CLIFF Hanley was, in some ways, ahead of his time.

Back in early 1972, mere days before the opening of the Charing Cross section of Glasgow’s controversial inner ring-road, Hanley, an esteemed journalist, novelist and lyricist, wrote a long and thoughtful article for the Glasgow Herald. The city’s ring-road plan, he began, was bold, imaginative and startling and, if it all went through, “the result will be a monument to [Glasgow] Corporation’s ability to think big.

“Unfortunately,” he added, “it isn’t much fun living in a monument. More and more people are coming to the view that they would rather live in a city, while simultaneously the current planning philosophy is trying to make less and less city available for them”.

Read more: How a genius put the world in our pocket: the rise of the mobile phone

It was true, he also observed, that cars destroyed cities as places worth living in. People – planners included – overlooked the fact that, at that time, only a small minority travelled by car. He admitted to liking his own car but went on to say that he had made a “small, embarrassed gesture” against the car’s ubiquity by, first, riding into town on his daughter’s push-bike and then on his other daughter’s moped.

Two-wheeled traffic, Hanley suggested, could be the way ahead, despite the presence of heavy traffic and the unpredictable weather. And this was when he made something of a visionary suggestion.

“If we want bold, visionary, stupefying plans, compare the cost of cantilevering rows of transparent canopy at first-floor level throughout the shopping streets of central Glasgow, to shelter pedestrians and cyclists alike, with the cost of a couple of miles of motorway.

“The uncovered space in the middle of the road would let the rain in to wash the streets and leave space for public transport. Actually, the whole idea may be silly, it may have complications and miseries I haven’t thought of. Like the planners, I tend to have utopian fantasies too ...”

If his plan were implemented, “I see road surfaces lasting forever because there’s practically no weight on them. I’m a woolly-minded romantic. But at least my spectacular visions are concentrated on people – on the people who pay the planners – and not on dead cities full of monuments. Up with people”.

That article of 51 years ago seems particularly relevant now, given the energetic campaign that asserts that it is time to scrap the M8 that runs through Scotland’s largest city. On Twitter the ‘Replace the M8’ account has in excess of 4,000 followers. Its Twitter bio speaks of a ‘campaign to remove the motorway from Glasgow city centre and replace it with something better”. More of this later.

A few days after Hanley’s article appeared, on February 1, 1972, twenty architectural students from Glasgow School of Art, furious about the effect of the city’s ring road on the environment, demonstrated as Gordon Campbell, the Secretary of State for Scotland, opened the £6 million Charing Cross section.

The section linked the north end of the Kingston Bridge to the St George’s Cross interchange on the north flank of the inner ring road. Campbell described it as a bold and imaginative part of an integrated development “which aims at providing an old but rejuvenating city with a modern system of road communications and a forward-looking pattern of redevelopment at the same time”.

“The provision”, he added, “of what is now a major by-pass of the city centre is bound to be of great benefit both to the traffic which is using it and, through the easing of congestion it will provide, to the driver and the public in the city itself”. The Charing Cross section was a key link in the development of a high-standard motorway and dual carriageway linking east Scotland with Glasgow Renfrewshire and Greenock.

 

Campbell continued: “From the time the basic strategy for motorway and dual-carriageway development in Scotland in the ‘60s and early 70s was laid down in the 1963 White Paper, to the latest Oceanspan thinking, the importance of a major fast new route of this kind, drawing closer together the cities, industrial centres, and ports of east and west Scotland has been emphasised”. (Oceanspan had been a Scottish Council (Development and Industry) study of the country’s economic geography and social structure).

Concern had long been expressed about the congestion in the city centre, which was seen as part of the reason why there were so many empty shop units. A lecturer in land economics at Paisley College of Technology had declared – in the summer of 1970 – that the inner ring road “will be more than a fast bypass of the city centre; it is the first stage of a transport plan which could ensure the future viability of the city centre”.

In January 1972 a Glasgow councillor – one Vince Cable – suggested that the city make bus travel free for a week to assess its effect on traffic congestion and reduction in the use of private cars. He said the pilot scheme would be similar to one recently carried out in Rome.

Congestion was one thing - but to Hunter Reid and the other demonstrators, whose placards read “people not cars”, “the car is a luxury not a necessity” and “this scar will never heal!”, the M8 motorway had completely despoiled the city. “It has,” Mr Reid told a reporter, “been rushed through without any regard to the effect on the surrounding area”.

Many took the view – and still do, today – that the formerly elegant Charing Cross area had been rather savagely bisected by the M8 and aesthetically ruined. Several fine buildings were lost, including the stately Grand Hotel. Before it was demolished in October 1968, many former patrons rushed to book a room for one last, sentimental look at the hotel where they had spent their honeymoon.

A Glasgow Herald editorial the day after Campbell spoke said: “The Charing Cross section … is a classic example of the massacre of an area by urban motorway. Not only has Charing Cross, one of the most attractive landmarks in the city, been destroyed but the residents of Garnethill and the St George’s Road area now find themselves living in a shambles, more closely resembling a ghost town than a community”.

The GSA students, for their part, were now engaged on a process to re-integrate the Charing Cross area with the city centre.

Hunter Reid, just 25 at the time, is now 76, having enjoyed a notable career as an architect. Asked last week by the Herald columnist, Mark Smith, what his motivation had been in 1972, he said it was partly his anger at the prioritisation of cars and partly the destruction of buildings. Essentially, he and his colleagues were making the point that it was impossible to design a motorway through the heart of a Victorian city without paying a very heavy price.

Read more: Mark Smith: They said Glasgow’s scar would never heal. They were right

Cliff Hanley lived long enough – he died in August 1999, aged 76 ­– to see the full impact of the motorway on his city centre. Glasgow has continued to develop since then. Car ownership has grown massively, too: according to the RAC Foundation, more 77% of households in Great Britain have a car. Because car-owning households tend to have more than one person, the number of people with access to a car in the house is 81% of the total population.

Pressure has been growing to do something about the effects of the M8 on Glasgow. Replacing it seems like a colossally ambitious step, but in an open letter dated October 17, 2021, the Replace the M8 group argued that while Glasgow “has many characteristics of a highly liveable city” its 1960s motorway infrastructure, especially the M8 motorway link through the city centre, “greatly  undermines this liveability”, even if the fast journeys enabled by the motorway are a key part of many peoples’ everyday lives.

The open letter is worth quoting in some detail. While the suggestion of “replacing the M8” may seem irrational to many, it concedes, “we are still living with an urban transport system imposed on Glasgow by Planners in the 1960s, a system which prioritises the car while blighting the surrounding city with its enormous presence.

“ … We now have the benefit of 50 years of experience of the negative social impacts of urban motorways, and greatly advanced understanding of traffic management. Furthermore, despite decades of car-centric planning, around half of households in Glasgow continue to have no access to a car.

“The road is a harmful legacy of a narrow policy agenda which prioritised private car ownership as the solution to urban economic problems, and placed comparatively little value in the beautiful, coherent city that was earmarked for wholesale transformation and large-scale demolition”.

Replace the M8 also points out that many cities around the world with urban motorways face similar questions and challenges with freeways which are nearing the end of their 40- to 50-year lifespans. “Common legacy issues”, it says, “include the driving of elevated or sunken motorways through inner-city neighbourhoods, the demolishing of buildings and occupation of valuable land, deadly air-pollution, and the creation of divisions between people and elimination of continuity between city centres and surrounding areas”.

A motion passed by Glasgow City Council recently described the M8 as no less than a scar in the urban fabric of the city, with a “deeply damaging impact” on the city centre’s placemaking and creating severance “between the city centre and localities to its north and west”.

‘Car-centric transport design’ had created many significant negative impacts on quality of life for communities across Glasgow and the West of Scotland, including “unsafe” routes for walking, wheeling and cycling, and increased noise and air pollution, it added.

In the motion’s wording, the public cost of maintaining an ageing motorway was “so significant as to warrant further investigation of possible alternatives, including but not limited to, full replacement”. The chance to reimagine its longer-term future potentially includes replacing the city-centre stretch of the M8 with a boulevard or “avenue-style road”.

Greens councillor Christy Mearns, who initiated the motion, said while being interviewed on STV’s Scotland Tonight: “We know there are cities around the world who have managed to look at their urban motorways, decide that they weren’t really fit for the present and for the future and have created something much better which is healthier for people, addresses some of the most pressing issues of our time such as the climate crisis and really helps to lower car-kilometres, for example, and makes things nicer and better for all”.

Glasgow Labour MSP Paul Sweeney has voiced support for the Replace the M8 campaign, tweeting on April 5: “Pleased to see cross-party support in Glasgow City Council for the negative impact of the M8 through the city centre to be reduced through short- and longer-term interventions”. He has said that phasing out the M8 and replacing it with homes, offices, public buildings and green spaces could encourage people to move into the city and thereby increase the tax base.

Hunter Reid, talking to Mark Smith last week, mused that what could “really work” would be a roof over the Charing Cross section, reconnecting it to Sauchiehall Street. Indeed, last summer, the city council submitted a bid for UK Levelling-Up funding for a cap over the M8.

As the Herald reported at the time, “Plans for an M8 garden cap between Sauchiehall Street and Bath Street would completely reconfigure the Charing Cross area and reconnect the city centre with the West End. The council wants to create a peaceful green space offering a new community asset to residents, visitors and local businesses”.

Certainly, cities across the world have been looking at new uses for ageing motorways. A new report, Freeways Without Futures 2023, published by the US-based Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), is worth reading.

It focuses on 10 energetic local campaigns across America that reflect the fast-growing Highways to Boulevards movement which, in CNU’s words, “offers a path forward for communities to repair, rebuild, and reknit” and “seeks to replace aging highways that damage communities with assets like city streets, housing, and green space. According to CNU, no fewer than 18 US cities have, to date, either removed, covered, or pledged to transform urban highway corridors.

While focusing on North America, the latest edition of the biennial report could be seen to have lessons for overseas countries. “The history of urban freeways in North America”, the introduction says, “has been one of inequity and induced demand. Transportation officials built and maintained in-city freeways on the presumed value of high-speed automotive travel through cities no matter the social, economic, and environmental costs”.

The federal government in the US has acknowledged the adverse impact caused by infrastructure decisions taken in the past. President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law set up a Reconnecting Communities Pilot grant programme, run by the Department of Transportation (DoT) and funded with $1 billion over the next five years. Five of the 10 urban projects in the CNU report have been boosted by DoT funds for planning and studies, adding to work already done at local level.

In an online video DoT Secretary Pete Buttigieg points out the many benefits of good transportation. But when America has made wrong choices in the past, he said, transportation infrastructure can cut people off from schools or health care, and divide or damage neighbourhoods. The new funding, he went on, could improve places that were impacted by decisions of the past: “Sometimes, that might mean capping a highway, putting in a park over it, where kids can play and people can get across to where they need to be”.

The Replace the M8 campaign and the city council motion have aroused a good deal of interest and support. But sceptics have queried the cost and the desirability of such a huge project as replacing the motorway. Graham Simpson MSP, the Scottish Conservatives’ transport spokesman, acknowledged that while Glasgow is the only Scottish city with a motorway running through it, but said: “The fact is, it’s there. We can’t get rid of it”.

Speaking on Scotland Tonight alongside councillor Mearns, he said the councillors ought to have discussed wider issues such as improving public transport, aiming to get people onto it and out of their cars.

“Bear in mind”, he added, “that the M8 is a through route. It takes people from beyond Glasgow through Glasgow and out into other areas. People need to travel about. If people like Christy are suggesting … that we get rid of the M8 and create some nice boulevard, then where’s that traffic going to go?”

“I think Glasgow really needs and deserves to be aiming high”, responded Mearns. “No-one’s suggesting that we’re going to close the M8 tomorrow, or indeed that we can do that. What we’re saying is that we need to look at the possibility and we can’t waste any more time not doing that. That’s going to be a long piece of work in itself.

“We’ve also been very clear from the outset that we have to improve public transport”, she added, “and of course that must go alongside any efforts or plans to make driving more difficult.”

Actually, that Glasgow Herald leader of February 1972 foresaw all sorts of problems arising from the new ring-road and other projects. “The great danger”, it said, “is that this generation of urban roads will become the fathers of the next. Roads that relieve congestion also attract traffic. If the process continues the new roads will become congested and there will have to be another ring of roads to reduce traffic on the first”.

The newspaper’s proffered solutions on how to avoid this fate? Dispersing offices and shops from the city’s central areas – and encouraging and developing public transport.