“THE light at the bottom of the close was out so I had to grope for the stairs. Sheets of corrugated iron hid empty vandalised apartments on each floor like giant Elastoplasts. The howl of a dog in the wasteland of the backcourt, and [water] dripping from a broken waterpipe punctuated my slow progress.”
So began a report by Anne Johnstone in the Evening Times of February 14, 1978. A tenants’ association based in part of the city had invited Glasgow’s then Lord Provost, David Hodge, to spend a night in one of the semi-derelict tenements in their area, but he had politely refused. The Evening Times took up the offer instead, Johnstone spending the night on a settee, guests of a couple and their two teenage children.
Conditions in the flat, she wrote, were worse than most people would expect on a rainy camping holiday. The couple joked that they would be better off in a tent.
Part of the roof had caved in the previous year, leaving the house open to the sky. The bedroom once occupied by the daughter “now has the atmosphere of a fish-pond; mould grew around tattered pin-ups of the Beatles and David Soul. The carpets were “audibly squelchy.” The girl and her brother now slept in bunk-beds in the kitchen.
Thieves had stolen lead guttering and ripped out water pipes. The couple got more water through the roof than from the tap, but they said they needed the rainwater to flush the toilet since the plumbing was on the blink.
The couple, and other families marooned on the street, originally owned their home, but Strathclyde Regional Council had agreed a Compulsory Purchase Order with them. A clearance scheme had already accounted for a third of the area in the last five years.
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