With the Commonwealth Games set to return to Glasgow, Dylan Brewerton-Harper returns to some of the communities that were condemned last time it came to town.
It was revealed back in April that with the Australian state of Victoria withdrawing itself as host for the 2026 Commonwealth Games, a new host needed to be found – one with the infrastructure already in place to ensure the Games could go ahead at such short notice. No time for the usual years-long adjustment period of rapid building and drastic urban restructuring that cities come to expect when they’re announced as hosts of major sporting events such as this.
All eyes on Glasgow. Ten years on from the 2014 Games hosted in Scotland’s biggest city, it is poised to host it once again, after Commonwealth Games Scotland put the city forward as a last resort option.
I didn’t live in Glasgow in 2014 to witness the impact of the Games firsthand, or in the seven years leading up to the event after the city was announced as host in 2007. Those years, as my recent research found, were fraught with the double-edged sword of ‘regeneration’: investment in new infrastructure, housing, sports and leisure facilities paved the way for gentrification, social-urban engineering and cleansing, and a promised ‘legacy’ which saw communities dispossessed and displaced.
My research grew from a desire to understand the extent to which there was a ‘haunted’ quality to the post-industrial city – specifically in this instance, Glasgow, during the years between the city’s announcement as host in 2007 through to the event year. What I found was a shocking story of displacement and social engineering in the East End. Although quite widely publicised at the time, through a broad front of academics such as Libby Porter and Neil Gray, the campaigning work of the Games Monitor as well as others such as the documentary work of Liam Young, and a BBC documentary from 2014 titled ‘Commonwealth City’ painted a sobering picture of the Games real legacy, and provided a reminder of capital’s ability to create and destroy in one fell swoop. This is simply what we’ve come to expect in the neoliberal city.
Applying the theory of hauntology to these spaces, and tying it to a deeper understanding of demolition as a sociological and cultural phenomenon, I uncovered a decades-long history in Glasgow that persists to this day. In 1977, the Scottish historian and literary critic David Daiches wrote of the “curious betwixt-and-between position” that the city was in then, “poised between a half-demolished past and a beckoning but uncertain future”. It was a city in flux, being made and re-made, moulded and morphed in dizzying fashion.
Maybe this is true of any major city, particularly those on water with such illustrious industrial and maritime histories as the Clyde’s. Glasgow, like Liverpool, Bristol, Newcastle, and London, are in a constant state of metamorphosis. They have both absorbed the flows of an increasingly globalised world, and made their mark in return through their exporting power.
Merely to walk around the city is to see for yourself how this curious position that Daiches recognised back in 1977 persists to this day. Glasgow’s built environment – from its famous tenement housing, its rarified Victorian architecture and its industrial infrastructure, mixed with its vastly diminished-and-still-diminishing post-war high-rise social housing – can be understood as a palimpsest, or what theorist James Reader described as “a city constantly overwritten by new developments whose traces of the past linger painfully on”. I use a geological term, ‘superposition’, to describe how Glasgow’s urban landscape reflects layers of history and architecture that co-exist and overlap. The past within the present. This ‘lingering’ feeling, an affect, a sense, a shared socio-cultural experience, made Glasgow in my eyes a place that could be better understood through a hauntological lens.
Dalmarnock Condemned
The East End neighbourhood of Dalmarnock was chosen as the site for major redevelopment in the build-up to the 2014 Games. Once a thriving community of 50,000, with full employment, decent social housing and bustling high streets, it had degenerated under decades of neglect and dereliction following the de-industrialisation of the 1960s and 1970s. Images taken by Chris Leslie for his Disappearing Glasgow work present the spectral quality of Dalmarnock before the Games redevelopment. The emptiness, the half-demolished tenement flats, the shuttered and derelict shop fronts. By 2007, its population had declined to around 2,000. As Leslie says, it was largely a ghost town.
A hauntological site is a place in which a linear experience of time is suspended, where expected futures are lost in the cacophony of broken promises. But one woman’s story has endured from that time. Margaret Jaconelli had lived on Ardenlea Street in Dalmarnock since the 1970s with her husband Jack. They had done everything society had asked of them: working, saving, buying a house, raising two generations of their family there and eventually paying off their mortgage. They were denizens of the ‘homeowning democracy’. And yet, the ‘homeowning democracy’ didn’t want to give back. It would eventually turn on them.
In 2000, the Housing Association that owned their building decided it was to be demolished as part of a planned redevelopment of the area, a whole seven years before the Glasgow Games were announced. Their neighbours either left or were forced out, and by 2002 they were the last residents not only of their street, but of the entire surrounding blocks. They were alone, and their building stood alone, as Leslie’s apocalyptic images from the time show.
The Jaconellis were for one reason or another ineligible for rehousing, and so when they rebuffed both the first measly offer of £30,000 for their home and the increased offer of £90,000, they were served a Compulsory Purchase Order. After five years of court cases and appeals, eventually in March 2011 over a hundred police and sheriff officers evicted Margaret and her family at four in the morning – violently removing them from their home of 35 years, despite a strong showing of solidarity from local people and campaigners who tried to resist the police’s violence.
Within a month of the eviction, the building was gone, the street was gone, and old Dalmarnock took its last dying breath. Dalmarnock had been ‘condemned’: both the place, and the people like Margaret and her family who still lived in the ruins.
The case of the Jaconellis tells us a lot about the larger forces of dispossession, displacement and social cleansing at work in neoliberal Glasgow. The drastic reordering of public space in the East End occurred in several stages. The first was a protracted, decades-long period of disinvestment, neglect and stigmatisation, in which an area and its people were condemned to the scrapheap of history and society. The second stage was the one that put the Jaconellis at the sharp end: forcible removal, dispossession, displacement and ‘lawfare’. The third stage, principally achieved through the machinations of a poorly regulated private housing market, was the gentrification of the area to attract different, and more desirable, people and their money.
Dalmarnock perfectly exemplified this three-stage process. When the Games were over and the new housing stock was put on the market, promises about homes for the displaced residents to return to were predictably broken. By this point, Dalmarnock was one of the most deprived communities in the whole of Europe, and yet the 700 new homes were put on the market at between £75,000 and £200,000, despite the average cost in Dalmarnock being £54,000. On the first day of sales, all were snatched up – but only a third of them by people from the East End.
The plan had worked. A new Dalmarnock was born. The Jaconellis were never offered one of the new homes in the community they had called home for over 35 years. Dalmarnock represented the ‘new urban frontier’, in which the state, in lockstep with property developers and the larger forces of speculative capital, looked in Neil Gray and Gerry Moony’s words to “secure their grip on all social life, regulating those individuals, groups and behaviours considered to be disorderly or incivil”. Those groups deemed to be a threat to the new order are cleansed from public spaces, particularly when the eyes of the world are watching.
While there was talk of a ‘legacy’ for the people of Glasgow and particularly of the East End, what was actually left when the dust settled? As reports from the time suggested, the new facilities built for the Games didn’t actually serve the community that was left after the event. David Stewart, then a youth organiser in Dalmarnock, noted that the membership fee for the new leisure centre was “astronomical”, the spaces for hire for youth events were really expensive too, and while there was a new café, local people couldn’t afford it. “It doesn’t feel like it’s been designed for Dalmarnock”, he said. And that’s because it wasn’t. Well, certainly not for the old Dalmarnock. This was a ‘new’ Dalmarnock for a ‘new’ person. Who that ‘new person’ actually is isn’t ever given voice to. Best not to say the quiet part out loud.
My year of research was a sobering reminder of the impermanence of the public and social realm under late capitalism. As Marx and Engels taught us a century and a half ago, capital’s modus operandi is the “uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations”, leaving people and places in a liminal state between past, present and future. People’s homes and communities for decades were swept away in an instant for a two-week sporting event.
E.P. Thompson said the English working classes were “present at their own making”. In post-industrial Glasgow, sections of the city’s working class have been present at their own un-making, cleansed from a sanitised public and social realm and displaced to the peripheries of acceptability. These processes, although vehemently resisted until the last, seem almost inevitable and unstoppable – redolent of the ‘capitalist realism’ that Mark Fisher warned us about, in which the horizons of the thinkable are colonised by capital, leaving us unable to imagine anything better.
With the 2026 Glasgow Games being announced, are we to actually confront and atone for this recent history, or sleepwalk into another crisis? Time will tell.
Dylan Brewerton-Harper is a postgraduate student of sociology at the University of Glasgow. He won the Nicole Bourque Award for Sociology for his undergraduate thesis on post-industrial Glasgow, ‘I Know You’re Out There; I Know You’re Gone: A Hauntological Exploration of Post-industrial Glasgow and Living in the Shadow of ‘Lost Futures’.