IN THE last hurrah of the Cold War, the BBC made a movie about Guy Burgess, the MI6 officer who fled to the USSR. They wanted to show his life in Moscow in the 1950s. So they filmed in Glasgow.
The 1983 film, An Englishman Abroad, showed Mr Burgess, played by Alan Bates, in what producers thought looked like a suitably drab Soviet apartment building. It was Moss Heights, one of Scotland’s first tower blocks.
The old Glasgow Corporation had put up the flats in 1953, shortly after the Burgess defection. They had been experimenting with multi-stories ever since councillors had seen them on a post-war European tour.
READ MORE: Every single tower block in North Lanarkshire to be be demolished
Glasgow – and its Clydeside suburban counterparts – bought in to skyscraping like almost nowhere else in Britain. The city built high and then boasted about it. Its Red Road flats were wrongly claimed to be the highest in Europe – even though they fell way short of kind of heights hit by showcase Stalinist buildings where the real Mr Burgess wandered.
Glasgow’s highest buildings were the twin Camlachie towers near Parkhead, at 30 storeys. Like all the high rises, they had indoor toilets in every flat – a godsend for many former tenement tenants.
READ MORE: Every single tower block in North Lanarkshire to be be demolished
Lanarkshire – despite having more space – followed the trend, Its Muirhouse scheme had seven 17-storey towers. Then Glasgow started demolishing. In 1993 the “streets in the sky” Gorbals complex designed by Basil Spence was blown up. The Camlachie and Red Road flats came down 20 or so years later. Now North Lanarkshire goes low-rise.
The West of Scotland may no longer look quite like a BBC producer’s notion of a Soviet theme park.
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