Demolition by explosion. Sunday, March 23, 2025.
*Photo Notes: Canon 90d - High Speed Continuous 11fps -Canon 70-200 L f4*

The Wyndford estate was designed by Ernst Buteux and built 1961-69 on the former estate of the Maryhill Barracks by the Scottish Special Housing Association. The Maryhill Barracks hosted the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and the Highland Light Infantry and even held Rudolf Hess after his ‘peace’ flight when he attempted to meet with the Duke of Hamilton to negociate an end to the war. Yes Maryhill is named after a woman called Mary Hill, you can read about that here.

As with a lot of post war schemes the Wyndford had some high ideals, with a clear spread of housing types; 8 story, 15 story and these 4 towers at 26 stories; a community centre, 2 schools a nursery, a church and football pitches were all included. By the standards of New Town planning in this era the Wyndford was a well balanced, thought out ‘urban village’ approach which seems relatively sober when measured against Cumbernauld or Anderston. The balconies for the towers were originally left open to emulate the ‘stairheed’ closes of the tenements and encourage community in the building. Finished in 1964 these flats were very sought after and were considered aspirational in the area. Folk who got on the scheme considered themselves ‘a cut above’ as their landlord was SSHA and not the Glasgow Corporation.

However by the 1970’s people were desperate to leave the estate, the area around the high flats had become a notorious fleeto stomping ground, with muggings and heroine use becoming completely endemic by the 1980’s. I have been unable to find any photos of the area in this era much to my chagrin. Raymond Depardon’s photos of Glasgow in this era are probably the most complete body of work but I’m not sure if he took many in Maryhill, at least I have yet to find them ,despite owning the book. His work can viewed in part here.

In 2010-2012 their was a large programme of regeneration undertaken with the buildings being insulated and re-clad, new lifts and a district heating system with three 4500kw gas boilers that cost £27 million. Originally the buildings were built to surprisingly high standards for the time, with two stair wells and an incredibly robust super structure. In fact it was this ‘sturdy build’ that was used as an excuse to demolish them, Wheatley Homes citing the in-ability of repurposing the single person flats into larger homes. With 47,000 embodied tonnes of carbon expended in building them in the first place and the fact that these buildings were built so strong that they could easily last another 100 years it caused a lot of consternation that they would be blown up, replacing 600 social housing units with 386 units, 85% of which will be ‘mid-market’ rent. This obviously incensed a lot of folk, from residents to architects, ecologists and political factions. Residents had sit in’s, the Young Communist League infiltrated the building twice after the landlords had finally managed to extricate all the tenants. And with good cause, it seems so against Scotland’s sustainability goals that such well built buildings should be demolished to make way for houses that will likely not last much over half a century, cost more and house less people. For all the things that went wrong in the post war era we seem to have learnt very little lesson from it.

The photos below chronicle the demise of these towers from when I first started visiting them in 2018 and I have collated a bunch of links at the bottom of the article which go into much greater detail about many aspects of this fabled scheme and the protests against it’s destruction.

April 2024 - Cladding removed and stripped out revealing the hidden geometric patterning on the open air stairwells. The cladding solution that was added during the 2010 refurbishment and was a simple perforated metal paneling. The light here does a good job of illuminating the robust, re-enforced central structure of the building.
*Photo Notes: Mamiya RB67 - SEKOR C 50mm - CineStill 800T*
The halation of this film really accentuates the beautiful warm light that is illuminating the stripped out internals of these. Even though this film is Tungsten balance - it has a cooler colour temperature (3200k) than typical daylight balanced film - it has generated a really pleasing warm light, of course the lab scan will have corrected it’s coolness out somewhat. Only digital editing was turning the Red channel up and adding some sharpening. This is hand held so the depth of field isn’t quite as deep as I’d like, but the beauty of film photography is riding the balance of light, circumstance and equipment to create a compromise that works in the moment.

February 2024 - Soon after the cladding had started to be removed, showing the various layers that have been added to the concrete superstructure over the years.
*Photo Notes: Canon 90d - Canon 70-200 L f4*
*The light on this morning was sublime, so soft, so blue. This is almost the same composition as the photo I have of them being blown up.*

The pile of rubble that was 151 Wyndford Road. The chimney for the centralised, district heating system is in the background.

The Janitors House and the community hub in the background 2023.

Late Summer 2023 - A lot of the flats were vacant at this point and rather disturbingly the netting which had been installed over the derelict units balconies had started to collect dead Pigeons. On floor 12 of the right hand tower, 4 dead pigeons, on floor 8 someone’s washing drying.
*Photo Notes: Canon 90d - Canon 70-200 L f4*
*Perspective Corrected*

Technically these high flats at Glen Avon Road are on the border of Maryhill and Summerston, I call this photo ‘Joy To The Core of Maryhill’ and I would count this as my most aesthetic photograph of Maryhill (Gilsochill technically).

I wrote this short synopsis for this photo as I entered it into a competition … “The tower blocks of Glasgow been marred with a reputation of vice, isolation and unemployment. The architectural and societal principals of Brutalism were brimming with laudable, utopian ideals many of which never translated into reality. Many blocks have been demolished, due to endemic damp, shoddy building and myriad social problems. However many remain and these flats, 29 Glen Avon Road are getting slowly transformed from dark and isolated towers into bright, hi-tech buildings fit for the 21st century. Maryhill housing association is to install high speed fibre optic internet in the towers and is providing ‘digital inclusion’ lessons for residents. The cynic in me reckons the Bams will just get into crypto. More importantly they are replacing the ineffective and inefficient electric storage heaters and have three proposals for rearranging the layout of buildings and parking on the ground. It remains to be seen whether or not these proposals will actually improve reality for the tenants or will indeed be carried out in full. “

*Photo Notes: Mamiya RB67 - Sekor C 90mm - Cinestill 800t*

Here are the plans for regeneration https://www.maryhillhousing.dev/consultations/3 not sure whats been chosen but it does look like work is underway.

Here’s the sequence I managed to capture with the High Speed Continuous on my Canon, focus and exposure set manually and 11 frames per second - Sad that my SD card buffered and I missed the full collapse of the flanking towers. It’s pretty cool that you can see the fuse wires run up the close and the panels concertina out. It’s fair to say they did a pretty awful job of the dust suppression as shown in the photo below.