Niall Murphy:
Hello everyone. I’m Niall Murphy, and welcome to If Glasgow’s Walls Could Talk, a podcast by Glasgow City Heritage Trust about the stories and relationships between historic buildings and people in Glasgow. Some stories are harder to find than others. History can be revealed or concealed in buildings and street names. What happens to the collective memory of the city when buildings are removed and street names changed? A sense of loss has become a recurring theme in conversations on this podcast. Demolition and displacement have been part of Glasgow’s story for considerably more than a hundred years. So in this episode, we explore the invisible history of a shifting landscape. In the rapidly changing city of the 21st Century, there are few clues to Glasgow’s radical past, no maps to show where battles were fought and sometimes won in the working class struggle for decent housing at a fair rent. That struggle has never ended, as recent headlines have reminded us.
History seems to be repeating more than 100 years after Mary Barbour’s Rent Strike victory. Tragically, we seem to have learned little from Cathy McCormack’s tireless fight against dampness and mould in 1980s Easterhouse. So are we destined to keep making the same mistakes? With housing emergencies growing in every city, a new project aims to share and learn from Glasgow’s proud campaigning history. So we are delighted to welcome today’s guest, Joey Simons, co-founder of the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive, which aims to record, share, and discuss the past and present of working class organising in the city.
Joey is a member of the National Committee of Living Rent, Scotland’s Tenants’ Union, which has more than a thousand active members. He’s also an artist and writer working on projects with the Centre for Contemporary Art, the CCA, Platform, Glasgow Sculpture Studios, the Edwin Morgan Trust and The Travelling Gallery.
He uses words to good and often creatively provocative effect. In January this year, Glasgow City Heritage Trust hosted Joey’s talk, Gizza Hoose, which looked at how housing struggles have shaped and been shaped by Glasgow’s ever-changing housing stock. It was a stimulating hour and it began with thoughts on how city design, the layout of streets and buildings might enable or deter riots. And ended with a poem by Edwin Morgan, casting a critical eye on Scotland’s favourite bard. And this was on Burns Night. So we’re now looking forward to another stimulating discussion with you, Joey. And perhaps we might start by funding out what led you to co-found the archive, and this is kind of coming from your Burns Night talk, which revealed quite a depth of housing history. So can you tell us a bit more about yourself and how you became involved in the Glasgow housing struggle?
Joey Simons:
Sure. I’ve mainly had a background in political organising and campaigning in Glasgow since a pretty young age. And that was actually 20th anniversary of the big marches against the Iraq War. And that was maybe the start of my involvement in political organising, campaigning in Glasgow. But especially over the last five years or so, I’ve been heavily involved in tenant and housing organisations through Living Rent, which is our tenant’s union organising against evictions and for rent controls, public housing across Scotland. And I was involved in helping to set up the first branch of the union in Glasgow, and Living Rent is involved in a day-to-day activism and campaigning. But I’ve always had an interest in Glasgow’s history, and working class history in particular. And through Living Rent, is trying to connect those past struggles and dig into a bit of the history and the tradition of different housing movements to provide more context to the day-to-day organising we were doing in the union.
So through a couple of personal projects myself as well, and it was seeing how history was easily lost and getting buried in amidst Glasgow’s constant redevelopment. So one thing I was involved in was up in Easterhouse through the Art Centre platform, looking at the life and work of Freddy Anderson, who was an Irish poet and playwright and writer and tenant activist in Garthamlock. He moved to Glasgow after the war. And I first came across his name basically an event around radical theatre in Scotland. So looking at the work of Glasgow Unity Theatre and 7:84, someone mentioned, “Yeah, this guy Freddy Anderson, he’d written a play about John Maclean,” the great revolutionary organiser in Clydeside around the time of the First World War. I was just quite amazed that I hadn’t heard of this guy, Freddy Anderson, at all, despite all my interests, despite thinking I’d read everything around this kind of thing.
So I started digging into him in the archives in The Mitchell Library, then just meeting people in libraries and at funerals and at buses and mentioning Freddy’s name and people giving me their own archives and their own stories, and eventually republishing some of Freddy’s work in a collection called Let Us Act for Ourselves. And it was really interesting in the context, Easterhouse, this whole period of radical culture and political organising in the scheme from the 1960s right up until the 1990s was basically not part of any public narrative. Now there’s major regeneration, redevelopment happening in Easterhouse, but the story of people’s own fight for what they fought for across the decades is not part of this narrative of what the future of the scheme is going to be.
So now through different personal projects around aspects of working class history, and through my involvement in Living Rent as well, I just started to see how important it was to try to collate some of the elements of Glasgow’s housing struggle history because I’m not an academic, it’s really just things I’ve learned through other people, other discussions, and that history is out there, but it’s quite hard to find. So I was in the Mitchell Library, I’ve been going up to Glasgow Uni Library and you get a special pass. So you’re just trying to find these out-of-date or out-of-print books and just thinking how can we share this history? What is the form in which that information can be more easily accessible?
And during the first lockdown, I was working as a tutor for the Workers’ Educational Association, and I had a chance to design and deliver an online course on Glasgow’s housing history. So over the course of eight weeks, different Living Rent members kind of ran this course looking at eight different post-war housing struggles in Glasgow. They’re finding and sharing resources and linking it into the kind of day-to-day campaigning we’re also involved in. So through that course, through discussions with different housing scholars in Glasgow, like Neil Grey and Valerie Wright, and also with other archives. So for example, the Mayday Rooms Archive in London and the Spirit of Revolt Archive here in Glasgow. Just really had the idea to try to create a space online initially at least where all these different housing histories could be shared, could be critiqued and put into wider historical context. And in a way, kind of challenge some of the narratives of that history that are current at the moment.
So one thing we used in the course was a Glasgow City Council have an official illustrated timeline of Glasgow housing change. And that whole history is just told basically through a series of legislative acts. There’s a brief nod to Mary Barbour in 1915, but the story kind of ends in housing stock transfer, the elimination of Glasgow’s Council housing stock, the rise of private ownership. And yes, we really wanted to challenge that narrative. And even there’s a Shelter Scotland as well have a really useful resource on Scotland’s housing crisis over the past 150 years. But even in that approach, tenants and political movements that fought for good housing over the years are quite marginal to that story or appear mainly as victims rather than as agents of change.
So all of those parts of this story are true and part of it in terms of the legislation, in terms of that constant crisis. But there’s also this entire hidden history of tenant movements and housing struggles that have shaped Glasgow as a city and continue to do so. And I’ve also shaped it in their defeat at various times or their marginalisation. So yeah, I think the idea was just to provide a counterpoint to that, to connect what we’re doing today in Living Rent to past struggles, and at least to recover and share that history and then people can decide in a way what to do with that and add to it. So I guess it’s come from lots of different angles, but yeah, I think it’s just fundamentally though, it’s just always an interest in Glasgow and walking around the city and trying to figure out what the hell is actually happening here.
Niall Murphy:
How it all came about. Yeah, that’s what fascinates me about Glasgow too. Yeah, digging into all those hidden aspects of Glasgow’s history. And it’s teasing out those stories because they’ve been edited out of the official narrative, but they actually are part of our total history, and we need to somehow figure a way to feather them all back in again so history can be properly told from all perspectives. So, fascinating stuff. Okay. Your archive doesn’t occupy a physical space as yet, but the website does open the way to parts of the city that have disappeared or changed beyond recognition. So can you tell us about the aims of the archive? Who is it for, how it’ll be used and developed over time?
Joey Simons:
Yeah, so I guess starting out we had a few different aims for the archive, and definitely is a project to develop over the years. So one was just this space where tenants and community groups and housing organisers can more easily access the information, the text, the histories that do exist about Glasgow’s tradition of radical tenant struggles. So not necessarily even finding new primary documents or creating this physical archive, but to centralise the information that does currently exist, but which has spread across a number of physical archives, and it’s quite difficult to access. So there’s not one book, for example, that you could go get out at the Mitchell Library on the history of Glasgow’s tenant movement.
So one aim is just to centralise and to try and collate the information that exists.
Another aim is to place the housing struggles of today in that wider historical context to draw lessons from a hundred years of campaigning, demonstrations and occupations and rent strikes, to look at the tactical and strategic solutions that tenants have come up with in different situations over the past century and look to apply them or learn from them where possible in today’s struggles. And another one was just to also provide a space for activists and union organisers, historians, scholars to contribute documents and photographs and critical reflections on housing history to provide a space for people to write up contributions, to share things they’ve written before. And almost a space as a little training ground where we can get better at doing these kinds of things.
And the last one was to also start to document and archive the history of Living Rent itself is a tenants union. So over the past five years it’s gone through a huge number of changes and it’s very quickly that that story can get lost, especially there’s not a lot of time in the day-to-day organising to sit down and record and to collate documents and reflections. So those were some of the main aims from setting out. But started as a project with myself and Frances Lingard who designed the website with support from the WEA and the Lipman-Miliband Trust. But we’ve done a lot of different events, we’ve spoken with a lot of different groups, and we’re looking this year to establish a kind of collective that can take hold of the archive and decide how we want to resource it, and what we want to do with it going forward.
Niall Murphy:
Sure. It’s really interesting because it’s quite topical for me, I’m, with one of my other hats on, I’m the chair of Govanhill Baths Building Preservation Trust. But I was, for a very brief period, the chair of the Govanhill Baths Community Trust, and they have their archive, which is all to do with working class struggles as well and is headed up by archivist, Paula Larkin, I think is absolutely core to that project. And the fact that this all does need to be properly documented; what happened in Glasgow. It’s this fascinating history and it’s got to be put down somewhere. So that to me is absolutely central to what we’ve been doing at Govanhill Baths.
Joey Simons:
Aye, aye. And I think with Paula, yeah, look, I’ve known Paula for a long time and she’s been kind of invaluable as a resource support for the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive. So she led a great workshop for us at the Deep End space. We’re not trained archivists or professionals, we’re coming at this from a different angle. So Paula gave a great workshop on digitisation, on scanning, on record keeping that we did. And recently I had two other people involved in the Housing Struggle Archive went a long to an oral history training session that Paula and the Community Archives Heritage Group put on. So I think also that idea of gaining these skills and sharing these skills so people are able to engage in oral history.
Niall Murphy:
Document the history.
Joey Simons:
Document things properly, and just to make that a public resource rather than just kind of something in the hands of specialist only. So Paula’s been invaluable.
Niall Murphy:
She’s a great mentor. I have tonnes of time for Paula. I really like her.
Joey Simons:
Aye, because another thing that they had their 20th anniversary, the Govanhill Baths occupation.
Niall Murphy:
Yes.
Joey Simons:
So they had that Occupy Occupy Occupy event. So we spoke at that on post-war squatting movement in Glasgow. So in 1946 to 1948, the mass occupation of former Army camps, and then the occupation of abandoned mansions and buildings, press offices in Glasgow after the war, which again, is just a bit, understand your own history. I knew a bit about the Scottish movement in London, for example.
Niall Murphy:
But not up here.
Joey Simons:
Famous example of yeah, Kensington Mansions being squatted. But the Glasgow side of it, just the main thing I’ve read about it was in this unpublished PhD by Charles Johnson. So we were able to examine some of that history to share it at the Occupy Conference, and then it was turned into a part of this graphic novel that came out from the conference. So it was really amazing, it was a comic book artist took each of the presentations at the Occupy Conference and transformed it into this 50-page comic book.
Niall Murphy:
I didn’t know about this, this is fascinating.
Joey Simons:
Really amazing. So you can get it, I think, through the Govanhill Baths Community Trust website.
Niall Murphy:
Okay.
Joey Simons:
So it was the Lee Jeans Occupation, like a Castlemilks Claimants Union, like this whole history of occupation. So yeah, we’ve been able to do things like that in terms of using the idea of the archive to speak about different aspects of housing history. But this question of a physical archive, documents, storage, record keeping, that’s a huge issue. We’re definitely not in a position to do that yet, but it’s more about building connections with existing archives and collections that relate to this history and finding a way to maybe share resources across existing archives to look at this one particular aspect around housing. So we’re trying to figure it out.
Niall Murphy:
All right. Well, turning back to housing then. And the next question is, much of Glasgow and how we live in Glasgow has been shaped by housing struggles, and yet for many of us, that’s a hidden history. And ironically, we seem to know more about all these radical campaigns during the past, such as Mary Barbour’s 1915 Rent Strike. And so can you bring us up to date in terms of all that housing struggle in the subsequent period? And how does the timeline run in the housing struggle archive?
Joey Simons:
Aye. It’s kind of a complex question.
Niall Murphy:
I know, sorry.
Joey Simons:
Trying to figure it out. So yeah, I guess one thing that we’ve looked at is, in particular, these post-war housing struggles from 1945 onwards and within that framework, urban industrial change in Glasgow. So we’ve kind of got our timeline that we’re building that we’ve looked at a different number of, so for example, 1946 to 1948, the squatting movement that took place in Glasgow after the war in that period, you had a hundred thousand people homeless, a hundred thousand people on corporation waiting lists. And this mass squatting movement led by different tenants associations, elements of the Communist Party, but also just homeless families themselves in Govan and Gorbals in the East End was desperate for anywhere to live.
And again, that framing, sometimes it’s scene in a bit like this Ken Loach The Spirit of ’45 narrative where the Labour government gets elected and suddenly this utopia emerges from on high this mass programme of council house building. But when you look at it, there was constant struggle from below to put pressure on the Labour government on the state and the local state in Glasgow to push forward where housing demolition, some demolition, and were new house building. There was different conflicts. The Labour government was criminalising the squatting movement. So it was kind of different dynamics at play that maybe even within left wing history it’s important to look at again.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, it’s a really complex period then. Trying to understand and tease it apart is quite complex too, because you’ve also got the progressives in the council who were actually the conservative party and more right wing elements and who came together and they were really pro things like the high rises in the city. So it’s quite fascinating to see that as well. Everybody seemed to be focused on housing numbers and really generating the housing numbers, but not actually giving much consideration to the shape and form of the city that they’re actually developing.
Joey Simons:
Yeah, and I think in a way that even the progressives and conservative forces were forced to have that concern with housing construction because of the pressure, just the basic material public health pressure, because the situation was so appalling, but also because the working class movement had a clear set of demands on housing that couldn’t be ignored by no matter who was in power in the local state. But yeah, so that’s kind of the next section, after that squatting movement’s high point, maybe 1946, 1948, the progressives getting power in Glasgow Corporation in 1950, 1951. And that huge campaign around the proposed selloff of council houses at the Merrylee scheme in the southside of Glasgow. So that’s one of the kind historical struggles we’ve looked most at is this kind of huge coalition of mainly, well really led initially, by building workers, by the workers who were building these council houses themselves.
Also had tenant associations with women organising and also with the wider industrial labour movement in Glasgow that came together to demand that there was no selloff of this new high amenity scheme that had been built in Merrylee. So that’s quite an amazing period in a sense. I think one aspect that’s most interesting is you had the building workers themselves really feeling that they had built these houses, that the houses belonged to the people of Glasgow. And this context of mass squalor and homelessness and overcrowding that was still the situation six years after the end of war. That the idea that these council houses were going to be sold off for private rent provoked this fury in the movement in Glasgow.
And there’s amazing scenes described at the first demonstration in George Square where… There’s accounts in Charles Johnson’s PhD of people talking about it being like storming the Bastille, that women, they broke into the city chambers, that they were like flinging dead rats at the Councillors as they were talking about selling off the houses, and this huge movement that developed across the year, that was eventually victorious, the Labour council got voted back in.
And they were forced basically to be voted back in, in this single issue, refusing to sell off the houses. So two of the leading figures in that movement were Ned Donaldson and Les Forster, who were construction workers and communists, who had a long history of organising in Glasgow, and were central to that campaign. So yeah, we were involved recently in helping to republish the pamphlet that Ned Donaldson had put together, partly at the time, and also in the 1990s through our project Transmission and Ned Donaldson’s daughter, Annie Donaldson, is a professor at Strathclyde Uni.
Niall Murphy:
Right.
Joey Simons:
We worked very hard to basically, and the Scottish Labour History Society to republish Ned Donaldson’s account of the Merrylee Housing scandal in 1951 with new contextual essays by Valerie Wright and also James Kelman.
Niall Murphy:
Okay.
Joey Simons:
Who knew Ned and Les and looked at the other tradition, communist tradition in Glasgow.
Niall Murphy:
Yes.
Joey Simons:
So that’s been really, that’s the thing that’s really exciting to be involved in, that we’re republishing these pamphlets, the proceeds of the sales of that publication all go to Living Rent. So yeah, that’s been a really good project. You can get copies of it, if you get in touch. It’s still there.
Niall Murphy:
I’d be very interested to read that. I mean, because that brings us onto to my next question, which you’re talking about this incredibly radical time. What you’re describing basically another riot in front of the city chambers, completely fascinating.
But does that happen now? Has Glasgow become less radical as a city and what happens to cities when communities are displaced, street names change? It’s that poverty which used to be really obvious and clear has become more hidden as it’s been moved to the other areas of the city that it’s been dispersed into parts of the city that are more remote.
So how do you handle stuff like that? And looking at your 2022 exhibition in Edinburgh’s Collective Gallery, which you called The Fearful Part of it was the Absence, which is a really fascinating title. What does it tell us about Glasgow’s housing struggle and perhaps its relationship to the built environment?
Joey Simons:
Yeah, so I mean, I think just to go back briefly to that timeline, housing struggles. So I think if you look at that campaign around the house in Merrylee in 1950 1951, ’52, in a way that’s the last moment of that particular coalition that had existed in Glasgow since the early 20th Century. In terms that around this housing struggle, you had mass involvement in building workers, you had the threats of industrial action, you had engineering yards. So for example, the workers at Weir’s Yard and Cathcart threatened to withdraw their labour if that the sale went ahead. This huge list of working class organisations and industrial trade unions and workers committee. So in a way that never happened again in Glasgow. Potentially a little bit around the Poll Tax, but subsequent housing struggles from the late 1950s onwards are in a way much more localised, much smaller scale in a way, and really took place without this wider support of a labour movement or the threat of industrial action.
So the rent strikes of tenants in the Hutchesontown E flats in the Gorbals in the 1970s and 1980s, the campaign of the residents in Easterhouse around damp mould in the ’80s and ’90s, like Jeanette McGinn and the campaign for Rehouse and the Family and Castle Milk the nineties. So kind of incredible stuff going on, but in a completely different context than say 1915 or even 1950, where you have this huge working class labour movement that provides this possible background threat of industrial action to force action, house and different dynamics there. Yeah, I think it’s not like, it’s difficult to say as a question Glasgow becoming less radical. I mean, you’ve got huge processes change across the 20th Century, 21st Century that are affecting every city in every country in Britain and in Europe in terms the decline of Labour and Socialist movements, and I guess in Glasgow as well, through the extremes of de-industrialization urban redevelopment, that the basis of the communities that had fought these struggles is constantly been broken up, is resources attacked and it’s history taken away.
So I think it’s, yeah, it’s difficult whether a place has become less radical. I mean, yeah, I don’t know. It’s a difficult way of framing it maybe. But I think that the thing I was looking at for collective in that quote around the fearful part of it was the absence came from Lord Coburn, Henry Coburn observed in the huge demonstrations around the Reform Act in the 1830s and being on this demonstration in Glasgow and being frightened in a way of the silence. The fear full thing was the absence of riot and this feeling that any moment the shocky electricity could run through and explode. But the scary thing was that it didn’t, and I took that idea to look at aspects of the history of rioting in Glasgow. And in particular the riots that didn’t happen. So for example, in the 1980s, these explosions in Brixton and Handsworth and tox in different cities down south didn’t happen up here.
It didn’t happen up here. And there’s an amazing documentary called Whose Town Is It Anyway? Easterhouse: People and Power from 1984 and includes interviews with a journalist from the Voice from the local community paper up in Easterhouse. And the guy talks about these police from London and from Belfast all coming to Easterhouse after these explosions in the mid 1980s to go, why didn’t that happen in Easterhouse? What can the state learn? Why was it successfully avoided here? These riots and this resistance? And the journalist says that the cops were obsessed with race, with this racist explanation saying that there was no black people in Easterhouse at that’s how there was no riots. And he says they toured the scheme and they kept coming back. They’d kept trying to get a local community to take this standpoint. But the journalist said that the reason there was no riots in Easterhouse was because there was not a single bit of private property and the whole scheme that people could riot from one end of Easterhouse to other, and it wouldn’t be called a riot because there was nothing of value in terms of private value to destroy.
And that the only thing people could attack in a way was themselves. So it’s interesting because these are even further, back in the 19th century as well, there was attempts to portray the docile Scottish worker as different from rebellious Irish workers that had come into the city. And skipping forward to 2011 again when there was riots in London and Manchester across England, that same thing didn’t happen in Glasgow. And again, you had these journalists, credible article on the Daily Record where they brought on these different academics and journalists and officials to opine about why the riots didn’t reach Glasgow. And again, as had one academic, Sterling was saying, yeah, because there was fewer ethnic minorities in Glasgow and Scotland. That’s why the riots didn’t, I mean, this is in 2011 saying that.
Niall Murphy:
Sorry, I’m bobbing my head in astonishment.
Joey Simons:
It’s incredible in this way saying that they’re in England, they patronise and condescend ethnic minorities, they’re not strict enough with, just this incredible, openly racist explanation.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, yeah, quite.
Joey Simons:
But there was other interesting ones though. One explanation was that the miner strike was not as serious in Scotland as in England. So this rupture between police and communities taking place during the miner strike was somehow less bad.
Niall Murphy:
I don’t see how that’s related.
Joey Simons:
So the other thing was saying that, yeah, people in Scotland somehow had a more meaningful connection to their own history compared to England. That also the urban structured was different as well because, and Glasgow and Edinburgh, the rich and poor didn’t live cheek by jowl. So somehow this meant that riots were less likely to occur. And what’s the stuff about the rain that, because it was raining up here, that that was the main explanation why there was no riots. And again, looking back in the 1820, you had this, the Scottish insurrection, this uprising in weavers and other workers across the west of Scotland that took place in 1820. And there’s an amazing account of one of the Dragoons that was involved in suppressing the uprising. And he talks about how in a way, all the military preparations and repression was far less important than the fact that it just rained the heavens. It down poured that day in 1820.
Niall Murphy:
And stopped people gathering.
Joey Simons:
So it’s just these incredible cycles of repression, but also how that history is seen and also in a way that those absences have also shaped the city. Because obviously, in the wake of it, Brixton, you had the Scarman report, you had these major investigations about what was happening in England’s inner cities that had led to these riots and explosions. And a way, because that didn’t happen in Glasgow schemes in Edinburgh. In a way it’s like everything’s fine in Scotland, we’re better than England, that there’s no reason to.
Niall Murphy:
But it doesn’t explain things like, I mean, going back to Mary Barbour’s strike, which is obviously the most well known one that starts in Glasgow. The rent strike starts in Glasgow and it spreads nationwide from Glasgow, was the method of how they organised that strike in Glasgow is completely fascinating. But how would you do the same thing in some of the English towns and cities where you had a completely different architectural form, you’ve not got the tenement, which down in England is associated with poverty, whereas in Scotland it covers all classes. So you don’t have the same structure of say eight different families living together collectively in a close and having the same collective responses to the pressures that they were under.
Joey Simons:
Yeah. Although I guess it’s like, yeah, people find a way no matter what and that, yeah, like you say, it is the specific forms of house and struggle are to a greater or a lesser extent going to be shaped by that physical environment. So in that account of the 1915 Rent Strikes Joseph Mellon talks about that how this enforced collectivity of the tenement was crucial to how the former, the 1915 rent strike took place in terms of tenement committees, kitchen meetings, back court meetings, and you had that physical setup in a way. And that this idea yet in an industrial strike, you’re locked out, but in a rent strike, you’re in the fortification. The women held the houses against the factors, and there’s the famous accounts of the factors being attacked with peas and soup meal and everything when they come and trying to evict people. But I think also, oh sorry.
Niall Murphy:
No, no. I was just wondering could it be the after, I mean the point where you’ve got your rights in the 1950s and then beyond that from the 1960s onwards, you get the comprehensive development area policies and the tenement as a structure that helps structure working class communities is smashed and you get a whole load of working class neighbourhoods that are cleared, completely cleared, obliterated as a consequence of that. And the soft networks you need in all of those communities to tie the society together is obliterated as part of that. And people are scattered to the four winds across the city and end up randomly in neighbourhoods on the external edges of the city. So those ties are all massively weakened by that. Could it be something to do with that?
Joey Simons:
Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that, and it’s this debate to what extent with these developments and post for some clearance and urban regeneration and comprehensive redevelopment.
Niall Murphy:
It’s much more extreme in Glasgow than it is in any of English cities.
Joey Simons:
And in a way that also though the housing situation in Glasgow is more extreme, so forth, and that Charles Johnson’s PhD does this amazing little table about the percentage and different Scottish and English cities of people living in one room houses without internal bathroom. And the numbers are crazy. I mean, in Glasgow, the 50% of population living in one or two rooms in 1951.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, yeah, shocking.
Joey Simons:
The next equivalent city Leeds or Manchester is about 3%, 4%. So the levels of overcrowding are just incomparable to anywhere else in Britain. But I think it’s why it’s interesting to go back that it’s like we look back now and I think it’s a bit this Romanticisation about could we have saved the tenements and this nostalgia that is a bit taken out of context. And if you look at Harry McShane and other leading figures in the Clydeside workers movement, they were constantly saying that slum clearance wasn’t proceeding fast enough. The new scheme building wasn’t proceeding fast enough. So yeah, I think that emergency.
Niall Murphy:
The pressures from both sides. I’m really fascinated by this because it was one of the things we touched on one of the previous podcast, and I was speaking to Reverend Dr. John Harvey of the Gorbal’s Group, who’s in his late ’80s, but still as sharp as a tack and still completely open-minded and what to know about stuff. And it was about his experience in the globals at the time and how they sent delegations to the council and to say, please don’t destroy the area. Don’t do it. It was the first of the comprehensive development areas. Don’t destroy the area. What it needs is reform. What it needs is investment in the buildings. It needs infrastructure, but you don’t necessarily have to bulldoze the entire thing and scatter the community while you’re at it. And they just weren’t listened to. And for me it was really fascinating to discover that the city had sent delegations when they were looking at the Motorway network and recreating it.
So the white heat technology stuff, great leap forward for Glasgow is that you completely re-geared this Victorian Edwardian city to something that’s fit for the future. And this great leap forward is going to solve all of our problems because we’re going to shift the emphasis onto to the car rather than a walkable city. And they send these delegations to the States to look at it. And for me, that’s completely fascinating because you get people like you ever come across Dr Mindy Thompson Fullilove, in the States who’s she’s really interesting. So she writes on this as a neighbourhood in Pittsburgh, and funny enough, Glasgow sent a delegation to Pittsburgh to find out what they’re doing with their expressway there. And one of the expressway carved its way right through an African American neighbourhood, which was incredibly culturally interesting, really rich and vibrant African American neighbourhood, and completely destroys it, replaces it with this expressway and a huge conference centre.
And the community are scattered to the four winds. And she wrote this book in it called Root Shock. And it’s all to do with the impact on that community and how it destroys the integrity of the community. It completely undermines their spirit and it creates a sense of eunoia in the community that they’ve lost a sense of purpose because their surroundings have been completely destroyed. And you look at that and you look at what happened when they were creating the inner ring road or wanting to create the inner ring road in Glasgow. And I just look at it and I see all the parallels there. It was this community that people were embarrassed about because they thought reflected badly on Glasgow so it was the worst slum in Northern Europe. And it was like, right, okay, let’s not try and fix the problem. Let’s just obliterate it and or forget about it.
And it’s that that really, really disturbs me those parallels that what we’ve done, if you look at it now, you think, why would you have done something so incredibly racist? And it may be not racist here, but we’ve done the same thing in terms of class as of move. Yeah. We’ve wiped out a working class community that everyone was slightly ashamed of, and yet with some with a really interesting, fascinating culture.
Joey Simons:
Yeah. Because it’s interesting because there’s a Oscar Marzaroli film, Glasgow 1981 that was made in 1971, that’s this propaganda version for what you were talking about. No, its amazing, it’s a great film and the jazzy music and the car going over the Kingston Bridge and this brave future women are playing squash. And I don’t know, it’s like we’re all working in these high-tech industries, but there’s William McIlvanney, the so author of Laidlaw wrote their introduction to Marzaroli’s collection Shades of Grey, and yes, one of my favourite piece of writing about Glasgow. And he mentions, he talks about this slum clearance and the post-war redevelopment and the fact that changes had to be made, but they were made by people with all the imagination of soldier ants. Yeah. So these labour officials that should’ve known better, the idea was that working class aspirations stopped at an inside toilet and that nothing would be lost basically by unstitching and demoliting these communities that had built a way of life over centuries.
And that this malignant implication was no such thing as working class culture. So nothing would be lost by destroying things in this way. Yeah. I mean I think that is even more so the case now in the sense, at least for all the mistakes was made, that is the first time when you had this mass programme, a council house building overwhelming concern whether despite all the contradictions that everything that happened was a concern with how do you provide decent housing for the majority of people in the city for the first time that it’s going to be publicly owned and basically all right for people.
And I think what is happening now in the city is worse in a sense, is that the demolitions and social cleansing we’re seeing, and this highly unequal urban development is only aim is to privatise the remains of social housing to sell off land for private speculation and development to break apart what was achieved in the sense that the housing is not what it was in 1945, but we’re starting to see more and more those inequalities in our housing condition. And it’s an unaffordable rent.
Niall Murphy:
It’s depressing.
Joey Simons:
And overall development that is not like for what end, at least to that period in the ’50s and ’60s, they’re dealing with extreme crisis. And also that was the demands from the slum dwellers themself in a way was for clearance. Obviously there was battles fought over how that happened. But I think, yeah, that point though about you were saying about this delegation, I think is really interesting and that appears at certain points.
Niall Murphy:
It does. It does.
Joey Simons:
Glasgow corporations. Yeah. So when the talk that in the mid 19th century before the city improvement acts in the 1870s, this delegation from the corporation, go and visit Paris and Baron Von Haussmann.
Niall Murphy:
Yes. Yeah. Lord Provost Blackie and Dr. William Gardner and.
Joey Simons:
Exactly. Yeah.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah. John Carrick.
Joey Simons:
Yeah. Exactly. And there’s lots of debate about Haussmann and what that meant for Paris, and it’s militarization of the boulevards.
Niall Murphy:
Totally, there’s a great Èmile Zola novel on this La Curée, which is the Kill, and it’s all about the speculators making all the money on the back of what Haussmann’s doing because they’re able to get access to his plans and they’re buying up the land. I mean, unofficially get access to his plans and they’re buying up the land along these great avenues and just speculating and making an absolute killing on it. And it’s the cynicism of it. And I do wonder, I’d love to see a Glasgow equivalent of that if there were people doing the same thing in Glasgow, because I expect there probably were in various parts, that they knew that these things were coming not just in the 1860s and ’70s, but also in the 1950s onwards, that people knew and they were speculating.
Joey Simons:
And well, much more recently in that you were seeing, you’ve had Chris Leslie and Mitch Miller on, and obviously they were involved in different projects in the Commonwealth Games in 2014. They were held in Glasgow, and there was Neil Grey and Libby Porter and others ran the Glasgow Games monitor to try to take a bit of a critical eye on this mega event in the East end. And yeah, Chris documented the eviction of Margaret Jaconelli by hundreds of police from her flat. And the games monitor documented these, I don’t know, seemingly extremely corrupt land deals that were happening around the East End in terms of the council selling land very cheap around the East End to certain developers and speculators, who then sold it back to the council for tens of millions of pounds more. So I think you can see… But in a way, though, that is our standard model of regeneration. That’s nothing to be ashamed about.
Yeah, and this compulsory purchase order was used to evict Margaret Jaconelli, but not to take any of the land that was needed around the East End from developers. But I think to go back to your point about what was that kind of way of life and networks that were built up over hundred of years and then people being scattered to the four corners.
But then you look in Easterhouse of Castlemilk, Drumchapel, like people did, it took a long time, but in those environments, people did again, start to recreate the basis for collective organisation in the schemes and yeah, it’s interesting like WEA pamphlet, Castlemilk People’s History Group, the big flip, where yeah, just talk… People obviously didn’t, the only spaces where the churches initially, and also community gardens, for example, Castlemilk, that was the only place people could physically come and meet. But over the decades they built up the tenants associations, the residents associations, and then around The Poll Tax and the claimants unions and Easterhouse, you had the Easterhouse Summer Festival, you had rent strikes and big campaigning around the Rent Act in the 1970s. You had a whole radical culture, that people forged and forced the authorities to take stock in the extreme conditions that the houses were falling into.
Then, yeah, we had an event last night, the CCA with Living Rent and the Worker Stories project. We showed six different housing films in memory of Cathy McCormack, the Easterhouse activist. And Gary, her son, spoke really beautifully, just about her legacy and his experience as well of growing up in those conditions and the process of self-education that Cathy went through in order to gain the knowledge and the power she needed to fight for a radical change in the housing conditions and in Easthall, and the campaigning they did for these new sustainable houses there, a struggle that she was fighting until the very end of her life.
So, I think people did find a way to come together. And it’s interesting compared to 1915, there was a big, you were fighting in a city where 90% of housing stock is owned by private landlords. Seventies and eighties, “Your new landlord is Glasgow Housing Department.” But in a way, it doesn’t matter who the tenants, everyone is going to keep fighting for a basic dignified life.
So, I think we were coming back… So, on Saturday just there, we had an action. With Living Rent in Dennistoun, and one of our members, Pierette is living in a private let. She’s been there for 11 years with her four children. And I don’t know if you’ve seen any pictures, but the level of mould, the entire house covered in black mould, no heating upstairs until a few months ago, walls crumbing and collapsing, and Letting Agency blaming Pierette for breathing too much. “You’re taking the hot showers, you’re not opening the windows.” But this is exactly what Cathy McCormack and also the Dampness Campaign fought against this. The first thing is to take away this shame, this individualised shame where people are blamed for their own conditions. And those are-
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, totally. It’s straight back to kind of Victorian era Dickensian stuff. A warm home, it should be a human right.
Joey Simons:
Yeah, but I think in a way, what I was saying about this thing about things repeating, or lessons being learned, without the pressure of a housing movement, then the regression to the mean is for private interest, and even the state to exploit housing to the maximum degree to extract the most from it while investing the least.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah.
Joey Simons:
Yeah, so it was just interesting because we’ve done this stuff with House and Struggle archive. I sat down with one of the Living Rent organisers before the action. We were reading Cathy’s book, the Wheel of Butterfly. We were looking at the account of the rent strikes in the Hutchie E in the 1980s and the Dampness Monster.
Niall Murphy:
Yes.
Joey Simons:
The slogans they were using, the demands, and applying them quite directly to this situation we were in today. So yeah.
Niall Murphy:
It brings me onto my next question, which is all about what you’re doing, it’s about, in order to avoid falling back into those traps again, you need to know your history. And so it’s all about unearthing and then recording these hidden histories and bringing them back out into the light. And obviously lockdown has helped with some of that, because it’s given people the time and space to explore some of that. And during lockdown, and this is certainly something I did, was able to explore the streets of the surrounding area that I thought I knew and then was discovering all the stuff while I was doing it. And guided walks can reveal even more. But what you’re doing with the Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive, is exploring this kind idea of a different kind of city walking tour. So can you tell us anything about that and how you’re going about doing that?
Joey Simons:
One thing I’ve been looking at is the work of Neil Grey, who’s a housing scholar and activist based in Glasgow. And yeah, it’s been evolved over, for example, in the Glasgow Stock Transfer campaign, and has done masses of work into the politics of regeneration and urban development in Glasgow, especially in the East End, around the Commonwealth Games and in the north side of the city as well.
So, one idea he’s taken, sorry, is this idea of the territorial inquiry. So, emerging from these workers inquiries that took place in Italy in the 1960s during the hot years of strikes and resistance and the kind of industrial towns in Italy in the 1960s in the huge car factories in Turin. And of really trying to have a close investigation of what is the real material, social, economic, cultural consciousness factors within a factory, within one industrial unit, and what are all the technical connections, the political connections, and using this real investigation and knowledge as the basis for your political organising, rather than just abstract generalities.
So, a lot of Neil’s work has been about how, especially in Britain, that the main sites of capital accumulation now are less in industry, but really in land and in property. This is how capital is accumulating at the moment. This is the main ways how it passes through the built environment, how land is regenerated, how rent gaps are closed. So, on that basis, shifting this idea, the workers inquiry and the factory into the territory, like the neighbourhood, and a kind of spatial composition of capital. So, he has been developing this idea of the territorial inquiry, just a way of walking through space in your city and really trying to think what is happening there.
So we did one in Partick, I think… I can’t remember if it was before or after the first lockdown. But really walking through Partick, like the new build-to-rent accommodation, the student developments down by the Clyde, Glasgow Hardbar, the older tenement parts, and each person… So I was looking at some of the radical history in Partick. Other people had investigated the international investment funds that were involved in building different aspects of the student housing. And other people looked at how the former land along the river, and they’re owned by the Port Authority, is now in the hands of these speculative companies. And it’s just really a useful way to actually physically just walk through a space, to go from one end to other and think, “Yeah, who owns the land? Who was here before? Who owns it now? What are the conditions of the houses? And what are the points in common between all the different tenures here? What are the differences?” And kind of recording that walk, writing it up, leading to further points of investigations.
So yeah, that’s something we’re hoping to definitely do more of, and to do in different local areas. And then the results of these investigations can be recorded through the House and Struggle Archive and maybe… Yeah, you meet people, you speak to people, new things emerge, new things, connections come up.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, I love doing walking tours. So, big fan of that. Because it is a great way to connect with people and it’s a great way to explain facets of the city that are not necessarily obvious, and explain how cities changed over time and what the implications of that are, and how cities are always changing. So it’s trying to get that across to people, I think, is a really, it’s worthwhile way of doing it. It’s a great way to connect. And it’s a challenge too. I mean, one of the things haven’t led many walking towards, there’s nothing worse than somebody’s eyes glazing over what you’re talking to them.
Joey Simons:
Just cross the road.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, it’s like, “Okay, okay, that’s boring. Next.” Yeah, it’s a bit of a challenge, but…
Joey Simons:
But the thing is, like another project I’m involved in just now with the Edwin Morgan Trust, is looking at the life and work of James McFarland, this kind of 19th century peddler poet who was born in the Calton. And he wrote a lot of, I mean, he’d lived in abject poverty his entire life. It’s the usual Glasgow poetic life. He walk from Glasgow to London on foot to get some of his poems published by Dickens and came back up the road here, was totally not… Anyway, but yeah, he wrote a lot about the attics and garrets where he lived, and this incredible apocalyptic poem called The Ruined City, where he just presents this hell-scape vision of Glasgow in the mid-19th century.
So, it’s looking at his work and also the work of Edwin Morgan, the 20th century Scottish poet and his Glasgow Sonnets, I think one of the best bits of writing, trying to think through Glasgow’s redevelopment in the 1970s, to use their writing to look at what’s happening in Glasgow now, where in a way there’s not a poet of a urban change in Glasgow. There’s far less discourse around it compared to, for example, the 19th century. Or we’re still talking a lot about slum clearance, comprehensive redevelopment. Whereas the transformational regeneration areas that are taking place across Glasgow just now, are receiving far less and a discussion, and actually the work of Mitch Miller and Chris Leslie are some of the few people that have really documented this latest round of regeneration of Glasgow, of demolition, of the high rises, transformation of places like Sighthill.
Yeah, I guess it’s just interesting that in a way, despite all our technology and the social media and the massive amount of information that’s exchanged constantly, that I think there’s far less being talked about Glasgow now, or far less understanding about the processes of change happening in the city now, compared to previous periods.
So I took a walk through the city centre looking at McFarland’s route. There’s this huge Barclays Bank development on the south side of the Clyde that has just arisen with all this associated luxury build-to-rent under the Kingston Bridge, there’s this new Kingston Quay, another huge development of massive build-to-rent private equity capital investments. The same time I was up in Sighthill the other day, and that’s constantly, this is the biggest project outside Glasgow’s 250 million pound regeneration of Sighthill.
Niall Murphy:
Yes.
Joey Simons:
It’s interesting up there’s been 140 GHA houses built. The tenants that managed to stick out the very end of their tenancies on Sighthill have got out, or have got flats now. The rest of the site, it’s quite incredible. It’s just fencing everywhere. There’s this fancy entrance way off Springburn Road. You walk up, it ends in a fence, you walk back down Pinkston Drive, another fence. You have to kick in a bit of a fence to get into the scheme. You walk around, the whole thing is kind of fenced off or empty all along Sighthill Cemetery, you can’t get out. You can’t cross the road to get into it.
I was speaking to someone, like one of the few people I met there, and she was saying that’s because they’re still remediating the land from all the chemical damage. But some people are living there. Others know that was, in Sighthill, that was two and a half thousand units, so council housing that was built, that’s been replaced by 140 GHA flats. And then 800 private-bought flats, some mid-market rent. So, that’s a huge change.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah, absolutely.
Joey Simons:
There’s mass erasure of that community. Very few people are going to be able to come back. But again, there’s no… Where can you discuss this in a way? And I think it’s even interesting looking at these Glasgow Corporation Housing films throughout the, after the war, where you have these propaganda films in a way, explaining and talking about these huge changes that are taking place, like high-rise flats, the motorway, the new schemes. But there is some kind of critical discussion in those films about the problems Glasgow faces, about the problems, the inequalities, the contradictions in the urban plans. Whereas now, well if you go on the Glasgow City Council YouTube, there’s no films being made discussing-
Niall Murphy:
No, not in the same way.
Joey Simons:
… what’s happening in Sighthill or any kind of critical potential that maybe there’s some questionable things happening or things that you can talk about or challenge.
So, I think in a way, because of all the processes, the change that’s happened, that in a way we have much less knowledge at the moment, and we’re facing a much more difficult process to understand and also to combat. And there’s a kind of hegemonic discourse that urban regeneration, this is the only path, the correct path, that there’s no room for discussion, that private investment, private housing, the sale of public land, this is the answer to Glasgow’s problems. But you look at this huge development that’s happening in the city centre, in the financial district, seven new luxury hotels in Glasgow city centre. Yet we’ve just seen the budget release there, cuts to Mitchell Library, cuts to sport, cuts to communities, cuts to cleansing. And you’re thinking, “Well, how come Glasgow could afford these things in the seventies and eighties-
Niall Murphy:
And we can’t now-
Joey Simons:
… when we were much poorer.
Niall Murphy:
… when we’re supposedly a richer society. Yeah, that’s a very good question.
Joey Simons:
So what is all this huge speculative urban development? Where is the money going? Who is benefiting from this? How can this two stories be told that this is the Glasgow miracle, and at the same time, the basic infrastructure of the city is crumbling?
But I think it’s not necessarily a clear answer, but at least if we can critically discuss it, and through Living Rent, we’re seeing the consequences every day in terms of rent increases, housing quality, damp, mould-
Niall Murphy:
Sure.
Joey Simons:
… a basic breakdown.
Niall Murphy:
Okay.
Joey Simons:
And you’re right to housing. Sorry.
Niall Murphy:
That brings me onto the next point, which is the role of women in Glasgow’s housing struggles. And it just comes up again and again and again, the central role that women play in these struggles. And it’s something that I’m wanting to talk about in our podcast with the Glasgow Women’s Library, which is going to come further on in the series. So you have generations of women who have done these incredibly inspiring things in Glasgow and have achieved remarkable results in terms of the housing in the city. And so I just wanted to ask you how that had come about, and is that role now changing?
Joey Simons:
Yeah, in a way that… The first thing to say is that that history, women’s political organising and movements has been consistently marginalised, and not only by official narratives, but within Labour history itself and within the Labour movement. So there’s an amazing film called Red Skirts on Clydeside that was made by the Sheffield Film Co-op in the 1970s, that told really for the first time or in a long time, the story of the 1915 rent strikes. And they met and they interviewed women who, as children, remembered growing up at the time of the rent strikes, were involved in the rent strikes.
The film is interesting because it shows the women who were doing the historical research, and they go to the Marks Memorial Library, I think it is, and they’re looking in different archives, working class archives, and there’s nothing about the rent strikes. There’s no box marked Women or Housing. And they eventually find this box marked Miscellaneous that’s like packed at the back of the way, that has some of the documents about this. So now it seems obvious, but in a way even that story in 1915, which was probably the most successful action or campaign ever fought by the Scottish working class in terms of its immediate results, and that that was really marginalised.
So, like Willy Gallagher, in his famous revolt in the Clyde, barely mentions that. Harry McShane in his autobiography talks about how, that even within the working class movement, most of the women, well McShane or John McLean or Willy Gallagher, that they also were very traditional, that they were wage slaves and their women were slaves of the slaves, even within the most radical ailments of workers’ movement.
So, it’s been a long process. It was a long process to recover that history in 1915 against the prejudices of the Labour movement itself. And that’s just more generally as well, that housing is always this secondary issue to workplace and industrial struggles, but actually it’s been provided the kind of context for some of the most radical and successful struggles have been in housing rather than being in industry in Glasgow.
Niall Murphy:
Very much, yes.
Joey Simons:
So, the Women’s Library, I think has played a crucial role in sharing that history. And we had another, one of the films that we showed last night was about the Take Root Women’s Self-Build Co-op, that was organising in Glasgow in the 1990s, where, as a response to homelessness and precarious housing, a group of women formed a self-build co-op that trained up as construction workers to work with Molendinar Housing Association to build the houses and to build the kind of housing that would meet their needs for the first time. And raised funds, and over years and years and years, led this project, only for the last minute for all the funding to be pulled because it was supposedly sexist, that this would’ve been housing only for women. And you can imagine that kind of tabloid campaigns that were taking place at the time. And the Cathy McCormack’s archive as well, which is now at the Glasgow Women’s Library. Cathy meticulously documented all the years that you saw, resident associations.
Niall Murphy:
I’m particularly interested in what Cathy did as well. It’s my next question for you, is all about what Cathy did and how her fight against the mould was this kind of incredibly powerful collaboration with the Easterhouse residents and architects and scientists, which resulted in this kind of innovative method to cut dampness and high fuel costs. And yet we’re going through that again.
Joey Simons:
Yeah.
Niall Murphy:
And it’s high for your costs, and yet we’re going through that again. It’s dreadfully depressing. Why is it happening again?
Joey Simons:
I think just to go back a wee bit, women have been in the leadership of housing struggles because they have been the ones that have suffered the consequences the most because of everything we know about how society is structured. Women were the ones dealing with the rents, that were dealing with housing conditions, that were trying to maintain the conditions, a dignified life and conditions of extreme overcrowd and poverty, poor housing, and also having to fight the prejudices within their own families and within the working class movement itself.
You read her book, and Kathy’s story, people don’t want to become activists. People just want to have a dignified, decent, fulfilling life without having to constantly fight. But Kathy, the day that she came back from the hospital with healthy babies and she took them home and she had sick children. This kind of shame that attacks you because it’s like you are responsible for this. Why is this happening? You can’t share this with anyone else because it’s so shameful. But eventually her being forced to overcome that and then fight this incredible battle against Glasgow Housing Department officials against elements, scientific establishment. Gary talked yesterday that you quoted this academic at the time saying that he was certain that there was no connection between bad housing and poor health, signing off on stuff.
So Kathy was forced to fight this and through this recognising that her individual problems were the problems of her community and the problems of her community were those of communities across Glasgow and then eventually the world in South Africa and Nicaragua. And the film that we showed last night that she made was called The War Without Bullets, this poverty that was killing more people than bombs and guns. And this kind of innovative approach where she talks about, as well as organising Easthall Residence Association, making links with middle class professionals, with technical service agencies, with professors, architects at GSA to kind of build that coalition that could put the pressure needed on the housing department to get the changes they need. But in her book, she constantly talks about fighting these battles where people on your side are well-meaning professionals that are constantly in a way trying to take her voice away from her or speak for her and speak for her community, and this kind of process of radical education organising and fighting that she did that.
And that’s the thing, as soon as that pressure stops and it takes a massive toll on people trying to raise a family, trying to survive in poverty, trying to survive your housing trying to kill you, as well as organising activism, it’s a difficult process. It takes its toll on people. And as soon as those movements can be sidelined or repressed, then again you just revert to this meaning where the state and private capital is interested in working class housing, if at all, is to invest as little as possible from it and to extract the maximum from it. And that’s why we’re seeing these housing conditions reappearing today. Because without pressure from below, then the interest of the builders and speculators and officials and landlords is that housing is not a home. It’s a commodity to be speculated on.
Niall Murphy:
It seems to be a particularly British disease, unfortunately that, and it’s so frustrating. It really does depress me. I mean, I come from Hong Kong originally, and what really angers me is when you get Tory politicians, and I know I’m not meant to be political, but talking about Singapore and Hong Kong as being these kind of societies to aspire to, and yet they’re both the biggest public housing landlords in the world, and they really look after the people. And it’s so frustrating that we’ve gone in completely, we’re kind of went in that direction in the 1950s and we’ve completely abandoned it from the 1980s onwards.
Joey Simons:
And I think that is the overall lesson from the Glasgow Housing struggle archive is that without tenants organising, without housing movements from below, then you won’t win anything. And I think you’re saying you are not meant to be political. I think that’s the other question is that this form of market led state facilitated urban development that we’re seeing in Glasgow is presented as beyond politics. Tory, Labour, Green, SNP, it doesn’t matter who’s been in the council chambers, it’s almost unquestionable what’s happening. It’s beyond is presented as beyond politics. So we’ve just seen a 16% budget cut to social housing budget, but the sell off of public land in Glasgow, the destruction of social housing, the demolition of communities like Sighthill, this is presented as a natural inevitable process.
Nobody is challenging that planning framework from within any of those parties because it’s seen as kind of inevitable and within a wider system, it is. Glasgow, you have to compete, you have this kind of boosterist approach, you have to attract private investment, you have to stop anything that might put off potential investors. So I think that’s what we’re trying to do as well, is intervene within Living Rent is that there is a different vision for housing for our city that Kathy and others have fought for. And it’s completely necessary because this current one is not working for the vast majority of people.
Niall Murphy:
That brings me onto my next question, which is basically how you present that in terms of street names tell a story about the history of the city and how those street names came about, but development and redevelopment and demolition of the city bring a sense of loss, which is a theme of our podcast. But can you explain why words matter in the past and present stories of Glasgow’s housing struggle? How are you going to use that to improve things?
Joey Simons:
Yeah. Well, I think the basic thing about looking at this history is that you see people have organised in the past in the streets and in the same community where you are now, it breaks down this sense of a inevitability that you’re just kind of pushed by these forces from above to go along with whatever. And I think words are really important. So for example, this Glasgow Harbour development. So it’s obviously down by Partick, but Partick is being erased from the name of that development. And if you think about Partick, you can make these connections back to 1915, back to the rent strikes, Partick was one of the centres of that, histories of industrial organisation of migration. And it’s interesting that you’re not Partick Harbour, these investors you’re not come to live in a specific area of a specific city with its own history, its own tradition. It’s just this abstract bit of land in a luxury house, it could be anywhere.
I did some work with some young people living in the scheme in Townhead. That’s another place being erased, they’re literally being hemmed in on all sides by student accommodation, by the college, by the expansion of Strathclyde University, surrounded by libraries and swimming pool and bars and rooftop terraces they can’t access. And they’re saying that the name of Townhead is disappearing. There’s nothing there’s no signs to Townhead. You can’t even see into it now from George Square. It says Collegelands. This is the name of this new area. Nobody has a connection to it, it’s meaningless for anyone in the city. But again, kind of flattens the space of this city just makes it this abstract space where people can invest and let then leave.
Niall Murphy:
Absolutely. It reminds me of, I used sit in the Glasgow Urban Design panel. Glasgow Urban Design panel basically any kind of big scheme that’s going to affect the city tends to get run past the Glasgow Urban Design panel. It’s not a statutory body, so the planners don’t necessarily have to listen to it, but they get input from various kind of people in Glasgow who might be expert in the city or amenity groups in the city or architecture groups in the city to get their say on things.
And there was one that came to us about Glasgow Harbour, which was when they were looking to develop a kind of shopping centre around the Riverside Museum. And all the images that were getting projected were people in fancy clothes, drinking wine and Lambrusco and that kind of thing. And it was like somebody finally piped up and said, “The image you’re projecting doesn’t really have an awful lot to do with Partick, which is literally right next door to this. Would you care to comment?” And the guy actually to give him credit, at least he was honest enough to say, “That’s not really the image we’re looking for.” And you’re like, but it’s totally disconnected from the actuality of the city. And you’re not trying to connect into these neighbourhoods at all. You’re just not interested, it’s all about the money.
Joey Simons:
Yeah, definitely. And I think connections between the past and the present are also to think about different futures as well. And we just did this project with the Travelling Gallery: Resistance in Residence, looking at kind of histories of resistance and also different kind of urban theories in Edinburgh and Glasgow. So in Wester Hailes and Pilton and Muirhouse and also the work architects and theorists like Phyllis Birkby and Yona Friedman.
And that sort of thing is just this poverty, a vision that… And it’s like, again, in that post-war era, you had this grand vision, a modernist vision for better or worse, about how people should live and how cities should be designed. And it’s funny now that the same things are happening now in terms of, but without discussion. So again, in Sighthill I was looking on Collective Architecture’s website about their award-winning development. And it’s just interesting, you’ve got these kind of two storey townhouse, garden kind of street, just the lay out of the streets and they are talking about that they want to redesign the relationship between public and private space, some people like others don’t, but it’s just quite interesting that how the city is being redesigned is coming from an ideological point of view about how we should relate to each other in spaces, what’s desirable or not, whether consumption should be prioritised. This kind of Lambrusco drinking class.
Niall Murphy:
Yeah. It’s very 2008 just before the crash.
Joey Simons:
But again, it’s just presented as this is just natural. This is how we want to live rather than, this is another grand redesign through architecture and urban planning of how they think people should relate to each other. And histories of collective struggle are not part of that because they’re not designed for that and they’re present. And that’s what Living Rent we’re trying to do is like…
Niall Murphy:
Is it because they’re uncomfortable, they’re uncomfortable. It’s about resistance and therefore it’s not something that’s an easy sell.
Joey Simons:
And I in that Charles Johnson PhDs chapter on rent strike in Arden in southwest Glasgow in 1957, 1958, that took place in Scottish Special Housing Association housing. And yeah, again, it’d be interesting to work with the housing associations down there in other areas and think… Or even these murals that are appearing around Glasgow on the gable ends.
It’d be interesting to, can you connect that history to what’s happening now? Can people get a sense you’re living in these same houses in the same schemes where people have come together, where they have fought. People had an influence in their own future. When that is wiped out, then the answer to our present problems isn’t people’s own organisation, it’s again, saviour from above by the council through private investments. So I think that connection between the past and the future is crucial. It’s like who controls the past, controls the future or whatever.
Niall Murphy:
And it is about grassroots and something of the whole thing organically rather than being imposed.
Joey Simons:
Yeah.
Niall Murphy:
Okay. Well, basically it brings me onto my next question, which is what is next for you? And people are obviously looking for answers. Can a better understanding of Glasgow’s housing history help us improve the present and provide more hope for the future? And did the pandemic teach us anything about building back better?
Joey Simons:
Yeah, I think, again, well, there’s this quote from Brecht always and it’s there’s not much knowledge that leads to power, but there’s plenty of knowledge to which only power leads. Where in a sense, not just about knowing things, we need the power to implement the lessons we know from the past.
So I think Living Rent, we’re not a campaigning group, we’re a lobbying group, we’re a tenants union. We’re rooted in local communities and the idea is about we’re trying to build the power from below where you can take this knowledge and these lessons from the past and enforce them or learn from them. But without having that power, then it doesn’t matter in a way. This idea of mistakes being repeated, whose mistakes? It’s benefiting some people, it’s only a mistake for some. So I think we’ve seen that with the pandemic and the Workers Stories’ Project that and that led this archive of workers’ experiences during Covid-19.
So people should check it out online. People contributed stories, poetry, films, diaries, documenting workers’ experience. But again, without the kind of political organisations and movements… We’ve seen with Covid, I’m astounded how little has changed. I mean, if you think even about the Covid in the built environment, in your workplaces, if there was another pandemic just in terms of adaptations to windows, ventilations, nothing. I mean, it’s actually incredible how little it has changed in a way because without this kind of political power then the regression to the mean, it’s always towards inequality. But I think with Living Rent, we are starting to have that influence and build some of the power we need. And learning from that history, understanding our cities better, and seeing the potential for organising today from what has happened in the past, but also without romanticising it. That we’ve gone through whole periods of defeat as well as victories.
But we need to just have that history to understand it, to critique it, to learn from it, to use it, and also to add for it and people to contribute to it. Because I think what I’ve learned is, there’s always a feeling that somewhere there’s some academic or some researcher looking at all this stuff, but a lot of times there’s not, and we just need to do it for ourselves. And people have their own stories, their own documents, their own photographs, their own personal histories.
So I think we’re just trying to provide a framework and try to establish a collective, kind of take ownership over the archive and collectively decide what we want to do with it. Do we want it to be online or physical? Do we want to just use it to do talks? So I think it is open question, and again, we’re not professionals or academics we’ve just done this kind of out of our own interests. So the future’s open. We definitely feel hopeful that it’s possible to change things. And we’ve already, through the pandemic, won a ban on evictions, a rent freeze, the battles over these are being lifted now. So the struggle never stops, but you can take great inspiration from it as well.
Niall Murphy:
Good. Final question, and this is always a loaded question and people’s answers to it are always really fascinating. But what is your favourite building in Glasgow? And it could be visible or invisible, and what would it tell you if its walls could talk?
Joey Simons:
Well, it’s probably a boring answer, I’m sure everyone…
Niall Murphy:
No answer is boring. They’re all really fascinating.
Joey Simons:
I think the Mitchell Library is a hundred percent my favourite building in Glasgow. So I think I like it as you’ve got all humanity in the Mitchell as well. I mean, it’s basically the last kind of free public space, indoor space in Glasgow. And there’s just kind of always new and weird things I’m finding in there as well. And I actually did, I wrote this kind of piece of fiction, semi fiction about the Mitchell Library where I was imagining its future where the library was closed and a group of librarians and archivists had gone underground to try to fight for it. But I think its walls would tell an interesting story because…
Niall Murphy:
They certainly would.
Joey Simons:
I mean, it is just those contradictions from the past. You’ve obviously got through Stephen Mitchell a lot of connections back to Glasgow’s colonial and slavery past and where that collection emerged from. You’ve got Carnegie that laid the final stone that paid for the new building. Also a very complex history of repression on one hand or another.
Niall Murphy:
Absolutely.
Joey Simons:
But I think it’s just, again, to that period where at least the rich in the city left something in terms of civic infrastructure whereas now there’s nothing, it feels like things have just been…
Niall Murphy:
I know it’s like the days of municipal socialism and completely moved on from that.
Joey Simons:
Yeah. So I think the Mitchell and I always go back to kind of Tom Leonard and his collection Radical Renfrew. He talked about always being on the other side and this librarian fairy would go away into stacks to find this mysterious text that he wanted. And by going on the other side of it, he discovered so much. So I think it’s it as a huge untapped resource still. And we did some workshops where we worked with our librarian archivists, public workshops where people could come in and just see how do you use the filing system? How do you get a card? How can you… Just breaking down those barriers that exist where it’s quite intimidating. So I think I spend a lot of time in the Mitchell, I’m still into the carpets and I do…
Niall Murphy:
Who isn’t, they’re wonderful.
Joey Simons:
I’ve got a couple of books I need to bring back as well that are overdue I think they’ve cancelled the overdue fees now. So I’ll shall sneak back in.
Niall Murphy:
Classy carpets. Love them. Well, thank you very much, Joey. That was a complete pleasure talking to you. Really enjoyable.
Joey Simons:
Cheers.
Niall Murphy:
Thank you for your time. Much appreciated.
Joey Simons:
Thanks for having me.
Niall Murphy:
It’s a pleasure.
Katharine Neil:
Glasgow City Heritage Trust is an independent charity and grant funder that promotes the understanding, appreciation, and conservation of Glasgow’s historic built environment. Do you want to know more? Have a look at our website at glasgowheritage.org.uk and follow us on social media at Glasgow Heritage. This podcast was produced by Inner Ear for Glasgow City Heritage Trust. The podcast is kindly sponsored by the National Trust for Scotland and supported by Tunnocks.