GLASGOW'S NEGLECTED PERIPHERY. THE EASTERHOUSE AND DRUMCHAPEL INITIATIVES.

Glasgow's peripheral estates have achieved fame in Scotland and beyond for their deep-rooted social and economic problems. Yet, unlike many urban crisis points elsewhere in Britain and abroad, they are not a relic of the industrial revolution or the unplanned development of the nineteenth century, but modem housing estates conceived and developed precisely as part of the answer to urban decay and dereliction in central Glasgow. Their origins lie in the housing crisis of post-war Glasgow and the battles fought at that time between the advocates of new towns, dispersal and overspill and those forces within the old Corporation who insisted that Glasgow could solve its housing problems within its own boundaries. The outcome was a compromise. By the early 1950s, the Corporation had conceded the case for overspill and was actively assisting in the decanting of population and industry from the city; but rising pressure for housing and the slow pace of planned overspill kept up the pressure. As a result, large parts of the discredited 1946 Bruce Plan were in fact implemented, with building at the periphery and at ever higher densities to the early 1970s. The periphery, as a result, developed further and faster than had ever been planned, encroaching into the green belt. Easterhouse grew as a single-tenure, one-class estate. Some 95 % of the housing was corporation-owned, predominantly in three and four storey tenements and from the start there was a substantial proportion of large families. Such was the urgency to build houses that shopping and community facilities were, in the early years, seriously neglected. Lack of school building combined with teacher shortages to curtail education provision with children in part-time schooling until the 1970s. In 1963, proposals were first mooted for a Township Centre, combining shopping and social facilities but concern about viability and costs held it up for a decade. By 1966 agreement had been reached with a private developer for a project of 95 shops, 5 supermarkets, a cafeteria, a restaurant, a ca