Mark Smith: How tall should Glasgow be? Much, much taller

But only in some ways. You may have noticed what’s been happening more recently in the city and that a lot of the new development in Glasgow is pretty high: the students flats at Charing Cross, the apartments on the Broomielaw, the Barclays offices on the south side, and many more. Suddenly, developers and architects seem to have rediscovered the sky and are designing tall again.

Is it the right thing to do though? Glasgow City Council has just launched a new public consultation on the subject, which it says will help shape guidance on tall buildings and the way planning applications are handled. The council is doing it, it says, because an increasing number of tall buildings are being planned and built and the question is whether we want more of them, and where they should go, and whether tall is the way to go in the first place.

The council itself acknowledges some people are worried about the trend for tall, and it’s understandable to an extent. I mentioned the high-rises in the Gorbals: the ambition and expectation for those was high in the 1960s but we know what happened to them. The construction was poor, the design wasn’t right for a windy and wet environment, people started to feel isolated in them and the planning process did not properly consider the effect on the community. Eventually, the residents were desperate to get out and who can blame them.

But just because some buildings weren’t right, we shouldn’t conclude the experiment in tall has failed: far from it. You’ve probably been following the controversy over the Wyndford flats, which some have portrayed as part of the problem. However, Alan Dunlop, the architect who’s been among those campaigning to save the flats from demolition, points out that the Wyndford flats are in fact an excellent example of well-designed high-rises set in a cultivated landscape that’s got better as the landscape has matured. And lots of people liked living there.

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There’s also a feeling in Glasgow perhaps that the city shouldn’t really get above itself and go much above the height set by the Victorians who designed the tenements. On the whole, they are three, sometimes four, storeys high but that was for practical reasons rather than part of a masterplan. The scale of the tenements and other buildings was determined by how high a fire ladder could reach and the use of stone in their construction. They could only go so high because if they’d gone any higher the stone structure would have collapsed in on itself.

Then everything changed: we invented the lift and started constructing in steel and so buildings got higher, then higher. Indeed, a sort of international mines-bigger-than-yours developed : first, it was New York, then London, then New York again, the Far East, the Middle East. Maybe it was a bit vulgar, and some of the buildings that emerged certainly weren’t the bonniest, but as Alan Dunlop points out, most of the great cities in the world have tall buildings so why not Glasgow?

The trick is to do it properly. We don’t want high-rises surrounding George Square, or slap bang in the middle of a row of much shorter buildings, but done with consideration and in the right place, tall buildings can add real drama and status to a city. In a place that desperately needs new residents in the centre, more tall buildings in Glasgow could also rapidly increase the number of new homes without adding to urban sprawl.

Alan Dunlop’s view is that tall buildings would work on the riverfront in Glasgow on both sides, from the Cuningar Loop in the East to Clydebank in the West, and in the area around the Charing Cross and Garthamlock gateway into the city from the east and west. The tall buildings that have started to emerge around the Kingston Bridge are also in proportion to the bridge itself meaning the Broomielaw is another ideal place to go higher. The point is that it should be planned, and considered, and to scale.

There are signs that the council gets it. Councillor Ruairi Kelly, the convenor for neighbourhood assets and services, says that the increased density that tall buildings provide could help to grow the city centre population and it certainly needs growing – Glasgow has a woefully small central population compared to other cities of comparable size. The council also seems to recognise that tall buildings can be sustainable if they are designed and built with care and using the latest techniques.

No doubt, all of these points will come up in the consultation, which runs until September, so if you care about how Glasgow may change, I urge you to take part. There will be some who will take the chance to argue against tall buildings. They will suggest they use a lot of materials and energy and are inherently unsustainable; they may also argue, for perfectly reasonable historical reasons, that tall buildings breed economic and social problems.

But I would argue there’s a kind of prejudice in that, based on anxious memories of the novels of JG Ballard and the idea that high-rises beget drugs and crime and social problems. In fact, those problems go way deeper than architecture and whether a building is one storey or 20 storeys; the quality of high-rise buildings, and the materials they use, has also dramatically increased in recent years.

(Image: Clydeside)

And there’s a great opportunity here isn’t there? The quality, and look, and feel of the centre of Glasgow is important to protect and maintain and we don’t need to stray too far from what our Victorian great-great-grandfathers had in mind. But a little further out, along the river, and along the motorway, there’s a chance to be different and dramatic and defiant.

Interestingly, the site of the old Daily Record building I mentioned was flattened in the end before rising again and there’s now a new building there that’s even taller than the one it replaced. So if I wanted to, perhaps I could recreate that view from the 90s. That would be fantastic. Up on the roof. Looking out. Thinking: this is good.