Castlehead - Clyde Valley Regional Plan

Clyde Valley Regional Plan

After the Second World War, during which the Luftwaffe scored one direct hit and a score of near misses, Castlehead faced a new threat from a study group set up by the Scottish Office.

The co-authors of The Clyde Valley Regional Plan (1946) were Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Robert H Matthew, and they began work on their blueprint for the future in 1944. To understand their perspective, it has to be remembered that the jet engine was still a secret weapon at the time and foreign travel something that required a troopship.

The report includes a detailed and precise account of Paisley’s history, industrial prosperity and culture. It charts the rapid nineteenth century expansion of the town and an equally rapid decline towards overcrowded slums. Population density was greater than even Glasgow’s. This was a problem that post-war Scotland would have to address urgently, but Abercrombie and Matthew believed that expansion should not encroach too far onto the farmland to the south and southwest. This was an invaluable national asset, as five years of food rationing had demonstrated.

Castlehead, together with the adjacent Craw Road, Riccartsbar Avenue, and most of the residences spread out to Brodie Park and Corsebar Drive, provided their escape from a dilemma. Here was an area of extremely low-density housing close to the town centre. Better still, wartime shortages of materials and tradesmen had left it unkempt and neglected. There were no gardeners for hire. Able-bodied husbands and sons were in the Forces and so were house painters, builders and slaters.

Stating glibly that “the report does not set out to make detailed proposals for individual towns”, the authors then included an artist’s impression of Paisley as they would like to see it. Described as “a bird’s eye view”, and in full colour, it shows that Castlehead, Craw Road, High Calside and the rest have gone – replaced by high-density skyscrapers. There were 16 storeys to the concrete tower blocks they envisaged for the south side of Main Road from Woodend to Calside and they were hardly any smaller on the other side.

And so on it went – another vast plantation of concrete and roughcast replaced Craw Road and Riccarstbar Avenue, and there was yet another on what appears to be the present site of the Royal Alexandra Hospital.

The Ferguslie cricket ground was to be preserved, and so, it seemed, was the old Canal Street with its ribbon of tumbledown tenements and what looked like an impossibly busy Canal Street station and its attendant coal yards and sidings.

Castlehead householders, having survived Adolf Hitler’s bombs, feared that they were about to be evicted for some derisory compulsory purchase settlement. For some there would have been no alternative to becoming council tenants on this dystopian new housing estate. The protests were vociferous, but the council seemed unconcerned. The reason soon became clear: apart from following the Town and Country Planning directives on short-term permission for garden sheds and garages, Paisley ignored Abercrombie.

The Clyde Valley Regional Plan played its part in shaping post-war Scotland. It proposed the new towns of East Kilbride and Cumbernauld, the Glasgow overspill strategy and had a host of plans for regenerating industry, transport, and agriculture. But in this and much else it failed to realise how much the world was going to change.

Abercrombie and Matthew’s priorities included an improved rail service to Gourock and Wemyss Bay to handle the hordes they envisaged taking holidays on the Costa Clyde, as it was later (and ironically) dubbed. They wanted to preserve farmland at all costs so that the nation’s food supplies would never again be threatened, but they enthusiastically recommended dotting the region with little wooden huts, their so-called “holiday shacks” where dutiful citizens would spend rural holidays and long weekends. The Balloch end of Loch Lomond would be a National Recreation Centre, with sail boats, canoes and hotel complexes as ugly as any in today’s package holiday destinations. There was also to be a holiday town of dachas at Roseneath.

Having opted against encroachment on the indifferent agricultural land at the foot of the Gleniffer Braes, the report proposed a major iron-ore terminal opposite Dumbarton Rock and an iron and steel plant on the rich farmland between Bishopton and Erskine. Bishopton would become a full-blown New Town and so would Houston. The report did not, however, contemplate anything as far-fetched as a New Town at Erskine.

By 1947 the Burgh Engineer, John McGregor, a Castlehead resident, had outlined plans of his own for a new Paisley pattern. Canal Street and George Street would be redeveloped and the overspill from the overcrowded homes there and elsewhere in the town centre re-housed in new garden suburbs to the south and west—Glenburn and Foxbar. There were many pitfalls and many objections before McGregor’s dream became a reality in the 1950s. But Abercrombie’s eccentric vision was receding. Castlehead and common sense had prevailed.

And, of course, Castlehead began to pick itself up again. Gardeners and housemaids were becoming politically incorrect as well as expensive, but tradesmen were back from the war and the area began to look better. The Burgh Engineer who followed McGregor, Val McNaughton, saw the area’s best hope of further revival in dividing houses into more manageable units and building on dead land between some of the bigger houses. All this began to happen in the late 1950s and within 20 years McNaughton was singing the praises of Castlehead when it was designated a conservation area of architectural and historic merit.