Powerful Photos of Life in the Old Glasgow Tenement Blocks – 1969-72 | Hacker News Reader

Powerful Photos of Life in the Old Glasgow Tenement Blocks – 1969-72

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75 pointscurtis35 comments

Unfortunately, place like Maryhill are still some of the most deprived areas in Scotland:

http://simd.scot/2016/#/simd2016/BTTTFTT/9/-4.0000/55.9000/

I still find it shocking that in such a small country (6 million people) there can be a variation of over 10 years in the life expectancy of a newborn based purely on where they are born:

https://www.nrscotland.gov.uk/news/2017/variation-in-life-ex...

NB I'm 53 so a contemporary of many of the kids in those photos - although I grew up in a fairly idyllic rural part of Scotland.

This BBC documentary shows what its like in more recent times. Its better, but not dramatically so. Most importantly the despair and lack of hope is still there.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bxYeyq0xq4

The photos have a striking similarity to what I've seen in Soviet Union as a child, in the end of 1970s. I can easily imagine myself one of these children on the photos, doing the same things.

Of course, not all parts of Soviet cities were as rundown, much like not all parts of Glasgow were as rundown.

I have recently been to Morozov Tenements in Tver, Russia (originally built in 18xx for workers of Morozov textile factory there) and people still live like that to this day. It's really hard to believe that that can be within a couple of hours travel time from Moscow. https://nvdaily.ru/info/129950.html

It appears that most of the populations on both sides were miserable, while having the image of the other side shaped by the other's side propaganda, culture, and pop-culture.

What's striking is that nearly every one (with only a couple possible exceptions) of these photos show children and family occupants. Did single people (without kids) not live in these tenement blocks, or were in the overwhelmingly minority and these were mostly flats for housing family units? Or were singles just as common, but are not represented in the photographs?

At the bottom of the page are links to other pages of Hedges' work. There are a number (e.g., in London) showing single men living alone. Often pensioners (OAPs).

Perhaps your guess that the particular tenements in Glasgow were reserved for families is right.

Not all Glasgow: I saw some Leith shots in there. God.. I used to visit some musicians down there in the mid-late seventies, the stairwells still make me shudder. All pervasive smell of damp and decay and despair. Unhappy places.

The book Angela's Ashes is a pretty solid read. Life in a poor area of Limerick Ireland.

The film Ratcatcher (1999) is about a boy growing up in tenements and dreaming of moving out to a new housing development.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0171685/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

The Scheme is a tv documentary about an estate in Kilmarnock. I don't like programmes like this, but it's not the worst of its kind. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X6KfCYJx_g

Poor Kids (2011?) shows children living in poverty in the UK. It's pretty grim for one of the richest nations in the world. Note that austerity started only a couple of years before the programme was shown, and the "bedroom tax" and the benefit cap were introduced after this programme was shown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9aSp9bFmMg https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011vnls

Bill Forsyth (who went on to make Local Hero) did a nice wee comedy set in Glasgow in the 1970s - That Sinking Feeling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_Sinking_Feeling

That's exactly where and how my parents grew up

The image of the father smoking with a child on his lap is disturbing.

It was 1970. Very common at the time. Few people thought it was harmful.

What is the background economic situation in Scotland at this time?

I just have three anecdotal bits to share.

1. One friend said the rest of Britain historically exploits Scotland. People are poor because their taxes and profits they generate are sent south. AKA Thacher/Majors 's government was pulling £1000 per capita a year out of Scotland.

2. Another man said that heavy industry in Britain was in decline in the 1960's 1970's.

3. And a guy I worked with said Britain after WWII was in economic ruin because of the WWI and WWII. Rationing continued into the mid 1950's.

> worked with said Britain after WWII was in economic ruin because of the WWI and WWII.

Yeah for the rest of us, WW 1/2 was absolutely the best thing that happened in history. Europe burning the wealth and power of ages in a short orgy of mutual destruction brought the rest of us out of their yoke and develop our own destinies. Some would argue the US replaced Europe as the hegemonic power but until they got muddled in the middle East, it was mostly light touch except for Vietnam. The challenge for China now is to avoid a shooting war that will burn the wealth of two-three generations of development at all cost.

The last major ship was built and launched from a Clyde shipyard in the early 1970s. Unemployment in Glasgow was heading up: the winter of discontent was just over the horizon. Rampant inflation. The new towns surrounding Glasgow like cumbernauld were ramping up, but life was hard.

I was a kid in Edinburgh during these years and we had a good life. We went through to Glasgow from time to time, it was a wreck of a city much as Manchester, Sheffield, Birmingham were. Manufacturers were moving to lower cost economies. People were joining the army out of a sense of desperation for jobs, and winding up in n.ireland being firebombed, or on cyprus dealing with the Greek/turkey thing.

It wasn't an entirely happy time economically speaking oil not with standing.

Things were much worse than I presumed. I only imagined the "swinging sixties" sort of thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_United...

Doesn’t look that bad, frankly. Everyone looks healthy at least.

The kids look fine, but the older folks look pretty bad, I think. So many of the captions are of the form: So-and-so waiting. For what? Nothing much, I'd guess.

Erm, most of the world is still like this.

Still, seeing white people living in such a bad conditions is striking.

Please don't take out of context my comment, it's just what I think. I am brown by the way.

Poverty is a class issue, not a race issue. Sometimes they are correlated (US cities, all of the US southeast), sometimes not (west Virginia, rural everywhere EXCEPT the southeast, everything Irish - - you can't get whiter than Irish)

Poverty is a class issue.

Class is a race issue.

Poverty is not a race issue.

And something has gone wrong with this argument.

How is class a race issue in somewhere like Scotland?

"you can't get whiter than Irish"

Sectarianism was a pretty dreadful problem in Glasgow (and to a lesser extent the other cities in the Central belt of Scotland) - it still exists although not nearly as bad as it used to be:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarianism_in_Glasgow

My (poorly articulated) point is that all the non-class markers we use to oppress people - whether skin color, religion, accent, clothing style, music preferences, etc - just disguise class oppression. In the USA, I think we emphasize color in order to avoid the hard truth that society was created so that a few could fuck the many.

And I meant "white" literally, to point out the absurdity that poverty is a function of skin color as opposed to deep class organization. If light skin color is what made one rich and powerful, then Catholic Irish would be at the top. But...

I agree with that, recently read a rant about how liberals have fallen into the trap of seeing oppression as caused by discrimination based on skin color, instead of of oppression as a power class thing. And think if only some of the feet in the boot were brown that'll be fair.

Does it help a man of color if the foot in the boot is sometimes brown? I think not a boot is a boot.

It's changing rapidly, though. In 1997, 29% of the world lived in extreme poverty. Today, it's less than 9%. Stunning, but true.

Or to put it another way... 50 years ago, people lived like that in Scotland. They don't anymore. Who's to say that places in the world that live like that today won't be as successful as Scotland has been in putting poverty behind them?

Reminds me of the Bronx, from a train window, in about 2005.

Hmm I'm always wary of those statements. The concept of "living in extreme poverty" is not a good way to measure progress in any sense. First because "poverty means earning less than x" implies that x needs to be updated and its not obvious how to do so; indeed it can be manipulated to push an agenda. Second because it reduces everything to money. You can make more money, but is your life actually improved? Sometimes yes, but surely not always. For example: millions of people have been relocated from the countryside to factories in China. They are now "lifted from poverty" according to that number. But now they live in smog-infested cities, stacked like sardines, working 12 hours per day, where before they had their homes and some sense of peaceful community. Have their lives improved?

In the end, you're judging the success of a system (capitalism) with a metric internal to that system. What does that tell you?

It's in fact so ridiculous a measure that a slave/indentured servant "earning" 5$ a day is considered a-ok in that metric.

EDIT: I'll just rememind that downvote is not a "disagree" button.

I agree poverty is a blunt measure, but literacy, infant mortality, poverty, life expectancy are all improving globally. By almost any measure life has improved dramatically over the last hundred years. It is no longer nasty, brutish and short for the majority, and the rural life people leave for factories is not an idyll, but instead often grinding poverty and early death with no way out. That's why they leave.

Read Enlightenment Now by Pinker!

Europe went through the same things - from largely rural extreme poverty, to dirty industrial cities, to modern clean, wealthy Europe. Heck, these very photos show a step in that process, from 50 years ago, when Scotland was in the state you're so horrified about imagining China in today.

And yes, working 12 hour days in a smog-infested city is better than extreme poverty. Life isn't a socialist realist painting. Literacy is better than illiteracy. Vaccination is better than no vaccination. Water from a tap is better than water in a bucket that you have to walk to get. Etc. People don't move to the cities because country life is getting worse; they move because city life is better.

Is income a pretty measure? No. But it's a good proxy. It's more fine-grained and less messy than something like birth rate.

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