Anderston (Glasgow)

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Anderston is a district to the west of the city centre. Built upon the lands of Stobcross, the name is a portmaneau of “Anderson’s Town” – the village founded here in the 16th Century by the Anderson family who owned most of the land. The area’s most famous son is the comedian Billy Connolly.

By the time the Industrial Revolution came along, it had developed into a vibrant and heavily populated working class area supporting the city’s heavy industries. By the middle of the 20th Century however, like many parts of inner Glasgow, it had become an overcrowded slum, against a backdrop of the city’s declining industrial base.

Following the recommendations of the 1945 Bruce Report, it was declared a Comprehensive Development Area (CDA) by Glasgow Corporation, with most of the population re-homed in the peripheral housing estates. The bulldozers moved in and virtually flattened everything and started again whereby a new, planned Anderston made largely from concrete would rise from the ashes of the old. The area was split into three zones, an industrial zone on the western side of the M8 on either side of the Clydeside Expressway, a residential zone, clustered again on the western side of the M8 along St. Vincent Street and an commercial zone on the eastern side of the motorway. Like so much of Glasgow's grand regeneration scheme of the 1960s, Anderston's reinvention had mixed results. The giant Anderston Centre never fulfilled its promise, and slowly fell into disuse and decay in the 1980s, whilst the residents of the new housing estates found themselves cut-off from the city centre by the motorway.

In recent years, Anderston has seen a renaissance, with the city’s rapidly expanding financial services district and new waterfront developments changing the area markedly. Much of the old 1960s housing estates have been demolished, and the original street grid is being restored in areas. In 2013, Anderstonians almost symbolically saw themselves reconnected to the city centre when the infamous Bridge to Nowhere (aka the Anderston Footbridge) was finally completed.

ukhousing.wikia.com/wiki/Anderston