FOLLOWING recent stories about street litter in Govanhill, today we look back to 1975, when Glasgow's bin men went on strike.

These office girls certainly had a mucky commute, having to clamber over piles of rubbish in the lane between Holm Street and Hope Street.

Elsewhere in the city, such as Crawford Street in Partick, became huge tips, piled high with tens of thousands of overloaded rubbish bags.

By early March the situation had got so bad that the Chief Environmental Health Officer advised the Corporation to call in the army to remove refuse before serious health hazards developed. Soldiers began work on March 19 and removed 39,000 tons of rubbish before the strikers returned to work on 14 April.

Lynne Ramsay's 1999 film Ratcatcher gives a good idea of how the city looked, and smelled, during the dispute.