Red Road Flats

The Red Road Flats were a mid-twentieth-century high-rise housing complex located between the districts of Balornock and Barmulloch in the northeast of the city of Glasgow, Scotland. The estate originally consisted of eight multi-storey blocks of steel frame construction. All were demolished by 2015. Two were "slabs", much wider in cross-section than they are deep. Six were "points", more of a traditional tower block shape. The slabs had 28 floors (26 occupiable and 2 mechanical), the point blocks 31 (30 occupiable and 1 mechanical), and taken together, they were designed for a population of 4,700 people. The point blocks were among the tallest buildings in Glasgow at 89 metres (292 ft), second in overall height behind the former Bluevale and Whitevale Towers in Camlachie, but still held the record for having the highest inhabitable floor and the highest floor count of any building constructed in the city.

Views from the upper floors drew the eye along the Campsie Fells to Ben Lomond and the Arrochar Alps, then west past the Erskine Bridge and out to Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran continuing south over Glasgow and East towards Edinburgh. On a clear day, the buildings were visible on the Glasgow skyline from up to 10 miles (16 kilometres) away. The 31st floor of the point blocks and the corresponding 28th floor of the slabs were reserved as a communal drying area.

Among the best-known of Glasgow's highrise housing developments of the 1960s, the buildings were formally condemned in July 2008 after a long period of decline, with their phased demolition taking place in three stages between 2010 and 2015.

After the publication of the Bruce Report in 1946, Glasgow Corporation identified Comprehensive Development Areas (CDAs), which were largely inner-urban districts (such as the Gorbals, Anderston and Townhead), with a high proportion of overcrowded slum housing. These areas would see the mass demolition of overcrowded and insanitary tenement slum housing, and their replacement with lower density housing schemes to create space for modern developments. The dispersed population would be relocated to new estates built on green belt land on the outer periphery of the city's metropolitan area, with others moved out to the New Towns of Cumbernauld and East Kilbride. These initiatives began to be implemented in the late 1950s.

Balornock was a green belt area that had undergone little development before the construction of the Red Road estate. The original plan for Red Road was far more modest than the eventual high-rise scheme – it called for a complex of maisonettes no taller than 4 storeys. What emerged was Glasgow Corporation architect Sam Bunton's scheme to house a population of 4,700 people in 28- and 31-storey tower blocks which were at the time the highest in Europe, although they were quickly surpassed when Birmingham City Housing Department opened The Sentinels, two 32-storey council blocks in 1971 (these were themselves surpassed by the 42-storey Barbican Estate in the City of London completed in 1973).

The first three towers were formally opened on 28 October 1966, by the Scottish Secretary, Willie Ross. For most of the early residents the flats provided a considerable and welcome improvement to their living conditions, since most had previously lived in much worse housing, often severely overcrowded, either nearby or elsewhere in the city. From the time they were built until recent years, they were owned by the local council.

Contemporary critics of the scheme accused Bunton – who was close to retirement at the time – of championing the development as a personal vanity project; he was well known within Glasgow Corporation as a strong proponent of high-rise housing; his practice having designed other similar multi-storey estates around the city. Bunton was said to have dreamt of "building a Manhattan-style skyscraper" in Glasgow, hence the use of the steel frame construction system in place of the "system-built" pre-fabricated concrete panel method which had been used for all other tower blocks built in the city until then. This would create one of the estate's most significant legacies – steel construction had to be fire-proofed, requiring the use of asbestos, a legacy which blighted the estate in later years. Bunton argued for the steel frame in numerous letters to the Glasgow Herald in February 1963, saying "it is the best material available in the construction field since it brings into active participation an array of steel erectors, and the resources of an industry which is at present only working at one-third of its capacity", thus suggesting that local politics (primarily lobbying from Glasgow's underworked steel fabrication industries) had shaped the design of the buildings in other ways.

During the original construction, large amounts of asbestos were used to ensure the structural integrity of the buildings' steel frames in the event of a fire. Despite contemporary concerns over the suitability of the nature of the fire proofing solution used in the buildings, Bunton vehemently defended it, stating in an article to the International Asbestos Cement Review in 1966; "steel and asbestos in partnership with social others operate as the collective that stabilises Red Road and holds it together, albeit provisionally, as a viable, safe housing solution".