Kevin McKenna: Carlton Place sums up Glasgow neglect

“The Pylons are classical triumphal archways composed of fluted Ionic columns in antis flanked by Doric pilasters in polished honey-coloured sandstone; central arch with moulded archivolt and keystone. These support entablature with deep plain frieze and cornice with blocking course.

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“The chains break through the frieze. The deck is made of wrought-iron lattice girders and suspended on two pairs of 4 and 5-bar flat-link chains. The parapet is of thin latticework wrought-iron. The bridge retains some of its original cast-iron lamp-brackets.” 

Paul Sweeney has made it a primary mission to highlight the jeopardy faced by many of Glasgow’s architectural treasures and to advocate for a rescue plan. He is keen to avoid apportioning blame on any single party or group, for the truth is that the city’s neglect of these buildings has proceeded across several generations and every political stripe of local government.

(Image: Colin Mearns)

The Glasgow Labour MP walks with me over the bridge and into Carlton Place, the 1800s development designed to equal Edinburgh’s feted Stockbridge and New Town districts. We begin at the former Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice, a magnificent Georgian townhouse whose roof was consumed by fire last month and whose rear walls are now left gaping. The new-build extension has been knocked down. Bales of razor-wire resembling crowns of thorns sit along the top of what had once been garden walls. Mr Sweeney grows visibly more agitated as he relates the details of its neglect.  

“The building was bought by a London owner and though it’s only been empty since 2018, it already looks like a condemned building. Every vice in Glasgow now happens in this place, but the city chooses to look the other way. A friend of mine who is a firefighter told me that following the last fire they found traces of a cannabis farm in the basement.” 

There are also serious concerns about the safety of vulnerable young people in this wretched place. It’s become a destination for people leaving the care system when – unsupported and often left to fend for themselves – they are quickly drawn in to a depraved world of sexual exploitation linked to the trade in street drugs. The city (you and I) have turned a blind eye to it because we regard these poor people as scum and not worth the money, time and effort. Nor, it seems, are the buildings.  

Mr Sweeney points up at the decorative, replica 19th century lampposts which were placed here in 1990 when Glasgow was named European City of Culture. “Now they’re converting them to LEDs and it’s awful. They’ve simply stuck f***ing motorway lights on them,” he says. “You can actually get LED lights made in that original ornate style, but it’s obvious that no-one could be arsed to make that extra effort.” 

On the suspension bridge itself only about a quarter of the LED lights are working. What other city would allow a Georgian Category-A listed bridge like this to become consumed by graffiti and to rot before our eyes? What efforts there have been to paint over the graffiti consists of daubs of brown paint. It’s like taking a wire brush to a Faberge egg.  

“Once, this was supposed to form the gateway from the city centre into what would have been a beautiful district of Georgian townhouses and tree-lined boulevards expressing Glasgow’s civic pride,” says Mr Sweeney. “Instead, it has become a monument to decay. The lights only work on one side. It’s mortifying, but it could still be beautiful. 

Paul Sweeney, Labour MSP for Glasgow Region pictured outside the former Prince and Princess of Wales hospice building on Carlton Place (Image: Colin Mearns)

“This is one of the finest Georgian terraces in Britain. I just don’t understand why it’s been so neglected. The city needs to be much more aggressive about its most important buildings, but there just doesn’t seem to be any appetite. Why are there PVC windows in the middle of an A-listed Georgian terrace?” 

I tell him I’ve seen a place like this in the middle of Edinburgh’s New Town: it’s called Charlotte Square. The official residence of the First Minister of Scotland can be found there. 

“This was designed by the famous architect, John Laurie as the Glasgow equivalent of Edinburgh’s new town. It was to be laid out with beautiful terraces stretching back towards Laurieston and Gorbals. But many of these were knocked down in the 1960s.”  

Ah yes, the dark ages of Glasgow’s built heritage apocalypse when the city’s panjandrums took a wrecking ball to the city, levelling entire neighbourhoods with the M8 motorway; destroying the fabric of the city centre and displacing entire working-class communities. They simply didn’t have the imagination or intelligence to think of something else.  

In time, neighbourhoods like Carlton Place and the gorgeous buildings in the old Draper’s District adjacent to here will also begin to disappear from the city’s collective cultural memory. In a few decades or so, who will ever remember what this place once was and what it could yet be?  

Paul Sweeney believes that redemption for Carlton Place can be found in the Miracle of the Merchant City. “The reason why the Merchant City worked so well was because, back in the mid-70s, the plank of the M8 motorway which was originally supposed to go down the High Street was cancelled. But the Council had already bought all the land up to enable the Motorway.”

A decision was taken by a handful of smart councillors and the old Scottish Development Agency to revitalise that area east of Buchanan Street and up towards the High Street. There were some historic buildings there and, through private and public investment the old factories and warehouses were turned into desirable and affordable residences.  

The people moved in, and, as a result a thriving retail and hospitality sector emerged. It became one of Europe’s most alluring neighbourhoods. “You could have a Merchant City Mk2 here with venues, pubs and restaurants,” says Mr Sweeney.

Hope that some of these buildings and the districts that once housed them can still be transformed can be found in the story of Annie’s Loo. This curious and uplifting tale followed Glasgow’s slum clearances between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s. Then, the so-called ‘lucky’ families were decanted to Castlemilk and East Kilbride while the vulnerable people – typically elderly, isolated and those deemed to be the ‘undeserving’ poor – were left behind in neglected tenements. The clearances were little more than social pogroms and were followed by a period of catastrophic local authority building. 

In my interview with him last year, Stewart Fraser, Director of the New Gorbals Housing Association said: “Everywhere the Council spent their money: Drumchapel, Easterhouse, Gorbals and Castlemilk, would become among the most deprived areas in Scotland by 1982. These poorer areas became projects for architects and social improvers to impose untested and unlived ideas which were doomed from the very outset.”  

And then, in an event broadly recognised as marking the birth of Scotland’s community-based Housing Associations, Annie’s Loo saved the day. In 1972, a local architect had designed and fitted a shiny, avocado bathroom suite to a third-floor tenement dwelling in Govan belonging to John and Annie Gibbons.  

The Chair of Glasgow Corporation’s Housing sub-committee arrived in his official car to view it … as did several hundred locals. For the first time, Glasgow’s old tenements were being respected rather than reviled. They didn’t need to be knocked down. “Tenemental rehabilitation could be done,” said Stewart Fraser.  

If the city feels unable or unwilling to redeem its lost buildings then maybe there is a measure of cold comfort still to be had. It comes with the realisation that in their decrepitude they provide rough shelter for Glasgow’s lost and lonely children before they too die before their time, the victims of another form of callous civic neglect.