Glasgow memories: When city streets were filled with smog and sooty tenements

The city would have revelled in the chance to bring Europe’s cheesiest, cheeriest music festival to the banks of the Clyde, given our track record of staging big events such as the Commonwealth Games, the MOBOs, COP26 and sporting occasions aplenty.

Glasgow as a tourist hotspot, attracting people from all over the world, is a vision of the city many who grew up here in the 50s and 60s might have struggled to believe.

Regular Times Past contributor Ian Hutcheson, who lives in the west end, agrees.

“Like Glaswegians of a certain age, I still can’t quite believe my eyes when I see open-topped buses full of tourists enjoying the sights and admiring the city’s impressive buildings,” he says.

“There was a time when even the idea of tourists coming here would have been scoffed at - and as for them gazing at the buildings, that was hard to imagine.”

Ian adds: “After all, what could street after street of soot-blackened buildings have to offer the curious visitor?  Nor was the city’s appearance doing much for its own people either. I can remember hearing Glaswegians, on holiday and preparing to return home, saying they were going back to ‘dear old dirty Glasgow’.  It was said affectionately but spoke a cruel truth. They talked of living in grey or red sandstone tenements; but in reality, the grey was jet black, and the red, a shade of rusty brown.”

Glasgow’s sooty tenements and smog-filled streets – like these images captured in our photo archives demonstrate – are thankfully long gone.

“The change from dirty and old to tourist attraction, or ‘windswept and interesting’, as Billy Connolly might say, was thanks to the introduction of smokeless zones, first of all, eliminating the curse of coal burning and its polluting and despoiling action,” he says.

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“Then came the real game changer: stone cleaning, such a boring description for work that produced such a brilliant transformation in the appearance of the city.”

Ian recalls seeing premises in Partick “unveiled” after being shrouded in scaffolding and tarpaulins for weeks.

“It was the day of the great reveal, with all the cleaners’ gear cleared away and the building ready for its close up, brightly lit by the early morning sunlight,” he says.

“In the back court, I found a small crowd of residents all gazing in amazement, seeing not the grey and black building they had lived in all these years, but now appreciating the expanse of stone, appropriately the colour of sand or, if you were poetic, honey.

“No one said very much, there were just smiles and words of approval, and pride; an experience shared by those who now found themselves living in tenements of hues of rose and pink.”

Ian adds: “As the work of stone cleaning continued to improve the appearance of the city, it had a similar uplifting effect on the morale of its citizens.  Soon there was the Miles Better campaign, the title of City of Culture, the Commonwealth Games and, we would never have imagined it, COP26 – and, of course, tourists by the busload….

“There is more to do, of course, but what changed the face of the city was the result of the work of the stone cleaners, now seemingly forgotten by those who witnessed it, while those who came after are unaware of their efforts.  Perhaps they are due a plaque on one of the buildings, now admired by residents and visitors alike.”