A girl pushing a baby buggy across derelict land against a backdrop of crumbling homes. Boys with nowhere to play standing in a filthy, vandalised close.

Glasgow used to deliver these images on every corner. Not any more.

Exactly a decade after the city's 2003 housing stock transfer much of Glasgow is unrecognisable.

Former city council leader Charlie Gordon today laughs about London news photographers who expected to come up with depressing pictures of Easterhouse or Drumchapel.

Mr Gordon, who championed the controversial stock transfer, said: "Now when they send a camera crew from London to find shorts of bad housing, they struggle.

"They usually end up with empty houses that are scheduled for demolition.

"If you drive around Glasgow it is very hard to tell a socially rented house from a private one."

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Nobody is saying poverty has gone away since Glasgow Housing Association took over 82,000 old council houses in 2003. But it certainly isn't as picturesque.

Mr Gordon – now out of politics – believes the transfer, despite GHA's ups and downs over the last 10 years, has proved to be a success.

He said: "It's mission accomplished.

"I don't know of any public housing investment project anywhere in Europe bigger than the £1.2 billion GHA has done."

This may sound like Mr Gordon patting himself on the back. But the ex-council boss was never a huge ideological supporter of "arm's-length" bodies.

So why did he – and much of Scotland's then political elite – come to back the transfer?

The answer is that the then Chancellor Gordon Brown offered to cancel Glasgow's crippling housing debt of more than £900 million, £1bn in today's money, if the city handed its homes (and the tenants who came with them) to the new GHA.

It was an offer – even for those, like Mr Gordon, who believed in municipal housing – that was too good to refuse.

Today, revealing the history for the first time, Mr Gordon said: "All other things being equal you are better with democratic control and accountability.

"It was made quite clear to us that it was just about getting the debt written off or keeping the houses.

"What were we going do here? Keep our dogma pure? Or accept the solution that is on the table, which will benefit all the tenants in the city?"

So how grim was city housing back in 2002? Well, the £900m debt was eating up 50p of every pound paid in rents. The result? Some of the worst housing in Britain.

Worse, the council was still paying off debts for developments – such as doomed Hutchie B and Queen Elizabeth Square projects – that had already been demolished.

By the spring of 2003 so-called "non-essential repairs" in the city had been on hold for 19 years.

Basically, nobody had had a bannister fixed or a kitchen tile replaced by the council since 1984.

Mr Gordon today insists it wasn't all the council's fault.

The Scottish Office, he stressed, historically underfunded housing in Glasgow as it focused on new towns, such as East Kilbride.

And this is where the second big reason for the stock transfer came in: the campaign to give more power to tenants.

Margaret Curran, now shadow Scottish secretary, was a minister in the first Scottish Executive back in 2002.

She too championed the stock transfer.

She said: "We needed to find a way to tackle the housing debt – it was like an albatross around Glasgow's neck.

"No matter what they say about Gordon Brown, he was the man who agreed to share that debt across the UK.

"We had had mistakes in Glasgow, with big experiments and big investments.

"When you balance tenant involvement with expert advice, you're more likely to get things right. The last 10 years have proven that."

Housing insiders, however, stressed there was always a tension among supporters of the housing stock transfer, between reluctant converts such as Mr Gordon and those, like Ms Curran, who believed in tenant-controlled housing.

Those tensions have taken years to resolve themselves, not least in the years of squabbles about so-called "second stage transfers".

Should GHA break up into lots of small tenant-controlled organisations. Or should it be "Glasgow housing department in drag"?

Such concerns were buried as Mr Gordon, Ms Curran and others campaigned for Yes vote on the stock transfer.

Against them were trade unions and a grassroots campaign, warning that GHA would be seeking private funding.

In April 2002, tenants voted by three-to-two to back the transfer, a far narrower margin than anyone expected.

Huge sums were spent on the campaign, £1000 claimed one critic, SNP MSP Sandra White, for every 'Yes' vote.

Ten years on and Ms White doesn't regret the transfer.

She said: "I'd say GHA is now getting its act together, especially under its current chief executive Martin Armstrong."

Her fellow nationalist Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland's Deputy First Minister, makes it clear that the party is now firmly behind the body.

She said: "GHA is a strong and successful social landlord that has demonstrated a sense of purpose and a clear commitment to complete its second stage transfers .

"It has played a very effective role in implementing Europe's largest house-modernisation programme, backed by hundreds of millions of pounds from the public purse.

"I have no doubt that GHA will continue to deliver a service firmly rooted in the principle that the needs of its tenants come first."

david.leask@ eveningtimes.co.uk