Bruce Report - City Centre

City Centre

Central to the report's recommendations were a set of radical proposals which amounted to wholesale demolition of a large section of the city centre. These would have involved knocking down many historic and architecturally important Victorian and Georgian buildings. The report advocated rebuilding most of the city centre to a single design with the aim of creating a coherently planned city. Part of this plan involved removing residential dwellings from the central area and replacing them with commercial developments that would house new service industries. Various inner urban tenement slums in central districts such as Townhead, Anderston, Cowcaddens and Charing Cross would be cleared to make way for concrete office buildings, many of which still stand today. For example southern reaches of Townhead were re-zoned for educational use in preparation for the former Royal College of Science and Technology's growth into a university. The college's inclusion in the new University of Strathclyde in 1964 made use of this space.

Among the buildings earmarked for demolition were many which are now regarded as Glasgow's most significant architectural assets. Bruce's proposals called for the demolition of (amongst others) Glasgow Central Station, The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow School of Art, designed by the renowned architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow City Chambers which is considered the civic heart of the city. Glasgow Royal Infirmary would also have been completely demolished and replaced by a new hospital. Robert Bruce's justification for these radical proposals was the creation of a new "healthy and beautiful city" based on formal 1950s architecture. Ultimately less draconian measures were sought for the regeneration of the city centre.

Many of the large mixed-use commercial and residential developments which went up in the 1960s in the light of the report’s recommendations were flawed in their execution, being of contemporary Brutalist architecture which quickly dated and aged badly over time, and soon fell out of favour. The infamous Anderston Centre, built in the early 1970s was a prime example of this – the grand “megastructure” designed by renowned architect Richard Seifert had fallen into partial dereliction by the early 1990s, and came to symbolise the mistakes of the city’s 1960s regeneration efforts.