Rounding off the Centre’s first semester tackling the theme of ‘space’, Rebecca Madgin (Glasgow) delivered a fascinating paper exploring the development of efforts to conserve and regenerate Glasgow’s urban environment since the end of the Second World War. As heritage has become an increasingly important means to reinvigorate cities across Britain in recent decades, Rebecca’s paper spoke to issues of considerable contemporary relevance. Robbie Johnston sends this report.
Rebecca began her presentation by asking the fundamental question ‘why does heritage matter?’. This question relates to crucial dilemmas confronting communities and policy-makers today, decisions relating to why we choose to preserve or demolish certain urban spaces. In seeking to provide an answer to this question, Rebecca stressed the importance of emotional attachment to place and its contribution to fostering a sense of belonging.
Turning our attention back to the 1940s, Rebecca characterised the era as one of a triumph of ‘rational’ urban planning over considerations of historic value. This spirit was embodied in the Bruce Report of 1945, a seminal document which influenced Glasgow city planning for decades to come. Controversially, the Report stipulated that a host of major historic buildings, including the City Chambers itself, were not worthy of conservation, but, rather, should be demolished.
In the event, many of these buildings were spared. Nonetheless, even the fact that planners thought about demolishing such grand and historic architectural structures is remarkable. As Rebecca reminded us, however, the immediate postwar period was an era in which there was a sense of faith in the future, embodied in ambitious new housing projects designed to sweep away the symbols of Victorian slums to make way for a new and better Glasgow. As such, ‘rational’ urban planning tended to display less reverence for antiquity.
These attitudes, however, began to shift over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. Amid growing disillusionment with centralised state planning, architectural critics articulated a sense of loss at redevelopment wiping away the past. This sentiment was by no means confined to high-society critics. Conservation groups formed with the intention of protecting sites vested with local pride or historic meaning. Here, Rebecca drew on an impressive array of historical sources, from archival materials to popular culture, which highlighted the ways in which anxiety over the loss of heritage was firmly rooted in everyday lived experience. As a result of this change in mood, conservation increasingly came under a legislative framework, with more and more buildings given protected status (there are over 1,800 listed buildings in Glasgow today).
Rebecca then analysed a paradigm shift in heritage from ‘place protection’ to ‘place branding’ which took place during the 1970s and 1980s. At this time, Glasgow experienced extremely painful deindustrialisation and catastrophic job losses in heavy industry. It was in this context that local authorities deployed heritage as part of an economic strategy to regenerate the city.
Rebecca utilised her case study of Glasgow’s Merchant City to explore how the idea of heritage became closely tied to a programme of ‘socio-economic diversification’. Previously, this part of Glasgow City Centre had been commonly known as the ‘New Town’ and ‘Workers City’. Its rebranding as ‘Merchant City’ by the Council in the late 1980s was designed to facilitate a major makeover for commercial development purposes. As a result, the area underwent a transformation, attracting private investment in stylish new shops and modern residential developments.
And yet, this rebranding did not go uncontested. Critics pointed out that ‘Merchant City’ referred to a pre-industrial period and so effectively left working class labour history out of the picture. Moreover, while the new name may have conjured up a romantic picture of enterprising traders, much of the wealth accumulated by Glasgow’s 18th century tobacco merchants was in fact dependent on the Caribbean slave trade. Despite recent efforts to raise greater awareness of this historical reality, Rebecca observed that there are still relatively few physical markers. This spoke to an ambiguous legacy for the Merchant City – ‘saved but sanitised’?
Rebecca then moved to discuss the campaign to save Govanhill Baths. When the Council announced the closure of the pool at the beginning of 2001, it met with a remarkable local response. Such was the strength of feeling, activists protested the closure in one of the longest occupations of a public building in British history.
Rebecca’s interviews with people who took part in the campaign found they were moved to action, not only out of a basic sense of unfairness, but also because they felt it was an essential part of the community’s social fabric. The ‘Save Our Pool’ campaign serves as a fine of example of what can be achieved through dedicated community organising, and also underlines the importance of a sense of attachment to place in local movements to preserve local heritage. Following refurbishments, Govanhill Baths is due to re-open in 2020.
The talk was followed by an insightful comment from one of Edinburgh’s own urban historians, Anna Feintuck. In her remarks, Anna agreed that urban planning should endeavour to take greater account of the emotional connection to place. In this, the role of heritage should not be reduced to a marketing tool. Rather, it should relate to wider community needs.
In the subsequent Q&A, the audience posed a wide-range of questions, including: Does everyone truly want to save sites deemed to have historical significance? Is the present dominance of the heritage industry a symptom of a loss of faith in the future? Edinburgh’s distinguished historian, Richard Rodger, also raised the problem of whether heritage is an inadequate replacement for the loss of infrastructure and local amenities. In other words, is there simply too much heritage today?
Rebecca indicated she had reflected a great deal on this issue and, in fact, had delivered a paper the previous day on the question of whether we are we asking heritage to do too much. She added that it was no panacea, and could not, in isolation, solve problems relating to health, well-being and the local economy. This lively discussion will no doubt help to inform and stimulate further ideas for Rebecca as she progresses with her valuable work.
Robbie Johnston is a PhD student in History. His primary research interests lie in the twentieth-century politics of Scotland and Britain. He is currently working on a thesis which explores the development of Scottish Home Rule and Nationalism from the 1970s to the 1990s. He is a CSMCH steering committee member.