Thin Ayrshire

Andrew O’Hagan goes back for the missing

David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964. We’re fond of hating his ideas nowadays, of seeing the horror of those damp flats and pointing up the stupidity of the planning. But Gibson and his allies were visionaries of a sort. They thought they could obliterate the past with new production, and they had reason to think a project like that might turn out to be for the good of everybody. It may be obvious now how wrong they were, but Gibson’s urge to remake, to deliver his own people out of the slums and into a pure, new, shock world, has plenty of wrong-headed nobility in it, and no shortage of high-mindedness.