Associate feature: Urban regeneration can avoid the mistakes of the past

Social housing in Glasgow has had a chequered past. Its high-rise flats, built as a utopian vision of the modern city in the 1960s, are being torn down after turning from solution to problem.

At the start of the demolition process in 2006, Glasgow City Council said: “We are determined we will not repeat the mistakes of the past.”

One place this ambition has been realised is Anderston, transformed by a £60m regeneration programme with Sanctuary Group, one of the UK’s biggest social landlords.

Started in 2008 after a stock transfer from Scottish Homes, the Anderston regeneration has been a 10-year labour of love for the group’s development director, Peter Martin.

Holyrood caught up with Martin at the site, where trendy-looking, New York-style red brick apartments face a tenement more in keeping with the traditional Glasgow sandstone flats nearby.

Between the two new buildings runs a pedestrianised section of Argyle Street, reopened by the project after it had been built over in the 1960s. The famous street now runs under the M8 and through to Finnieston towards Kelvingrove, as it did in Victorian times.

The space rings with the voices of playing children, one of whom has tied a plush push-along horse to the fence. Three hippopotamus statues, which had been crumbling but much loved in the old estate, have been faithfully restored and are being climbed on.

The street is paved with cobblestones returned to the area after they were discovered embedded in walls during a demolition in Cumbernauld.

“Right from the very beginning we had a vision we would reopen Argyle Street for pedestrians,” Martin tells Holyrood.

“The street had been built over in the redevelopment vandalism of the sixties. They’d actually built houses on top of the main street in Glasgow. It’s just crazy.”

The finishing touch to the project will be a new statue of Charles Rennie Mackintosh by sculptor Andy Scott, who designed the Kelpies, which will face out along Finnieston.

Martin calls the piece of public art a “totem”, a focal point and meeting place for the community as part of a recognition of the importance of public space.

Martin, who grew up in a council house in the east end of the city, is well aware of the historical mistakes made by regeneration projects in the west of Scotland and beyond.

It was clear when he was brought in as senior development manager to oversee the Anderston project that the residents were too.

“We were acutely aware that there were a number of people here who were old enough to have been in the first demolition and regeneration,” he says. “They weren’t slow to remind us of that. They were pretty vocal, and rightly so.”

Sanctuary is a large social enterprise with a wealth of experience in the sector. Of its 100,000 properties across the UK, around 70,000 are affordable or social rent. Sanctuary’s services in areas of regeneration are subsidised by care homes and student accommodation. In Scotland, it manages 4,161 student beds and 419 care beds.

The organisation has more than 7,000 homes for rent in Scotland, including 924 in Dundee and 2,316 in Glasgow and Renfrewshire.

Martin says the process of demolition and rebuild can be a “hard slog” when there is a large number of owner-occupiers to convince.

He says Sanctuary prefers to speak to people one-to-one than at public meetings, where people can be reluctant to air their views if one or two voices dominate.

“You have to bring the people with you,” he says. “You have to produce plans that they like, and you can’t just disperse everybody, so you have to move them round, decanting them as you’re building. You have to build, move, demolish, build, move, demolish.”

It is an instinct, he says, to love your home.

“So when you chap on the door and say you’re going to do something which involves knocking their houses down, you should never be surprised by the fact you can get a poor reaction to it. From some people, that is. Some people are delighted.

“So you take the time, you show people a bit of respect and demonstrate to them what it’ll be like when it’s finished. You give them promises you’re going to keep. The worst of all is promises that aren’t kept.”

Of the 93 owner-occupiers in Anderston, only three ended up as compulsory purchase orders, he says.

On the back of that success, Sanctuary was awarded the contract to transform Cumbernauld, involving demolishing many of its infamous tower blocks, including Bruce House, Buchan House and Douglas House.

“Our main driver was there were 12 multi-story blocks of which 365 flats were owner-occupied. Two hundred and ten were owned by Cumbernauld Housing Partnership,” he recalls.

“And they leaked like a sieve. They had substantial defects. People had been looking at them for about 15 years. We came in and said, ‘we can knock them down and build anew. That’s the solution here’.”

The majority of the owner-occupiers were elderly people who had all moved out to the new town at the same time when it had been established, or private landlords who had been unable to sell after the market for the flats had “collapsed entirely”.

But Martin recognised something he had not expected. “I could see Cumbernauld for what it is: really popular. People really like living in the place.”

Despite some predicting a difficult process, Sanctuary won the ballot “convincingly”, he says.

“The council were on board, and like our previous experiences working with local authorities and government, when everybody’s got the same vision, it is much simpler to do.”

Martin says Sanctuary has found Scotland “a great place to invest in” because it is a “can-do kind of place”.

“Most of the best learning we’ve had has been in Scotland. We’ve dealt with much bigger projects in Scotland,” he says.

The Scottish Government, he says, has provided a good level of subsidy. “The Scottish Government has done everything that could be asked of them, it’s up to us to meet the challenge. It’s up to us to get on with it.

“I think their 50,000-unit challenge was ambitious. Local authorities need to think bigger, in terms of how to deliver that. Thirty unit schemes? You’re not going to get there. You need to challenge the perception that you can’t build social rent in big numbers anywhere.”

He describes fears that large-scale redevelopments could create new ghettos as “a nonsense”.

“We built 800 in one place in Dundee. I challenge anybody to go and look at that and say it doesn’t work. You build it right, the right size of houses, you build it in the right location with shops and everything and it’ll work fine.

“People forget the success of the private estates we have that were council estates at one point. They were popular because they were well built and well laid out.”

Although Martin is happy with subsidy levels north of the border, across the UK Sanctuary foresees some challenges ahead.

“We already see in England, where public subsidy of social housing has been dramatically reduced, that we have to have a sustainable business model regardless,” he says. Sanctuary has also started to move into building homes for outright sale. Its flagship project will be the redevelopment of the old Victoria Infirmary in Langside in south Glasgow.

Key to the group’s success in winning the bid for the site was a commitment to retain the old ward buildings, known locally as the ‘Nightingale wings’.

“It really seemed like cultural vandalism to demolish the Nightingale wings,” says Martin.

“It just seemed ridiculous to knock them down. Through the middle of the site, we’ve created a public realm, a boulevard to the park.

“If you build something beautiful, people will buy it. If you are mindful of the environment in which you’re building and people’s memories of it, then that helps.”

The plans were approved with commendation from the city’s planning committee as they include 135 affordable homes.

 “What is important to us is that people who buy and people who rent have the same product.”

Martin foresees a time when houses will have a much greater level of customisation, where both buyers and renters can have a say over the layout of their home. Residential housebuilding and the planning system, he says, must start to encompass the need for houses that recognise the ageing population and environmental needs of the modern era. This includes moving away from the traditional Parker Morris spatial design standards of the 1960s.

And it must avoid the mistakes of the past. Martin says Sanctuary is taking the time to build houses to last 60 to 100 years, unlike the 1960s estates which looked tired after 20.

“There have been many award-winning design fads in housing over the years. Sanctuary is not interested in fads or awards. For Sanctuary the goal in every site we develop is to create beautiful places to live where communities thrive.”

This piece was sponsored by Sanctuary Group