A photograph showing the backcourts of tenements built by the City Improvement Trust in Howard (now Finnart) Street in Bridgeton in 1914.
The Glasgow Improvement Act, 1866, gave the town council the power to set up a City Improvement Trust to purchase slum property, demolish it and to widen and re-align narrow city centre streets. Glasgow was one of the few cities to tackle the problem of slum housing.
Many houses in the city centre were demolished and new streets laid out, but the Trust was underfunded and private builders were reluctant to develop housing on the cleared land. From the 1880s the Trust began building houses intended for "the poorest classes". The Howard Street development contained sixteen single-apartment houses and thirty-two two-apartments. By 1913 the Corporation (which assumed the powers and property of the Trust in 1895) had built 2,199 tenement houses in the city.
Reference: P-404
Reproduced with the permission of Glasgow City Council, Libraries Information and Learning
Keywords:
backcourts, City Improvement Trust, council houses, flats, Glasgow Corporation, Glasgow Improvement Act, 1866, rents, slum clearance, slums, tenements, washing lines
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