the way it was
This is Govan, Glasgow, Scotland, UK.
I was born and raised here. Its a working class Community on the river Clyde based originally on shipbuilding. They built great ships here - at Fairfields and Harland & Wolves, shipbuilders, as great as the men who built them. Here it was, the best 19th century urban housing in Britain enclosing shops, cinemas, schools, parks, pubs of course, Churches - many of them - and everything we could need to grow up and live here in a tightly knit physical and social fabric. Eventually globalization and incompetent politicians an city planners and architects fucked it all up. Ships were built elsewhere and the men of Govan were trashed, unemployed. Their politicians - the Labour Party - which had used them as election fodder for decades stood by and let it happen. Then, finally the middle class architects and planners who hated this tight urban environment (it didn't fit their mindless suburban dreams) punched bug holes in the streets with their tacky, carparks, bus depots, malls, and 'public open space' with Their windswept, dreary and unpolicible spaces. Turned the place into an endless winter with a few blackened leafless trees. How these middle class bastards: the capitalists, the politicians and the planners must have hated the people who built the ships.But I didn't.
