People must have thought these blocks of flats were a big improvement on the old tenements with inside toilets, bathrooms, fitted kitchens, electric heating and bigger rooms, but they ended up just as bad and started to fall apart after ten years. Same thing in England, but sadly many perfectly decent terraced houses were demolished simply because they were old.
I was born in 68 and we moved into QE Square from Cathcart Road tenements. I remember the housewives out mopping the long corridors and the communal stairwells, and me getting baths in the big kitchen sink. People were happy to be away from the closes and middens.
Trip down memory lane…I used to play on that spiders web sometimes…I grew up in Govanhill but had a few pals from Hutchy town…my sister in law lived in the QE flats. It was an awful project, I think the designer was called Basil Spence though I could be wrong. Thankfully the demolition of tenements stopped at Govanhill and streets like Victoria Rd and Pollockshaws Rd survived and their grandeur is still there for all to see.
Aside from Area C and E, I wouldn't really call much of it 'brutalist', even if people tend to use this loosely to any large or imposing building they think makes their feelings 'brutalised', before they start raving incoherent shite about 'lack of human-scale' and 'the loss of individuality in large buildings'. A and D are quite strictly conventionally modernist. Sad that they're all going to be gone soon...
