52 CONTEXT 184 : JUNE 2025 Beyond the bureaucrats The Tenement Revealed: history, design and construction John Gilbert, Whittles Publishing, 2025, 384 pages, more than 300 photos and 150 diagrams and plans, softback, ISBN 978 1 849955 70 6, £39.99 ‘I always wanted a book on tenements,’ writes the architect John Gilbert as the first sentence of his preface, recalling that he was taught nothing about housing on his architecture course. Having since spent a long career renovating and improving Scottish tenement housing, he surely knows more about the subject than anyone. I too have always wanted a book on tenements, ever since living in Glasgow and researching housing improvement policies there many years ago. Gilbert’s book is even better than I dared hope for. He describes his aim as being to explain ‘how and why tenements were built, why they vary from place to place, and how they changed over different periods.’ His book will be invaluable to professionals working on tenements, and fascinating to anyone interested in architecture, construction or historic buildings. The many drawings are clear and delightful, and the photographs of immense value in telling the story and explaining about building techniques and materials. Readers unfamiliar with bunce, dwangs, greywacke, holderbats, nepus gables, peggies, platties, rhones, scuntions, tobies, twillath and wally closes will value the author’s explanations of these and countless other building terms. A tenement is a single building containing a number of separate flats or apartments. The contrast between the tenement tradition of working-class housing in Scotland and the lack of such a tradition in England and Wales is striking although in view of how common tenements are outside the UK, it is the relative lack of them in England that needs explanation. A variety of legal, technical and geological differences explain the difference between England and Scotland. There are about 895,000 tenements flats in Scotland, one third built before 1919. The main outer walls were almost always built of stone, though party walls and rear elevations are often in brick. Most tenements are of four storeys, or sometimes five if at a corner or overlooking an open area. In Edinburgh, tenements of eight, 10 and 12 storeys were not uncommon in the 16th century. In the early 1970s local authorities in various parts of Scotland and England were experimenting with home improvement as an alternative to slum clearance. Jon Gower Davies described the unfortunate experience at Rye Hill in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in his 1972 book The Evangelistic Bureaucrat. In around 1972, Glasgow Corporation tried a pilot project of tenement improvement in the Old Swan area, but it took two years to rehouse the residents and, as at Rye Hill, the consequence was the destruction of the community and its supportive social networks. A chapter by Mary Taylor on ‘The role of community-based housing associations in urban renewal’ in John Gilbert’s book tells the inspiring story of how activists in Glasgow invented a completely new approach. This grew out of a project by architectural student Raymond Young, who had been inspired by Jane Jacobs on a year out in Canada during his course. Wanting to improve tenement homes for their existing residents, Young and his colleagues set up an organisation called Assist (for which Gilbert worked for many years) in Glasgow’s Govan area. Coping with a variety of ownerships, needs and preferences depended on the flexibility that Assist provided by supporting the residents’ own efforts with a free technical service, operating from a local shopfront office. One of the keys to achieving this was working out how to install a bathroom in a typical bed recess in a tenement flat. This was done by installing a plumbing stack down through four flats, one above another, so that each resident could install a bathroom. If they were not ready, they could still remain living there and connect a bathroom later. Assist’s success led to a major programme of community-run housing associations improving tenements throughout Glasgow and further afield. (Raymond Young later headed the Housing Corporation in Scotland and chaired Architecture and Design Scotland.) The result was thousands of tenements, once considered obsolete and beyond saving, being given a new lease of life. The guidance in The Tenement Revealed will greatly help in ensuring that this valuable housing stock will be managed and maintained effectively in future. The text contains a great deal of repetition, which more careful editing could have avoided. Rob Cowan, editor of Context A drawing of a tenement from The Tenement Revealed
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