What Happened to Anderston?

[Music] [Applause] thing about wandering in the streets of glasgow um [Applause] i quite like wandering in this area and for a number of reasons it's not far from the river i always like to head down to the river it's nice walking by water um but the area also has an industrial feel to it and i've always liked wandering through areas in cities that are or where once involved in lots of industry and although there's practically nothing in the street now and it's clearly largely derelict if you look at the curve stones and the pavement you can see lots of little kind of issues that would once have led somewhere they don't lead anywhere now because i see the land that's just completely derelict but it's just a little a clue that at one time something was going on in this area and that there was activity of some sort and if you look at aerial photographs of this area i can't remember the date of these 40s or 60s i'll put the date at the bottom of the screen you will see just how busy this area once was with industry there's any number of buildings occupying every bit of ground there was no vacant space and every bit of land was put to good use from an industrial point of view everything from mills to engineering works foundries breweries bottle walks and every industry under the sun [Applause] and given that it is all derelict though the question is what on earth happened to [Applause] [Music] anderson [Music] this is anderson in 1795. the village came into existence in the early 18th century with weaving in individual cottages being the main industry here we see a little more detail in this map dating to 1807 even back then you can see the street layout that exists today with the high street or main street now part of argyle street and finishing road now stop cross street forming two sides of a long recognizable triangle emanating from anderson cross close proximity to the river clyde meant anderson was well placed to export goods and it wasn't long before any number of industries moved in to take advantage of the location in this close-up of the same 1807 map we can see kevin and company's brewery which later became the anderson brewery on either side of cheapside street there's a cotton works and a cotton mill the latter said to be a fireproof cotton mill given the fire disaster in cheapside street in 1960 there's a strange yet tragic irony there by the middle of the 19th century anderson had become part of the rapidly expanding city of glasgow and you can see just how heavily industrialized the area had become in this 1857 map on the right you can see anderson cross and at the sharp corner between main street and stob cross street is gushit house here's that house in 1882 main street is on the right and stop cross street is on the left [Music] just a couple of meters to the west of this bus stop is where anderson cross used to be and it is very hard to try to visualize what it was like before all this stuff happened and from the cross you had various roads going in all sorts of directions washington street staub cross street at main street in anderson used to be called high street then it was a main street and then it just became part of argyll street and you had bishops street going up that way and of course a girls tree going this way and just underneath the flyover the approach to the kingston bridge is anderson railway station of course you do have to wonder what possessed is to go from this to this monstrosity [Applause] another of the older photographs of anderson um shows sharps lane i'll show you on a map just now i used to run between main street and anderson and stop cross street just a short lane um in this photograph just in looking at the photograph and comparing it with a map was taken from stop cross street looking this direction and they almost almost exactly kind of runs from that little insert in the pavement there which you probably can't see in the line of this uh pedestrian bridge here towards stop cross street it's a lovely old photograph [Applause] in this mid 20th century aerial photo i've marked each end of cheap side street with red arrows the left hand arrow is pointing towards a short row of tenements that still exist today and beside them you can see saint mark's church and burial ground [Music] amidst all this dead election there are a couple of little bits of the old anderson left at least in this industrial area um the red sandstone building that you can see there used to be hsn's tires and i'll show you a photograph of it just now and in that photograph you can also see the the flats just on the left of that building [Applause] [Applause] and although there's nothing to see today [Applause] in this bit of grassy ground this was once the burial ground for mark's church the church being located on the northern end of the burial ground [Applause] a little bit of a these small buildings creeping to another photograph um which shows the cheap side flower mills and it's only for you look at some of these photographs muslim taking the night in the 1960s by john our human that you realize the anonymity of industrialization in this area at one time and it's quite astonishing to wander these streets today and just find it to be another wasteland [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] at 7 15 in the evening on the 28th of march 1960 here in cheapside street a fire broke out and bonded warehouses just here containing upwards of 30 000 gallons of whiskey and other spirit initially two pumps are fire engines attended along with the turntable ladder but as soon as they arrived in the scene it was a pun this was a quite big fire and a call went out to make pomp's five and very quickly it became apparent that this was becoming an inferno and another call went out to make pumps eight about one minute after that call was made there was a massive explosion and the front of the building just blew out and landed in cheapside street burying firefighters salvagement and their vehicles and a call went out to make pumps 10 and send ambulances 19 men died here [Music] this is elliott street i suppose it's right at the very edge of what you might tear them anderson and this will give you a good idea of how a lot of the streets and the industrial areas of anderson once looked um you've got three main structures here the white one along the end used to be cranston hill foundry the one next to that which is now smith and roger used to be anderson grass foundry and the one just at the corner here it was cook's saw factory and these aren't just functional buildings i mean you know there's a lot of work being put into making these structures look nice that white brickwork around the windows and doors and these three structures are all different [Applause] and you do wonder how an earthway could ever have lost so many beautiful structures in the anderson areas like cheap side street and work or work street and other streets um in fact the police used to be a police station and i think it was cranston street just around the corner and to look at photographs of that it was a stunningly beautiful structure of some considerable architectural merit how could we have knocked that down you know i don't quite understand because all that seems to be in that sort of area is either spare ground or very boring looking structures [Applause] i thought i'd do this last bit in the house for one that's much quieter than it is out there and um also in the last bit that i did the sort of closing footage i messed up i should have learned my lesson by now and that lesson is always to do two or three different takes of the same thing just case something happens you mess it up sometimes when you get footage back home and you think oh my god i've missed out words i'm talking gibberish i forgot to switch the microphone on or there's any number of things it can go badly wrong and sometimes you can kind of play about with the footage and cannot correct it a little bit but sometimes you realize that you just can't use that bit of footage because it's not very good one thing you may have noticed about most of the the footage in this video is that the background noise and as the noise of traffic on the m8 motorway uh approaching and crossing the kingston bridge um i mean for i'm recording on the vocals i use a wee bit of compression which i use just to level level out the sounds and try and kind of stop any kind of great peaks and such like level out but it does have the effect of increasing background noise and you will have noticed that the sound of this traffic was really quite loud and you can still hear me talking thankfully but it was kind of just always there sort of a drone that you just can't escape from so the question is excuse me what did happen to anderson and there are a number of reasons why anderson didn't quite disappear but suffered a serious decline certainly and as far as industry is concerned i mean anderson's still there today it's um it's largely modern housing um there's very little in the way of industry in the area certainly nothing compared to what it was like for some of these aerial photographs were taken that i showed you earlier the construction of the m8 motorway and its approach to the kingston bridge and the kingston bridge itself in the 1960s um was significant as far as anderson is concerned um that construction cut huge swathes through the city of glasgow and in particular in anderson and destroyed quite a bit of it but it's not the only factor at play here and i think probably what we're looking at is a just a general decline in industry in all of scotland and what you might turn the post second world war period um where we had decline in industry over the whole of the country not just in anderson but anderson seemed to suffer particularly badly he had a reduction in the use of the river clyde um to both transport goods and to build the ships that were used to transport any goods and when that kind of declined then just there was no reason for all these industries that sprang up just quite close to landsfield key in anderson to exist anymore um things were being transported um in different ways he also had an increase in importation of goods from foreign countries and that must have had a huge impact as well everything seemed to be declining in scotland in the middle uh towards the late 20th century governments destroyed our coal mining industries they destroyed our steel making industry and our ability to make things and more and more stuff was getting imported from foreign countries it was becoming no longer viable for us to do all this stuff ourselves and one of many consequences of that was the great reduction in other industries that somehow went hand in hand with these major industries i say it's just a scenario that was echoed all over scotland and perhaps it was just more obvious and anderson i'm eddie burns take care [Music] if you didn't have money [Music] what do you need [Music] take it back to basics [Music] [Music] [Music] a place to cry oh take a seat to set on [Music] without the this [Music] what do you need [Music] me to say [Music] you

Channel: Ed Explores Scotland

Views: 63,663

Keywords: Anderston, Anderston Cross, Stobcross Street, Main Street Anderston, Argyle Street Anderston, Cheapside Street, Cheapside Street fire, St Mark's Church burial ground in Anderston, Cheapside Flour Mills, Kingston Bridge, Old Gusset House in Anderston, Sharp's Lane in Anderston, Elliot Street, Scottish industrial history, Scotland's industrial decline, Eddy Burns, Glasgow, River Clyde, John R. Hume

Id: irUjsjdvEOw

Length: 28min 2sec (1682 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021