r/Glasgow Tools

Title
Author	eenbiertje
Comment	I've flip-flopped in my thinking on this over the years. I used to be all "how could they ever have thought the M8/ring road was a good idea"? But, being generous, put yourself in the thinking of the time. It's post-war. The whole of the UK and Western Europe generally is undergoing massive reconstruction, with some cities literally being rebuilt from the ground-up. There's money to burn on grand-scale infrastructure projects. There was a fresh wave of new thinking about the nature of the urban environment spreading across the world at this time, coinciding with the sudden boom of car ownership. From New York to Paris, and even on both sides of the Iron Curtain, cities were re-evaluating how they worked for their citizens, with planners riding this wave of utopianism. We can definitely agree now, in hindsight and with full awareness of the consequences both macro (greenhouse emissions causing climate change) and micro (destruction of neighbourhoods, isolation of communities, defunding of public transport networks, loss of cities' Victorian urban fabric, etc.), that the decisions of the 1940s-70s were on the whole, very very bad. But, "what would we do differently" is a hard question to answer. I think it's hard to imagine a world where the Bruce and Abercromby reports, and the resulting Motorway Plan for Glasgow didn't exist. The thing I've always found hardest to reconcile was why Glasgow's ring road was intended to hug the city core so tightly. People today talk of Glasgow being the only city with a motorway that "runs through it". If you know the history of the motorway plan, you'll know that's not quite right. The existing M8 which wraps round the west and north of the city centre is only 1/2 of what would have been a full ring road. So, from the planner's point of view, this ring round was to surround the "city core". Thing is - and this is why the M8 stings with so much of the city population - Glaswegians don't necessarily have this American view of the topography of the city, and arguably never did. In hundreds of mid-sized US cities which underwent the same motorway treatment in the 50s-70s, the divide between city core and not the city core was always more well defined. You had central business district, then quieter neighbourhoods with smaller single-lot housing. (There are of course major exemptions to this - Detroit and Philidelpha had large swathes of built-up tenement style neighbourhoods, and predominantly Black neighbourhoods, which were bulldozed to make space for their freeways). In Glasgow though, you could fairly claim there was a solid, densely packed, uninterrupted urban structure of tenemental housing (interlaced with commercial activity), running contiguously from Partick in the west to Bridgeton in the east. And from Possil in the north, to Shawlands in the south. The nub of what I'm getting at is: assuming they just had to build a motorway network and ring road, this should simply have been built much further out from where was planned. That's my alternate universe take. There was a plan for three ring roads. You can see it here: https://www.glasgowmotorwayarchive.org/inner-ring-road?lightbox=dataItem-kb6fmkq3 If I could wave a wand and have it turn out differently, I'd have avoided the central ring ever happening at all. No M8 dividing the West End and centre today. No tangled mess that is the Townhead interchange next to the medieval core of our city. No Springburn expressway. You still need to allow regional traffic to move around the city, without going through it. So there's an important role for motorways. If only they'd focussed on the outer ring road as the way to do this.
Reddit Link	https://www.reddit.com/r/glasgow/comments/nbvktg/rebuilding_glasgow_bruce_report_1945/gy328bt/
Created	Fri 14th May 2021 11:45am
Status	normal ()

I've flip-flopped in my thinking on this over the years.

I used to be all "how could they ever have thought the M8/ring road was a good idea"?

But, being generous, put yourself in the thinking of the time. It's post-war. The whole of the UK and Western Europe generally is undergoing *massive* reconstruction, with some cities literally being rebuilt from the ground-up. There's money to burn on grand-scale infrastructure projects. There was a fresh wave of new thinking about the nature of the urban environment spreading across the world at this time, coinciding with the sudden boom of car ownership. From New York to Paris, and even on both sides of the Iron Curtain, cities were re-evaluating how they worked for their citizens, with planners riding this wave of utopianism.

We can definitely agree now, in hindsight and with full awareness of the consequences both macro (greenhouse emissions causing climate change) and micro (destruction of neighbourhoods, isolation of communities, defunding of public transport networks, loss of cities' Victorian urban fabric, etc.), that the decisions of the 1940s-70s were on the whole, very very bad.

But, "what would we do differently" is a hard question to answer.

I think it's hard to imagine a world where the Bruce and Abercromby reports, and the resulting Motorway Plan for Glasgow didn't exist.

The thing I've always found hardest to reconcile was why Glasgow's ring road was intended to hug the city core so tightly. People today talk of Glasgow being the only city with a motorway that "runs through it". If you know the history of the motorway plan, you'll know that's not quite right. The existing M8 which wraps round the west and north of the city centre is only 1/2 of what would have been a full ring road. So, from the planner's point of view, this ring round was to *surround* the "city core".

Thing is - and this is why the M8 stings with so much of the city population - Glaswegians don't necessarily have this American view of the topography of the city, and arguably never did.

In hundreds of mid-sized US cities which underwent the same motorway treatment in the 50s-70s, the divide between city core and *not the city core* was always more well defined. You had central business district, then quieter neighbourhoods with smaller single-lot housing. (There are of course major exemptions to this - Detroit and Philidelpha had large swathes of built-up tenement style neighbourhoods, and predominantly Black neighbourhoods, which were bulldozed to make space for their freeways).

In Glasgow though, you could fairly claim there was a solid, densely packed, uninterrupted urban structure of tenemental housing (interlaced with commercial activity), running contiguously from Partick in the west to Bridgeton in the east. And from Possil in the north, to Shawlands in the south.

The nub of what I'm getting at is: assuming they *just had to* build a motorway network and ring road, this should simply have been built much further out from where was planned. That's my alternate universe take.

There was a plan for three ring roads. You can see it here: https://www.glasgowmotorwayarchive.org/inner-ring-road?lightbox=dataItem-kb6fmkq3

If I could wave a wand and have it turn out differently, I'd have avoided the central ring ever happening at all. No M8 dividing the West End and centre today. No tangled mess that is the Townhead interchange next to the medieval core of our city. No Springburn expressway.

You still need to allow regional traffic to move around the city, without going through it. So there's an important role for motorways. If only they'd focussed on the outer ring road as the way to do this.