of a factor has left once sought-after flats fit for the wrecking ball. Broken security doors have attracted vandals and arsonists. With drains full of moss and rubbish piled up outside, the Happy Birthday banner on one first-floor window seems poignantly optimistic.

Greater Pollok's malaise also stems from the way resources have been poured in, then withdrawn, in a seemingly endless cycle, and answers foisted on it by well-meaning, but often ineffectual outsiders.

When, after a rootless childhood, Foote arrived in Priesthill, five children in tow, it immediately felt like home. Soon after, in 1999, a Social Inclusion Partnership (SIP) was established and the funding tap was turned on. Foote got involved with running special needs playgroups and summer clubs at the community centre, and organising holidays to seaside resorts. "Every single social support you needed was on your doorstep," she says.

But then, in the mid 2000s, the SIPs money dried up, the support systems vanished and most of the community centres were shut down, the land they stood on sold off for private housing. Today, the youth club operates – when it operates at all – from a tiny room in Sanctuary Housing Association. Meanwhile the Wedge, a multi-million pound "community facility" built in 2005, stands almost empty on the roundabout opposite Silverburn: a monument to squandered opportunities.

Priesthill is now one of Glasgow Community Planning Partnership's “thriving places”: areas identified as having consistent levels of inequality in terms of child poverty, health and employment. The Thriving Places initiative is supposed to be less about an injection of funds and more about community engagement, but Foote has little faith it will make a difference. "It could be a good thing, but in our experience it isnae a good thing," she says. "Organisations who have never even looked at this area think, 'Poor souls – they need some work done.' They parachute in and deliver a service for six weeks or three years, then disappear."

Once upon a time, Greater Pollok produced activists the way Harris produced Tweed or Dundee jute; it was the stomping ground of Tommy Sheridan when he was still a folk hero; and of Colin "the birdman" Macleod, founder of the Pollok Free State, who spent nine days in a tree to protest against the removal of woodland to make way for the M77. It is also the home of the redoubtable Rose Gentle, who campaigned against the Iraq War after her Fusilier son Gordon was killed when his lightly-armoured Snatch Land Rover was destroyed by a roadside bomb.

Despite the setbacks, Foote soldiers on. A neighbourhood improvement volunteer, she organises clean-ups and is in the process of founding the Greater Pollok Maintenance Scheme, an initiative that would supply tools to would-be gardeners in exchange for them tidying public spaces for free at the weekends. But she is the first to admit lack of progress has sucked the energy out of the place. "Some people are lethargic, with no hope for the future," she says.

McDonald wants to revitalise Greater Pollok; to his credit he understands that for that to happen, its citizens must be empowered. But already he is brushing up against reality. No sooner had he conceived his forestry trail than Persimmon Homes drew up proposals for an application for 500 private houses on one of the three pieces of woodland.

So, at his gala day stall, alongside the 80/20 leaflets and a copy of a council document recording “the cutting of the first sod” sits a petition objecting to the proposals on the grounds that the preservation of the woodlands were written into the conservation agreement when the land was handed over to the National Trust for Scotland.

Perhaps all this augurs well. Perhaps another tussle over timber is just what the community needs to recapture its fighting spirit. Hopefully, it's not an omen that, like so much that has gone before, 80/20 will be felled: by circumstance, political priorities or a lack of long-term vision.