The Gorbals has lived several very different lives. It began as a respectable Georgian suburb, became one of the most overcrowded slums in Europe, was almost entirely demolished and rebuilt with high-rise flats in the 1960s, and, when those failed too, was rebuilt yet again. Today it is a regenerated residential district on the south bank of the Clyde. The fuller story is on our Gorbals redevelopment page.

From village to genteel suburb

The Gorbals began as the little village of Bridgend, at the south end of the old bridge over the Clyde. For a time it was church land, then the estate of a Glasgow merchant who built a tower house there. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries it had become a pleasant and respectable suburb of villas and handloom weavers, a world away from what was to come.

The most overcrowded slum in Europe

As industry boomed, people poured into the Gorbals, among them Irish, Jewish, Highland and Italian families, and the district was absorbed into Glasgow in 1846. Its tenements were subdivided again and again until, by the 1930s, the wider Gorbals held around ninety thousand people packed into a tiny area. It became a byword for poverty and overcrowding, the very world of the novel behind the phrase ‘no mean city’, though its famous community spirit was every bit as real as its hardship.

Slum clearance and the high-rise dream

After new laws in the 1950s, the slums were swept away, and in 1957 the Gorbals became the first part of Glasgow marked for comprehensive redevelopment. The old tenements came down and were replaced by concrete flats and high-rise towers, most famously the bold blocks designed by Sir Basil Spence at Hutchesontown. The Queen came to see the new Gorbals rising in 1961, and many families were at first delighted with modern homes that had, for the first time, their own inside bathrooms.

A second failure, and revival

The dream did not last. The new blocks were soon plagued by damp and disrepair, and the towers that had promised so much became problems in their turn; Spence’s celebrated flats were demolished in 1993. From the 1990s the district was rebuilt once more as the New Gorbals, with lower housing, new streets and a population that is climbing again. For the harder chapters of its past, see our page on Glasgow crime.

Why was the Gorbals so famous?

For being one of the most overcrowded slums in Europe in the early twentieth century, an image fixed in the public mind by the novel No Mean City.

What replaced the Gorbals slums?

From the late 1950s the old tenements were cleared and replaced by concrete flats and high-rise tower blocks, including Sir Basil Spence’s famous Hutchesontown scheme.

What is the Gorbals like now?

Much of the failed post-war housing has itself been demolished, and the area has been rebuilt as the regenerated New Gorbals, with its population rising once more.