Henry's Songbook

[1994:] Drumchapel [housing estate] was part of the City Fathers' destruction of Glasgow. Instead of renovating the old tenements in the heart of the city they decided to raze them to the ground. The tenements symbolized everything that was bad about Glasgow, except to the people who actually lived in them, but there has never been a politician who listened to the people anywhere. In the Fifties in Glasgow they bulldozed away our history and background, erecting high-rise monstrosities that the people neither wanted nor needed. They created council housing estates or 'schemes', that were no more than ghettoes to replace ghettoes. Two-thirds of Pollok, eight miles to the south-west of the city, was built after the War and then Easterhouse sprang up six miles to the east, Castlemilk, five miles to the south-east and Drumchapel six miles to the west. (Henderson, Finding Peggy 89)