1959: Tackling Glasgow's HOUSING CRISIS | Second Enquiry | Classic BBC Documentary | BBC Archive

"So you've come to Glasgow, have you? Pretty grim, isn't it?" - Jameson Clarke, 1952.

Second Enquiry is a BBC documentary series that looks into some of the major social problems facing Britian in 1959.

This edition, entitled New Lives for Old, looks at Britain's ongoing housing crisis. Robert Reid and Jameson Clarke pay a return visit to Glasgow, the city with the biggest housing problem in the UK, which the BBC series Special Enquiry visited in 1952. They meet the Malcolm family, who in 1952 where living in a single dank room in French Street in Govan, and who now live in an airy new council house in Cranhill. What has become of their old room in French Street?

Glasgow has built over 30,000 new homes since 1952, but still the number of people waiting for a house is rising. Now in an ambitious attempt to turn the tide, Glasgow is undertaking "one of the biggest social upheavals since the industrial revolution". The densely populated old tenements in the likes of Hutchesontown and Gorbals are being torn down, and some 300,000 inner city residents are being moved out - some to new housing estates on the outskirts of the city, others to over 30 Scottish towns.

Taking in the uprooted Glaswegians are places as varied as the new town of East Kilbride, the harbour town of Girvan, and the old market town of Haddington. How are these areas coping with their new residents, and how are the new residents adapting to life in their new homes?

Clip taken from Second Enquiry, originally broadcast on BBC Television, 6 February, 1959.

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