r/Glasgow Tools

Agree more or less. There is something admirable/appealing about the idea that stuff used to just get done and on a massive scale.

Of course, as you say, this is always tempered by awareness (with hindsight) of the not so great decisions that were made.

I don't know what the direct cause of this lack of large scale capital investment and project planning is. It does seem UK-wide, and not limited to Scottish cities. Maybe the 70s oil crash was just the final nail in the coffin for big-scale projects. The *Abercrombie Clyde Valley Plan* (Glasgow new towns), *Glasgow Highway Plan*, and even the *Comprehensive Redevelopment Areas* (which came from the Bruce Report), perhaps the three biggest development undertakings for Glasgow in the 20th Century, and the focus of this 70s video clip, were each devised in the 1930s-40s, a time when Britain still had the prestige of Empire and aspirations for such large-scale projects.

These projects certainly follow on with the massive dock-building and railway building phases of Glasgow's development in earlier decades from the 1850s - 1920s, not to mention the city's own bold and large-scale *City Improvement Trust* tenement construction phases at the turn of the century.

It all sort of hit a wall by the 70s / 80s though, didn't it? The formal end of empire, the oil crisis, the Thatcherite revolution and move back to laisse faire government. Anything that happened after this was tinkering around the edges in terms of urban planning, at least until very recently (with the UK govt of HS2, 30 years late, and large road-building / rail projects starting to get off the ground in Scotland).

I do have some hope though for the plans laid out by the Glasgow Connectivity Commission. A "Glasgow Metro" network and new Crossrail-type central train station (tunnelled under George Square) are the types of things which would have a transformational impact on the city & wider region. I also reckon this could well get the go ahead within the next 5-10 years.