Scheming: A Social History of Glasgow Council Housing, 1919-1956

"Scotland is a very interesting part of the whole story and in some ways is distinct from the rest of the UK. The five books I’ve chosen come from distinctive academic disciplines and distinctive sensibilities. Boughton is a historian. The Scheming book is written by a sociologist. Sean Damer’s interest, first and foremost, is in what was it like to be a family living in a slum which then got relocated to one of these new Glasgow Corporation housing schemes. That’s where the name of the book, Scheming comes from. In Scotland council housing projects are generally called housing schemes and, in a derogatory way, people who live on them are referred to as ‘schemies’. Damer’s research, carried out around 1990, involved interviewing people who had moved into these council schemes in the 1920s, 30s, 40s and 50s and who were still living there. Those interviews are the meat of the book. It’s just fantastic to read about the experience that people had of relocating to these places and how they found them such an upgrade, their excitement at the facilities which they never had before such as bathrooms and running water and other facilities that today we take for granted. “It’s often the voice of the tenants that gets left out of architectural history.” The chapter on the Mosspark garden suburb—the scheme built by Glasgow Corporation under the 1919 Housing Act—is particularly revealing. What he shows was that although these may have been heroes, veterans from the war, that were living there they weren’t mere ‘squaddies’. These were heroes from the officer class, because these were highly sought-after homes. The rents were very high. There was pretty clear social exclusion operating even under this scheme. If you came from a rough neighbourhood originally, you wouldn’t be considered for tenancy. The Bowling Club was the centrepiece of social life on the estate and was full of businessmen, solicitors, surveyors—professional people in other words. That really brings it home that these stereotypes about council housing through the ages are not a true reflection of the historic reality. Here was a project that was basically housing middle-class people, because these were the best homes that you could get in Glasgow at that time."