The Bruce Plan was published in the last days of the Second World War. All over the country towns and cities were planning to rebuild, not only bomb damaged areas, but to overcome the legacy of their too rapid growth since the industrial revolution.

This was an era of massive political will for change.

The railways, mines and power companies were to be nationalised. A health service based on need not money was to be provided for all. Education for the young, pensions for the old were to be extended.

Glasgow was Scotland’s greatest city by far. Over one in five of the population lived there. Glasgow was Scotland’s industrial and cultural powerhouse. Glasgow influenced and Glasgow set the pace.

Glasgow’s citizens lived in one of the most overcrowded cities in the world. Despite the great wealth generated in such a frontier town of the industrial age poverty was endemic. On the positive side, living in a great city offered advantages. The mighty Corporation of the City of Glasgow, the city authority, could provide much better services than most smaller cities and towns. The city was a centre for culture, sport and education as well as industry.

Since the beginning of the planning movement, at the end of the 19th century, the horrors of the unplanned industrial city had created a powerful anti-city political sentiment. The Garden City Movement had begun to tackle urban blight.

• Crucial to the Bruce Plan was reduction in population density - but not that much - if they wanted to keep population they'd have to build tenements. The spin here is against the very popular 'cottage' housing & in favour of vast housing schemes. (Bruce may be one of the planners in this clip)
• Slums, Overcrowding and War. The need for planning after the Second World War. Not Glasgow but Greenock plans ahead. The case form a urban planned approach to urban redevelopment.
• Autocratic Attitudes. Good intentions bad attitudes.From the top down in this Glasgow Corporation commissioned movie. The Corporation played a huge role in the life of the city - from this evidence - a very paternalistic one.
• 1946. The Corporation mix reality with aspiration here. Pollok planned before the War was being built. In many other areas mentioned here the government had banned building in their plans to reduce Glasgow.
• It didn't take long to cut back on the garden city ideals. The neat equation justifying higher density building in new towns - near the country + a car = you don't need a garden.

The Corporation knew a powerful anti-Glasgow momentum in government planners and politicians existed. The Corporation knew powerful forces planned, in tackling the city’s problems, to reduce the city’s power and influence, to bring Glasgow down to the level of the rest of small town Scotland.

They knew the New Towns Act was coming. They had been banned from rebuilding within their pre-War boundaries.

The Bruce Plan should then be seen as an alternative vision, an insurance policy, a manifesto in defence of the city.

The artists impressions especially show the influence of 20th Century’s megalomanic extremist of international modern architecture Le Corbusier but the words in the plan express a desire to redevelop in area by area, community by community.

Glasgow didn’t win its battle with the anti-city government, The city’s population was reduced by almost half. Many skilled workers and the factories they worked in were paid to relocate elsewhere.

• In the 1950s the Schemes. By the 1960s - Comprehensive Development Areas - set out to flatten whole districts of the 19th Century city.
• Slash and Burn. The Bruce Plan had lost. Carrying on a Glasgow tradition of 'Slash and Burn' development. This clip shows an outline for total destruction and resurrection in concrete. Lists surviving areas like Partick, Pollokshaws and Woodlands that were to be razed and replaced by brutalist CDAs.
• Hutchesontown CDA. New town planning principles in city context. Did that shopping centre ever have all the shops occupied - before it was in turn redeveloped in the 1990s?

By the mid-1950s when the city was allowed to build more inside its own boundaries a new era of system-built multi-storeys housing had been promoted by a government concerned with numbers and not the quality of houses built.

Much of the Bruce Plans inclusive community sentiments had been ditched and the hard line Comprehensive Development Areas policy had bulldozed into action.