Flats and Stats: The Red Road Demolition

Phil Mason discusses the demolition of the Red Road flats, their historical context and residents' experiences of  life at Red Road.

Sunday 15th October 2015. There’s a cracking sound, as unremarkable as someone letting off an early firework in the distance. For a few seconds, the six tower blocks rumble, bow slightly to their audience on the perimeter of the exclusion zone, then fall. A cloud of dust rises to cover the ruins, then disperses slowly on the wind to the north. From my vantage point on Darnick Street, southwest of the Red Road estate, there is a mixture of mild incredulity and knowing laughter in the crowd as we realise that two of the buildings, troublemakers to the last, have disobeyed the laws of gravity and explosives and remain partially standing. Not-quite-so-high-rise blocks. Even at the end, the real story of Red Road is not as neat as the ‘official’ version.

That straightforward story is the one beginning with the construction of the flats between 1964 and 1969. Modernist times, when architectural form followed function. It is a story of decline, the one that ends around fifty years later, a failed experiment in high-rise living, with demolition following dysfunction.

But such a glib narrative, repeated so often over the years that it has become the consensual truth, glosses over the more complex reality of the lives of the thousands of people who at some time lived in the flats. Some of the latter is compellingly captured by the distinct facets of the Red Road Flats Project, which Glasgow Life and GHA set up to commemorate the diversity and paradoxes of people’s experiences throughout the flats’ history: in addition to residents’ personal recollections, Mitch Miller’s dialectograms burst with quirky detail of people and place, and Alison Irvine’s novel recounts more expansively the lives of Red Road residents.  

Statistics also simplify stories, reducing the breadth and richness of people’s experiences by summarising them as single numbers – percentages, averages and odds. Stats may be stark, but they are representative of the neighbourhood as a whole, and in interpreting what they mean, these depersonalised digits are another way by which we can challenge the standard narratives, and maybe restore a degree of nuance to them.

GoWell has been studying the residents of the Red Road flats since 2006, covering the period when the tower blocks were gradually being emptied and prepared for demolition. Over this time, we interviewed hundreds of residents on three occasions (2006, 2008 and 2011). People have come and gone from the estate over the years, so we interviewed most of them only once, but some people spoke to us on more than one occasion.

Contrary to the idea that the deterioration of the buildings and the community on the estate made it an increasingly unpopular place to live, around 65% of the people we interviewed said they were fairly or very satisfied not only with their homes, but also with the neighbourhood. These figures barely changed between the three survey years, even as the estate emptied, the environment deteriorating as preparations for demolition advanced.

About a quarter of the residents we were able to interview on two occasions had actually become more satisfied with their Red Road home over time, perhaps because of the improvements that had been made to their home. However, by comparison, about 70% of people who had who moved away from Red Road to somewhere else in the city were more satisfied with their new home, even though they were no more likely to be more satisfied with their new neighbourhood than with Red Road.

So, in contrast to the prevailing narrative of the inevitable structural and social decline of the Red Road estate, our interpretation of these statistics suggests another story – one hinting at a greater degree of satisfaction, resilience and adaptability among Red Road’s residents than widely assumed. In much the same way as a disused tower block being brought down, statistics can challenge a popular myth – even if they don’t entirely demolish it.