Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2011)
Built historiography in Glasgow’s New Gorbals – the Crown Street Regeneration Project
Abstract
In 2000, the Crown Street redevelopment in Glasgow’s New Gorbals was completed after a master plan by Piers Gough of the London firm CZWG. Built on symbolically contested grounds that were previously occupied by the Gorbals tenements (1870s-1960s) and the high-rise Hutchesontown flats (1960s-1990s), the new development is a textbook example of neo-traditional design. This article looks at the Crown Street redevelopment as a form of built historiography that inscribes a harmonized account of the past into the urban fabric. Like a written narrative, plan and buildings convey a historic narrative through tropes and character types. The historiographic dimension of the Crown Street redevelopment works on three levels. There is the site, which in various moments in the twentieth century came to signify the urban ‘other’ – the city’s underbelly of crime, plight, and misery – and which, as a result of both gentrification and architectural redesign, is now apparently pacified. There are carefully chosen historic references such as tenement façades, bay windows, underpasses, courtyards, and rues corridors, which communicate certain conceptions about recent history. And there is a municipal strategy for Glasgow’s economic revival, of which the re-writing of history is a part, and which, among others, makes use of the Crown Street redevelopment’s architectural imagery. On all three levels the Crown Street redevelopment reconciles conflicting perspectives: on the one hand a break almost as comprehensive as the modernist upheaval, which involved complete redesign and exchange of the population, and on the other hand the conception of historical continuity and long-lasting community life. Conveying a historical image cleared of ambiguities and imperfections, the Crown Street redevelopment thus communicates a message of both renewal and permanence.
