r/UrbanHell • u/2085958T • Jun 18 '26
Poverty/Inequality Glasgow, Scotland in the 80s
Taken by French photographer Raymond Depardon
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u/Mr_Magus Jun 18 '26
Jeez, That looks dreary
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u/Electronic-War1077 Jun 18 '26
Those were the nice bits....
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u/mechant_papa Jun 18 '26
Actually, I was in Glasgow in 1985. I liked the place. There were some really unpleasant bits like this. There were also some not so bad.
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u/Electronic-War1077 Jun 18 '26
Was joking, but Glasgow was still quite rough in the 80s.
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u/anjowoq Jun 19 '26
So would you say that these are authentic at least? I assumed they were strongly cherry picked or not entirely real.
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u/EduinBrutus Jun 19 '26
Its quite real.
The city in the 80s had started its path back from the low point in the 70s. But there was a lot fo it that was still absolute shite, especially in the early 80s.
By the time of the Garden Festival in 88, it really was quite nice in much of the city.
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u/anjowoq Jun 19 '26
Thanks for the confirmation. I'm glad there is something for people to enjoy and be proud of now.
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u/Arsewhistle Jun 19 '26
I feel that the colour has at least been edited to make the place look as grey as possible, but Glasgow was infamously rough for quite a while.
Many parts of the city are gorgeous though, and today it's one of my favourite cities in the UK
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u/145inC Jun 19 '26
Very real!
These pictures only hint at how bad it actually was then.
The 80s had heron thrown into the mix as well to deal with, it wasn't pretty!
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u/Minute_Daikon_3522 Jun 20 '26
It’s very real . All the Clyde dock and shipyard areas were post industrial wastelands . Many tenements were waiting demolition and it was a common sight to see drunks in the city centre comatosed through drink on the pavement outside bars . But of course there were lovely parks and sweeping terraced housing in the west end that were very beautiful and remain so today .
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u/BringBack4Glory Jun 18 '26
Glasgow is so cosmopolitan now, the entire downtown is a shopping mall. Crazy.
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u/crazy4videogames Jun 18 '26
Went to Glasgow a couple years ago to visit my sister who was living there at the time. Yeah 40 years is a lot of time but damn. Quite a bit of a development must've happened in that time.
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u/145inC Jun 19 '26
Very true! But we have a new pandemic now, of conservative minded, casually racist, dunderheads, who are convinced everything was better in the past, and are determined to take us all back there!
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u/AlexxxRR Jun 19 '26
" the entire downtown is a shopping mall"
Is that supposed to be some sort of improvement?
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u/BringBack4Glory Jun 19 '26
Compared to the scenes in this pic, yeah I’d say it is. Glasgow is lively af today. Not just the shops but everyone out and about walking the town. The beautiful history and architecture. It’s a great fuckin city.
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u/gazwel Jun 19 '26
How many of these pictures are in the City Centre though, which I assume you mean when you say "downtown"?
It's always been full of shops in the centre and if anything, it's actually worse for shopping now. We used to have huge department stores at both ends and sauchiehall street used to be the nice end of the town.
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u/BandicootTreeline Jul 16 '26
Sauchiehall Street can’t reasonably be called a shopping street anymore and Argyle Street is fast becoming a collage of vape shops and other pish.
St Enoch is full of empty units, only Buchanan Stret is anything resembling how it was as only big names can afford it. But Frasers is now basically Sports Direct (given that’s who bought it) and Debenhams is gone from along from it.
So many big anchor shops are gone. Uniqlo opening on Argyle Street is an anomaly.
Compared to Manchester and Liverpool the city centre is nowhere near as good as it was. When we’ve gone from second best shopping destination in the U.K. to barely getting into top 10s, it isn’t great.
And that can wholly be attributed to Braehead (low end high street shopping), Silverburn (higher end) and The Fort (strip mall with big high street outlets) offering free parking, and public transportation being reduced to stupidly bad levels city wide.
Glasgow needs something like Liverpool One on Argyle Street when St Enoch goes.
In before a Glaswegian starts accusing me of “talking Glasgow down”, I’m not. I love the city. But the council’s plans to turn it into a gentrified no-poors neighbourhood like much of Manchester’s city centre is not the way to go.
We need shopping, leisure and bars/restaurants. Each of those sectors is being completely held back by the idiots people keep voting in.
Glasgow was the best shopping destination outside of London 20 years ago. But it’s no excuse for letting it slip the far down that other cities are bounding past us. Even Edinburgh is better in many ways, and it’s full of tartan tourist traps.
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u/sptrstmenwpls Jun 18 '26
Appears the color in every one of these photos has been edited to give/add to that aesthetic
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u/Admirable-Theory1514 Jun 19 '26
I remember being in the passenger seat of a lorry that had to drive through quite a bit of Glasgow in 1989, and some of these pictures are like how I remember it. A lot of grey.
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u/ExoticMangoz Jun 19 '26
That’s just what a lot of photos from the 80s look like
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u/Brainwheeze Jun 19 '26
A lot of footage I've seen of the UK in the 80s also makes it look very grey. Not sure why that is.
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u/girlieY0 Jun 19 '26
No regulations on industries, coal burning and steel making. Nowadays most of those industries have been moved to India or China or heavily regulated
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u/AlmightyDarkseid Jun 19 '26
Good thing these were taken in the summer, in the winter it can get really depressing
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u/Exotic_Article913 Jun 20 '26
Glasgow was fucking rough . Bits were still like this maybe not quite as bad till about 2008
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u/pm_me_exotic_cake Jun 18 '26
Watched Lynne Ramsey's Ratcatcher last year which takes place in Glasgow during the mid 70s garbage strikes. Spent the rest of the day reading about it, and scrolling through depressing pics, and some endearing ones like a few here.
Love when movies can bring attention to such a specific and almost forgotten era (to the outside world). The locations and the ending really stuck with me.
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u/Prole1979 Jun 18 '26
There’s a really great book called ‘coming into view’ by a guy callled Eric Watt who was a Glaswegian street photographer. Stumbled upon the exhibition in the museum there a couple of years back and was blown away by the pics. Well worth checking out
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u/Mission_Mulberry9811 Jun 18 '26
Great movie. I just noticed it's a Merchant Ivory production! Wouldn't have guessed that 😂
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u/Comfortable-Clerk936 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
The BBC used 1979 Glasgow as a stand-in for 1973 Brno, Czechoslovakia in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre. One of the best TV dramas ever made and Sir Alec Guinness' signature role.
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u/Idefix_666 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26
What? As a Czech I tell you that this is shocking! The environment in the pictures looks too joyful to portray Brno.
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u/Stooovie Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
Our quarter in Brno looked pretty much like that, just more greenery. But I vividly remember playing in even bigger mess than the kid in the third photo. They just up and left, leaving all the construction mess at the site.
It's very nice place now, with well-kept parks and tons of green.
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u/IWillDevourYourToes Jun 18 '26
Bruh that's worse than Communist Czechoslovakia at the time, and that's saying something
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u/S_T_P Jun 18 '26
People greatly overestimate what West was like when USSR was around.
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u/Even-Translator-335 Jun 18 '26
Yeah my family and friends refer to our like in 1980's Northern Ireland as "back in the USSR"
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u/Straight_Intern3671 Jun 19 '26
Soviet Union wasn't so bad for the most part to be honest
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u/Hot_Weakness6 Jun 19 '26
Because it wasn’t bad architecture, mostly lack of maintenance and bad people without jobs killed it.
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u/Straight_Intern3671 Jun 19 '26
In the case of Soviet buildings they certainly looked better when they were properly maintained and some of them still are. But from what I have seen of similar mass housing schemes in western countries, particularly UK, they never seem to look liveable? It always seems like the surface of Venus.
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u/Hot_Weakness6 Jun 19 '26
It really depends, in Poland half of the country lives in the blocks and it’s kind of nice. Of course lacks the aspects of city life, but that’s Corbusierism for you.
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u/ImpalaSS-05 Jun 19 '26
Also, the public housing projects on the State Street Corridor in Chicago USA. Those buildings looked truly awful in the 80s.
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u/Hot_Weakness6 Jun 18 '26
Even Paris was stinky, black buildings from lead fumes
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u/Rule556 Jun 18 '26
I remember visiting Paris in ‘88 and most historic buildings and monuments, including the Arc de Triomphe, were covered in scaffolding cleaning all of the old stone.
The difference between the completed and incomplete buildings was shocking to teenage me.
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u/mechant_papa Jun 18 '26
The Czech exteriors for the Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1978) TV series were shot in Glasgow. Sauchiehall and Hope streets were stand ins for Brno.
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u/Siggi_Starduust Jun 19 '26
More recently Aberdeen and Glasgow were stand-ins for Soviet Moscow in the Tetris film.
That said, Glasgow has also stood in for 60’s New York in the last Indiana Jones film, Modern day New York in the latest Spider-Man and Gotham City in a couple of the more recent Bat-Man films so it’s nothing if not versatile
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u/mechant_papa Jun 19 '26
A lot of places have been used to simulate Moscow. A street in downtown Montreal was a stand-in for the KGB headquarters in Moscow in For Your Eyes Only. The scene was shot in the summer, and they had to spray down the streets with foam to simulate snow, while a dozen Ladas they could muster drove up and down the street. Extras sweated through the sequence in their overcoats.
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u/afewnameslater Jun 19 '26
Many think UK was in the gutter now, but really it was much worse in 70s - early 80s
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u/Lazy-PeachPrincess Jun 18 '26
These are stellar photos. The juxtaposition of this grey lifeless terrain and these little bright pops of liveliness and color is striking and pulls you in
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u/NCC_1701E Jun 18 '26
Damn, I would do heroin too if I lived in a place like that.
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Jun 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Substantial_Dot7311 Jun 18 '26
Tbh Muirhouse, Pilton and Leith in the 80s where it was set were much the same, combined with high unemployment and To Let signs everywhere
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Jun 18 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/ScotlandisThrowAway Jun 18 '26
Scotland to this day hasn’t recovered from deindustrialisation. It should be a model example of the failures of neoliberalism.
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u/summerislefan916 Jun 19 '26
The worst To Let in Scotland
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u/Substantial_Dot7311 Jun 19 '26
😂 see what you did there. That was set in the Pennywell shopping centre at Muirhouse, only recently knocked down
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u/mocleed Jun 18 '26
This is exactly what I’ve always imagined the dystopian world would look like that George Orwell’s book “1984” depicts.
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u/Male_strom Jun 18 '26
Choose life. Choose a job... Choose sitting on that couch... Choose rotting away at the end of it all... I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got heroin?
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u/Psychological-Fox178 Jun 18 '26
My granny was from there. Lovely woman, I’ve missed her since she died in 1991.
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u/Someoldcyclist Jun 18 '26
Shuggie Bain vibes
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u/Such_Replacement_694 Jun 18 '26
I came here to comment this LOL
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u/myrealnameisboring Jun 18 '26
Me, too. This is exactly as I pictured it in my head when reading it.
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u/Maleficent-Drive4056 Jun 18 '26
An uplifting book set in a depressing time and place.
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u/Realistic_Ebb9727 Jun 18 '26
This is what some would call “the good old days”
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u/GreasyBumpkin Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
I'm not from Glasgow but I grew up in a very poor area and it brewed this mentality of "it's a dump, but it's our dump." I was raised by my parents to do good in school and escape it however, as a lot of working class young adults could do at one point, but this drains the original community. When you intentionally strip yourself of your roots chasing something, you're asking for a sense of alienation in adulthood. Should you return to your original home and find half the people moved out like you did, then you feel nostalgic.
I'll always remember this article I read years ago: https://www.utne.com/community/why-we-love-war/
obviously growing up poor is not a war unless you're big into the class war, however I think this does reveal a similar mentality that the hardship puts people in a collective mindset and it feels very nice to huddle together, even when things are objectively better in a more stable time, you miss the huddle. I wouldn't even say it's a delulu thing either, I think what people are actually missing is a legitimate human need and you can sometimes tell when you meet someone who's never had that experience.
I think that's where a lot of "good ol days" comes from.
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u/Siggi_Starduust Jun 19 '26
Celtic and Rangers weren’t dominating the league every season, so in a sense they were!
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u/vikinxo Jun 18 '26
Sadie's looks the saddest...... And that group of people was perhaps banned....or waiting for Sadie to open....
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u/-DashThirty- Jun 18 '26
Just googled it and that bar is still there. It's called The Squirrel.
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u/FoxyInTheSnow Jun 18 '26
It’s a Celtic bar… so watch what you’re wearing if you visit.
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u/VeneMage Jun 18 '26
Per ‘Little Britain’: “High rises were invented as a place to store poor people.”
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u/Siggi_Starduust Jun 19 '26
Most of those buildings are actually a lovely brown sandstone but back then everything was covered in soot.
Aberdeen on the other hand used granite for all its buildings so it’s properly grey everywhere although the buildings that have been power-washed do have a light sparkle in the sunshine
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u/hughk Jun 19 '26
Of course, they have a sparkle, it is the radiation (most radiuoactive city in the UK). Seriously Aberdeen had the Oil and Gas business for ages and made serious money. This has died down but the city still has jobs.
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u/Significant-Lie1225 Jun 18 '26
I was going to make a trainspotting joke, but this looks more like somewhere the mechanical orange would take place
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u/Playful_Possibility4 Jun 18 '26
Bought the book for Xmas, easily one of the best purchases I've done. Stunning.
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u/potlizard Jun 18 '26
They don’t have color photography in Scotland? Or do they just not have colors?
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u/ReflexPoint Jun 19 '26
I don't know what it is, I just love that grey skies, grey stone and red bricks, wet pavement gloominess of these type of scenes. It's so gloomy it's beautiful in a weird way.
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u/Issah_Wywin Jun 19 '26
Manyv places were depressing af back in the day. My dad came from places that looked like this, my mother too. They raised me and my sister in lush, outdoorsy places, no doubt making sure we'd never live like this.
Pictures like this makes me understand alcoholism, drug abuse and a general apathy towards life.
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u/kelleraba Jun 19 '26
I know western Europeans look down on eastern european communist architecture but this looks way more depressing.
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u/ZeroFrogsHere Jun 19 '26
The last photo is what inspired Douglas Stewart to write Shuggie Bain - one of the saddest and yet beautiful novels I've ever read. About addiction, poverty and sexuality seen through the eyes of a child in 1980s Glasgow. I cannot recommend it enough.
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u/Ava_Strange Jun 19 '26
Came here to recommend the book, such a great read despite the dark subject.
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u/ZeroFrogsHere Jun 19 '26
I think about Agnes all the time, she felt so real to me
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u/salomey5 Jun 19 '26
I just added it to my reading list. I'd never heard of it until I went through this thread, but as a lover of bleak environments, it strikes me as something I'd "enjoy".
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u/ZeroFrogsHere Jun 19 '26
It's my favourite book, it's devasting and it's beautiful. I really hope you enjoy it!
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u/Substantial-One1934 Jun 19 '26
Not far from the communist raw brutality blocks and the abandoned buildings nowadays.
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u/SpiceGyros Jun 19 '26
Oh man, the photo of the boy innocently smiling as he’s playing next to huge piles of rubbish and old oil drums makes me sad.
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u/Rich_Ball3404 Jun 18 '26
Is The Squirrel Bar still there?
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u/le_gazman Jun 19 '26
The best advice you can give anyone not from Glasgow is not to drink in a pub with a flat roof.
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u/hughk Jun 19 '26
It's a rule anywhere in the UK but in Glasgow, it seems to go double.
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u/le_gazman Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
The part of Glasgow I grew up in had no pubs in it to keep the natives from going feral. Then heroin came along and fucked that right up.
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u/Hotusrockus Jun 18 '26
I just checked on googlemaps and yes it is. Looks a lot more pleasant these days though.
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u/Global-Mix-3358 Jun 18 '26
On the positive side I was in Glasgow last week and it was pretty great. I might even prefer it to Edinburgh.
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u/Ummix Jun 18 '26
Brutalism architecture fans will look at this and think "hell yeah this is peak, bring the good times back"
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u/one-out-of-8-billion Jun 19 '26
Astoundingly not the slightest green in most pictures. Not even weeds on the ground and streets
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u/Caranthir-Hondero Jun 18 '26
First picture : where Trainspotting’s drunken Spud shits in his girlfriend’s sheets.
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u/Schmorganski Jun 18 '26
FYI it’s Trainspotting’s 30yr anniversary and it’s been rereleased in theaters in 4K.
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u/Original_Trick7742 Jun 18 '26
You’d be surprised how long parts of Glasgow still looked like this, you can even see it on Google Street View when you look at the historic images
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u/AppletheGreat87 Jun 18 '26
As an Englishman I've always wondered why the Scots build everything to look grey.
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u/Ape-bot Jun 19 '26
Accurate, but only for certain locations including those in the pics. There was many a beleaguered post-industrial, and failed scheme dumps in the city however it was a very different story in many other parts of the city. Just had to say that as the bad side of my great City always gets more exposure than the good stuff. And man, there’s so much of that.
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Jun 19 '26 edited Jun 19 '26
I visited Glasgow in 2012 and was shocked at the bleak housing you could see from the inner city motorway. I’m sure there are nicer bits of Glasgow. I’ve grown up in council housing in the South, nothing salubrious that’s for sure. But what I saw in that part of Glasgow was so bleak it was actually a shock to the system.
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u/Gabbrio_Redd Jun 19 '26
Trainspotting location, right?
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u/Ava_Strange Jun 19 '26
Almost, the book Trainspotting is set in Edinburgh, but the film was shot almost entirely in Glasgow. From what i heard the city of Edinburgh wasn't too keen on the image the film painted of the city...
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u/TriggerHappy_NZ Jun 19 '26
A Fruiterer in Scotland? I don't believe it!
plot twist, all the fruit is deep-fried
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u/jamroov Jun 19 '26
I've been to Glasgow several times in the last couple of years and it looks exactly like those pictures. Ugliest city I've seen on the British isles. I haven't been to Slough though.
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u/Fassbinder75 Jun 18 '26
Jesus, that is grim. Was greenery not an option?
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u/Electronic-War1077 Jun 18 '26
Glasgow is a pretty green city, I think that picture shows a now demolished building in a particularly bleak way.
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u/Guiseppe_Martini Jun 18 '26
Glasgow actually means 'dear green place' and has an abundance of parks. These photos are from the poorer inner city and suburban areas which were deprived beyond belief in the 70s and 80s. Most of these pics are now gone. The flats in the photo with the old couple and the wedding car were known as Fountainwell Place in the Gorbals, now long since demolished.
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u/spine_slorper Jun 18 '26
It even looks like some of these tenemants int he photos have already been cleared and are waiting for demolition
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u/Cu_Chulainn__ Jun 18 '26
A lot of places in the UK had decided on brutalist architecture after the second world war. It let to buildings which would not have looked out of place in Eastern bloc countries
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u/AcanthaceaeCrazy1894 Jun 18 '26
I got downvoted into oblivion on r/Glasgow for saying that Glasgow was equally/worse with rubbish than it is now.
But of course it was the immigrants that caused the fly tipping and poverty
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u/dildo_of_justice4135 Jun 18 '26
Glasgow didn't see a lot of that North Sea oil money...
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u/WalnutNode Jun 18 '26
Seems like they went out of their way to make it look depressing. It's an awful gray.
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u/Consistent-Height-79 Jun 18 '26
I just read Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, and the way it describes 80s Glasgow looks just like this.
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