Problems
The blocks were popularly known as 'Hutchie C' and nicknamed 'The Hanging Gardens of the Gorbals' in reference to the large balconies arranged in groups of four throughout the building. For the first ten years the building was reasonably popular with its inhabitants. However living in the development proved less glamorous as the maintenance required for such a large and complex structure was underestimated from the beginning. By November 1976, the local MP Frank McElhone, councillors and Scottish Office officials, attended a meeting called by the Laurieston and Hutchesontown Tenants' Associations who pressed for solution to the problem of damp and fungus in the buildings, which led to water running down the walls and water beetles lodging in children's clothing. Several tenants had been following a rent strike for a year in order to get action from Glasgow City Council. The future of the blocks was a major issue in the 1982 by-election in the Glasgow Queen's Park burgh constituency which covered the site.
The persistent dampness, coupled with the attendant problems of vandalism and the uncompromising design, meant that by the 1980s the complex had become a by-word for all that was worst in public sector housing. In 1987 and 1988, the City Council undertook a major renovation, adding a sloping white roof with pediments, placing bright blue cladding around the exteriors of lift shafts, and enclosing the by-then unusable balconies in conservatories.
Read more about this topic: Hutchesontown C
Famous quotes containing the word problems:
“Our [adult] children have an adult’s right to make their own choices and have the responsibility of living with the consequences. If we make their problems ours, they avoid that responsibility, and we are faced with problems we can’t and shouldn’t solve.”
—Jane Adams (20th century)
“Belonging to a group can provide the child with a variety of resources that an individual friendship often cannot—a sense of collective participation, experience with organizational roles, and group support in the enterprise of growing up. Groups also pose for the child some of the most acute problems of social life—of inclusion and exclusion, conformity and independence.”
—Zick Rubin (20th century)
“Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual “morning in America” paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)