Bruce Report - 21st Century Perspectives and The Bruce Report

21st Century Perspectives and The Bruce Report

With hindsight, many of the suggestions in the Bruce Report might seem draconian or even idiotic. From a contemporary perspective many find it hard to imagine advocating the wholesale demolition of so much of the city, or how so many buildings we now recognise as significant and beautiful could have been earmarked for destruction. In some ways, the implementation of the Bruce Report was symptomatic of the naivety of the 1960s city fathers in their thinking that they could quite literally build their way out of poverty and decline.

Feelings about the Bruce Report still run high today: some argue the primary motivation was saving money for the Scotland Office and the British government, though it is hard to reconcile this with such a sweeping and expensive plan. If cost savings were genuinely the goal, expensive demolition and regeneration schemes seem unlikely. Bruce's prediction that the city would transition to a service based economy was ultimately proved correct. Today, the city's heavy industrial base has suffered almost continuous decline in the post-war era, whilst service industries (most notably education, research, financial services and tourism) have flourished and nowadays form the backbone of Glasgow's economy.

Seen within the context of its time, it seems likely that the report was genuinely motivated by a desire to improve the city. Architectural tastes in the early 20th century did not recognise the merits of then-recently outmoded Edwardian and Victorian buildings, seeing them simply as old and outmoded in much the same way as contemporary tastes often view mid-20th century architecture. The post-war drive toward a modern, clean and socially responsible Britain resulted in many sweeping schemes such as the Bruce Report. Most of these had mixed success and failure, partly because of flawed inception and partly through incomplete execution. Indeed, some of the Bruce Report's legacy has been reversed—new local authority housing developments, for example, have been constructed in the inner areas of the city, leading to the abandonment and demolition of the 1950s-era schemes on the outer periphery of the city.

Imagining a Glasgow either without the Bruce Report or having followed it to the letter conjures two images very different from both each other and the vibrant modern city that Glasgow is today. Those parts of the plan that were implemented can be argued to have contributed in equal measure to the strengths and the shortcomings of Glasgow today.