Valerie Wright

The managing of competition: Government and industry relationships in the jute industry 1957–63

This paper examines the development of the 1963 court case brought by the Board of Trades Restrictive Trading Agreements Office against jute manufacturers, in order to examine the impact of the newly introduced competition policy for government–business relationships. Governments active enforcement of competition marked an important change in the direction of industrial policy in the UK and the jute industry was one of the cases to be examined.

Education for Active Citizenship: Women's Organisations in Interwar Scotland.

Following the enfranchisement of women in 1918 women’s organisations throughout Britain reconsidered and revised their aims for the future. In many cases this involved educating their members, and women in general, on how to use their new influence in society. Such ‘education for citizenship’, which also drove attempts to raise the political consciousness of women, was a defining feature of the educational programmes of a range of women’s organisations in interwar Scotland. This paper focuses on the activities of two societies: the Glasgow Society for Equal Citizenship and Edinburgh Women Citizens Association. These organisations strongly promoted ‘active citizenship’ as the next step for the feminist movement. Consequently, both worked intensively to ensure that the women of Glasgow and Edinburgh, respectively, knew how to use their votes in order to best achieve further reforms. This article examines the educational strategies used by both organisations.

Women as Active Citizens: Glasgow and Edinburgh c.1918–1939

This article examines evidence of active political engagement by women in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the inter-war years of the twentieth century. While discussing the wider context of womens political activities in this period, in terms of party politics and the range of womens organisations in existence, it focuses in particular on Women Citizens’ Associations, Societies for Equal Citizenship and Co-operative Womens Guild branches. Comparing interventions by such womens organisations in the two cities around the selected themes of political representation, housing, ‘moral and social hygiene’, and contraception, the article demonstrates that womens organisations participated in public debates and campaigns to advance what they perceived as womens interests. Temporary alliances around issues such as the regulation of prostitution and provision of contraceptive advice brought together a range of womens organisations, but class differences in perspectives became increasingly apparent in this period, particularly in Glasgow. The issues addressed by womens organisations covered the spectrum of ‘equal rights’ and ‘welfare feminism’, although they did not necessarily identify as feminist. Common to all organisations, however, was a commitment to active citizenship, with women becoming a recognised part of local political networks in this period, although they remained poorly represented in parliament.

'People and their homes rather than housing in the usual sense’? Locating the tenant’s voice in Homes in High Flats

ABSTRACT In recent years, the social research of Pearl Jephcott has been subject to scholarly reappraisal on the grounds that it displays an early commitment to the unmediated reporting of ‘the authentic voice of her participants’. This article investigates the extent to which this claim holds for Jephcott’s seminal 1971 study Homes in High Flats. It suggests that, although Homes in High Flats sought to investigate ‘people and their homes rather than housing in the usual sense’, the study’s ability to realise this aim was complicated by the social distance obtaining between researcher and researched. Based on re-analysis of the study’s archived research materials, the article explores how this distance mediated the researchers’ interpretation and re-presentation of the tenant’s voice, deepening understanding of the epistemological premises of Jephcott’s work.

Isolated and dependent: women and children in high-rise social housing in post-war Glasgow

ABSTRACT In 1971 Pearl Jephcotts Homes in High Flats, the culmination of her groundbreaking research into high rise living in Glasgow, revealed the problems faced by young mothers on the new high rise estates in the city. This article interrogates two connected factors, social isolation and economic dependence, which characterised the experience of many women who were rehoused to high flats in the postwar decades. Drawing on evidence collected by Jephcotts research in the form of qualitative questionnaires with high rise tenants as well as ethnographic observation and action research with residents, we argue that the experience of many women of managing everyday life in a high rise flat with young children was frustrating, often lonely and unsupported, at a time when the home was still conceptualised as central to womens lives. Jephcott asserted that high rise housing had socially negative consequences for women and children. We do not disagree but argue that in the particular context of the postwar settlement, womens financial and welfare dependence on top of their particular housing circumstances in high rise flats constrained their opportunities rather than producing contentment thereby demonstrating the value of revisiting social research data.

Aspiration, agency, and the production of new selves in a Scottish new town, c.1947–c.2016

Narratives of deindustrialization, urban decline and failing public housing and the negative outcomes associated with these processes dominate accounts of post-war Scotland, bolstering the interpretation of Scottish exceptionalism in a British context. Within these accounts working people appear as victims of powerful and long-term external forces suffering sustained and ongoing deleterious vulnerabilities in terms of employment, health, and housing. This article challenges this picture by focusing on the first Scottish new town which made space for working peoples aspiration and new models of the self manifested in new lifestyles and social relations. Drawing on archival data and oral history interviews, we identify how elective relocation fostered and enabled new forms of identity predicated upon new housing, new social relations, and lifestyle opportunities focused on the family and home and elective social networks no longer determined by traditional class and gender expectations. These findings permit an intervention in the historical debates on post-war housing and social change which go beyond the materialistic experience to deeper and affective dimensions of the new town self.

‘Housing Problems … are Political Dynamite’: Housing Disputes in Glasgow c. 1971 to the Present Day

Historically, it has often been easy for those in power, whether in local or national government, to try and ignore the concerns of those that lived in the housing stock they owned and managed. This was especially true in the context of increasing stigmatisation and ‘residualisation’ of council housing from the 1970s. There are obvious continuities evident in the neglect which led to the fire at Grenfell tower last year. The justified anger and activism both before and following the loss of life at Grenfell has historical precedents throughout the UK. This article takes a case study approach to analyse the campaigns undertaken by community groups in Glasgow from the 1970s and beyond to highlight the council’s blatant attempts to blame the residents for its failures. This was not a new strategy for Glasgow’s municipal authorities, which had been struggling with some of the highest levels of overcrowding in the UK for decades. Persistent narratives which stigmatised residents in the city’s inner city and peripheral housing estates helped the authorities to try and minimise or dismiss demands for housing improvements. This article highlights how activists in the Gorbals and Castlemilk fought back by drawing public attention to the conditions in which they were living. There are lessons to be learned from their methods and tactics, a heritage currently being drawn upon by housing activists in Glasgow today.

Urban Regeneration in Glasgow: Looking to the Past to Build the Future? The Case of the ‘New Gorbals’

The Gorbals area of Glasgow, Scotland, is widely regarded as a successful example of urban regeneration. However, this neighbourhood, like many similar working-class urban areas, has been subjected to repeated cycles of renewal. This chapter seeks to explore the history of a ‘successful’ regeneration, looking both spatially and socially at what has happened in Glasgow’s Gorbals over the long term. In the past, ‘regeneration’ was often a process enacted on behalf of residents by planners, architects and municipal authorities. We posit a multi-method approach, tracking changing policy ambitions, physical change, and exploring the resulting physical and social environments in order to investigate the complex inter-relations between space, place, community and time. The authors argue for the centrality of the narratives of those who have lived in the area both in the past and today in any assessment of relative ‘success’.

Planning for play: seventy years of ineffective public policy? The example of Glasgow, Scotland

ABSTRACT This paper looks at the planning and provision of outdoor play spaces for children over a seventy-year period since the Second World War. Using Glasgow as a case study, the paper examines whether and how research on families and children living in flats has been used to inform national and local planning policies in this area, and in turn how well policy is converted into practice and provision on the ground. The paper considers these issues in four time periods: the period of post-war reconstruction from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, when large amounts of social housing was built; the period of decline and residualization of social housing in the 1970s and 1980s; the 1990s and 2000s when several attempts were made to regenerate social housing estates; and the last five years, during which time the Scottish Government has developed a number of policies concerning children’s health and physical activity. Planning policy in Glasgow appears to have been ineffective across several decades. Issues such as a weak link between research and policy recommendations, unresolved tensions between a number of policy options, and a lack of political priority afforded to the needs to children are identified as contributory factors.

Slum clearance and relocation: a reassessment of social outcomes combining short-term and long-term perspectives

Abstract Housing research rarely takes a long-term view of the impacts of short-term housing changes. Thus, in studies of post-war relocation, narratives of ‘loss of community’ and ‘dislocation’ have dominated the debate for decades. This paper combines a ‘re-study’ methodology with oral histories to re-examine the experience of relocation into high-rise flats in Glasgow in the 1960s and 1970s. We find that both the immediate and longer term outcomes of relocation varied greatly; while some people failed to settle and felt a loss of social relations, many others did not. People had agency, some chose to get away from tenement life and others chose to move on subsequently as aspirations changed. Furthermore, relocation to high-rise was not always the life-defining event or moment it is often depicted to be. Outcomes from relocation are mediated by many other events and experiences, questioning its role as an explanatory paradigm in housing studies.