A walking tour of Glasgow's transformed Laurieston district

For many Glaswegians the word Laurieston brings to mind the iconic pub on Bridge Street that is still a popular destination for real ale and good patter. But the bar was named after its location just south of the Clyde, once a fashionable, upmarket part of the city that declined over time and was eventually absorbed into the wider Gorbals, an area that was a byword for poverty, crime and deprivation for much of the last 150 years.

Thanks to a flagship new housing and regeneration project, however, the name Laurieston is in use once again, with great pride, to describe the diverse community that is flourishing in the bustling stretch of Glasgow’s south side – from Carlton Place, up Caledonia Road towards Eglinton Toll, from Gorbals Street to Bridge Street - that takes in the O2 Academy, the Citizens Theatre, an Alexander Greek Thomson masterpiece, Glasgow’s hospice, the sheriff court, and some of the most stunning new housing in Scotland. And it’s all just a short hop across the river from the city centre.

I’m taking a tour of both old and new with architectural historian Robin Ward, following one of the routes contained in his book Exploring Glasgow, which celebrates the city through its buildings and the people who built and lived in them. As the book highlights, Laurieston is both a treasure trove of hidden architectural gems and a work in progress that reflects Glasgow’s wider story, as the city continues to move forwards from post-industrial decline towards economic, social and cultural renaissance.

We begin our tour on the banks of the Clyde, in the aforementioned grandeur – now rather faded - of Carlton Place, where the Laurie brothers who gave the area its name developed their high-end housing scheme, heavily influenced by Edinburgh’s New Town, in the early 1800s.

“The brothers planned Laurieston as an upmarket inner-city suburb where the wealthy would walk across the newly-built suspension bridge to their office chambers,” says Glasgow-born Ward. “For a while this was one of the most desirable places to live in Scotland. You can see that by the exquisite quality of the workmanship in these buildings.”

In the mid-to late 19th century, however, a number of factors contrived to change Lauriston’s trajectory. Glasgow, then the second city of the empire, was a boom town, and before long it was the expanding West End rather than the south bank of the Clyde that attracted the flourishing professional classes. As they moved out, ruthless developers moved in, cashing in on mass immigration from Ireland and migration from the Highlands with poorly-built tenements which were soon overflowing with poverty.

The People’s Palace lists Laurieston as having some of the most overcrowded conditions in the entire city by the late 19th century, highlighting one instance where 47 people lived in a single tenement flat.

According to Ward, things didn’t get much better in the years that followed. “As many cities including Glasgow can attest, it can be very difficult to reverse decline when it sets in,” he explains. “After the both world wars there was little investment in housing in the area, and the slums and social problems that inevitably go along with such housing, got worse. The Gorbals became a default for journalists looking for lurid stories of crime and dysfunction.”

In the more optimistic 1960s, planning authorities thought the answer was to pull down the slums and disperse people to vast outlying new housing estates in places like Drumchapel and Easterhouse, and build high-rise blocks locally. As we now know, however, this strategy was fatally flawed; although many people loved their new homes at first, the properties and the wider communities they existed in often went the same way as the slums they had replaced.

“The industrial decline of the 1970s and 80s dealt a fatal blow to high rise council housing in Glasgow,” Ward adds. “The flats were designed for solid, decent working class folk in employment. But when unemployment set in, the social problems did too. Lots of people found themselves stranded up in the sky with no jobs to go to.

“Also, councils like Glasgow were under real pressure to improve housing conditions and often built too many, too quickly - some of the high-rises were cheap and nasty to say the least, and before long they were beset by problems. All this showed a real disrespect for the people who had to live in them. It was very much a case of top down planning, and that simply doesn’t work.”

You can still see the scars of this poor planning as you walk around Laurieston today. It's clear that many of the people who live here are not wealthy; there are some derelict spaces and disjointed road layouts, and amenities can be hard to find or get to. Two of the area’s most iconic and beautiful buildings, meanwhile, Alexander Greek Thomson’s Free Church on Caledonia Road, and the British Linen Bank on Gorbals Street, have lain empty and neglected for generations.

Crucially, however, you can also see the dramatic transformation that has already taken place, and continues a pace, the birth and rebirth of new and existing urban communities. Phase one of an ambitious £100m plan has already delivered award-winning architecture to the area in the form of 240 social homes for New Gorbals Housing Association and 69 private properties. Designed by cutting-edge architects Page/Park, Elder and Cannon RMJM and Stallan-Brand as part of a masterplan in conjunction with regeneration developers Urban Union, their clean, contemporary lines, big windows and landscaped green spaces now dominate the Laurieston cityscape.

The architecture of these homes may be contemporary, but the feel and atmosphere is in some ways reminiscent of traditional tenement streets in the west end and south side of Glasgow of the type that have survived and thrived for generations, a reinvention of tenement living for the modern world.

It’s impossible to tell which homes are privately owned and which are social housing – and that’s the point. The thinking behind this scheme is that everybody in the community deserves and benefits from good design. And, so successful has the transformation been that planners from across the world now come to see this model of city living, which has been funded by a partnership between the public and private sectors.

Building has already started on phase two of the plan – 173 affordable homes for sale, alongside retail space and a new park – and in 2020 work will start on phase, which will see around 400 owner-occupied and 80 social homes created.

Culture is flourishing in the area, too, with huge public artworks celebrating famous sons and daughters of the area, including artist Hannah Frank and boxer Benny Lynch, while the Greek Thomson church is being used as a community garden and exhibition space for contemporary artists. Elsewhere, a £20m redevelopment of the Citizens Theatre get under way next year, the most comprehensive since the building opened in 1878.

Unlikely as it may have seemed only a few years ago, then, Laurieston is now perceived as hip, and you can sense this change in the diversity of the people you see living and working here; young artists from Europe and refugees from Africa mixing with native Glaswegians who have lived here all their lives.

Tradesman Stephen Cairns is in the latter category, and now rents one of the new flats from New Gorbals Housing Association. “I’ve seen so much change around here,” he tells us as he leaves for work. “The people here have always been great, which is the most important thing.

“But what they’ve done in Laurieston is fantastic. I love my flat and this community a brilliant place to live and bring up a family. People of all creeds and colours get on well together and there’s a real buzz around the place. And once we get more shops and businesses it’ll be even better.”

This is the sort of reaction Fraser Stewart gets all the time from his tenants and occupiers. The director of New Gorbals Housing Association has been involved in regenerating this area for more than 25 years, harnessing people power with design to create attractive, sustainable communities. His organisation, working alongside Glasgow City Council and Scottish Enterprise, is behind the wider revival of the Gorbals that began in 1989 – the areas around Crown Street and Hutchesontown have already been extensively remodelled - and now has a lifetime of experience to pass on.

He’s justifiably proud of the positive changes he and his committee of local residents have been pivotal in making, both to the buildings and the people who live in them. But why does he think his association has succeeded where so many other attempts at regeneration over the years has failed?

“Churchill was often wrong, but not when he said: ‘We make the buildings and thereafter they make us’,” explains Stewart. “Folk want and deserve good places and homes to live in and what makes them good - or better still beautiful, fantastic and brilliant - is design and specification.

“What folk in the Gorbals recognised was that if bad planning and design can disable communities, then good planning and design will enable and support them. My committee started off demanding the best of their traditional tenements, things like good closes and neighbours, a better street experience, robust but not overpowering scale, with the dreams and visions they were sold on in the 1960s.

“But they wanted visual variety, not relentless homogeneity. In 1997 our Moffat gardens development project, with its cutting edge contemporary design, clinched the 1999 UK City of Architecture award; no one looks at it and thinks ‘social housing’. All of the many significant design and architectural awards given to the Gorbals have been won by us, community-owned social housing.”

Showing us round the new development in Laurieston, Stewart argues passionately that design is central to every successful regeneration process.

“On a prosaic level, good architecture creates safe places to live, with good lighting, secure rear areas for kids to play in, traffic calmed streets and the like,” he says. “Inside, spacious and rational layouts take the stress out family life. On a more poetic level, however, it lifts your spirits and makes you feel better.

“Good design contributes towards cohesion in communities though legible streets, bright closes and good public spaces. Everyone knows that the earliest interventions to improve lives are the most effective and you cannot intervene at a more basic or earlier level than in the configuration of the physical environment.

“Pride is crucial to communities, and in that respect perceptions of the Gorbals are now well and truly reversed. When the Gorbals Arts Project engaged a range of kids recently about how best to brand a new garden, they wanted it called the ‘coolest’ place because - and I am not making this up - Gorbals has the coolest houses and buildings in Glasgow.”

As to the future, Stewart talks about a 12-year ongoing plan that will see all areas of the Gorbals linked more cohesively through pedestrian walkways, cycle lanes, and new civic spaces. As part of this, the multi-ethnic north Laurieston area around Bridge Street and Carlton Place will also be re-developed and improved.

He believes the “vibrant, successful and peaceful community” here will thrive, but is adamant that the design standards his housing association has set must be maintained. The work, he says, never stops, the lessons of the past must continue to be learned.

On my way back into town, I pop into the Laurieston for a spot of lunch; the traditional pie and beans hits the spot perfectly. The 1960s décor of the pub, alongside the friendly local feel, makes you think you’ve stepped back in time. But the mixed clientele – long-time locals enjoying a dram alongside hipsters drinking craft beers - is representative of the wider changes I’ve seen in the area, and the welcoming atmosphere fills me with optimism. I raise a glass: here's to a bright future for Laurieston and its people.

Exploring Glasgow: The Architectural Guide, is out now on Birlinn, priced £16.99