Clearing the Slums
By MORRIS LINDEN AT the end of the last war Scotland was faced with an enormous re-housing problem. In a pre-war survey, the Scottish figure for overcrowding was given as 22.6 -. per cent. of the population, as against the combined English and Welsh figures of 3.8 per cent. The figure for Glasgow was 29 per cent. Other Scottish figures were Dundee 24 per cent., Aberdeen 22 per cent., and Edinburgh 17 per cent. Before the war Glasgow had the worst housing in Western Europe. By 1945, although she as the only municipal authority in Britain •• allowed to continue with housebuilding. her position had .; worsened. As late as .1950, Mrs. Alice Cullen, Labour M.P. , for Gorbals, said in the House that in her constituency 4,500 . families lived in one-roomed apartments (the famous single..., ends), and nearly 10,000 in two-apartment houses, many of ' them dilapidated, tumble-down, rat-infested holes. Families of eight were in one room, and fifteen in two rooms, and among them were people in their teens suffering from tuberculosis. At the 1952 census, it was shown that 37 per cent. of Glasgow's 306,000 households had neither w.c. nor bath. When re- building started in 1945, it was estimated that Scotland needed 500,000 houses. This in a country with a population of only five million. It was, and still is, an appalling state of affairs.
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