IN MAY 1961, an Evening Times reader complained about this rubbish heap, at the corner of Surrey Street and Pollokshaws Road, in the Gorbals: “Children who play among the mud throw stones at passing cars and buses.”
But then, there probably wasn’t too much for local kids to do. But things were changing. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh visited the old and new Gorbals two months later, with this paper expressing the hope they would be the last royal couple to see the “cramped intensity” of a slum home.
It was a day, we said, “that crystallised the end of an era for Glasgow – the era of the Razor King, the Billy Boys, and the Norman Conks – and stamped the beginning of a new one that will make Gorbals a pleasant seat of parks and multi-storeyed flats.”
The Queen visited a blackened Victorian tenement in Sandyfaulds Street, where one family lived in a single end with no running water, and a new maisonette block in Ballater Street.
She also saw the 20-storey flats near completion in the Hutcheson-Gorbals redevelopment area.
But other towns had their own problems. Jean Mann, a former MP newly elected to Gourock Town Council, said her ward’s slums “are worse than you will find in the Gorbals … In these circumstances, I really could not spend my life down here on picnics to the Holy Loch and Lochgoilhead.”
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