HERE’S some trivia for you: the average rent for a one bedroom apartment in the centre of Glasgow today, at £600, is roughly the same as the cost of a brand-new Mini was in 1971.
Mind you, back then the average weekly wage was £32, with a pint of milk a pittance at 5p. This was, however, a pittance that the residents of Garthamlock could barely manage, as can be seen on the placards here.
Glasgow Council were on the verge of raising rent from £15 to £27 for the coming months and the rent payers were having none of it. In response, the Garthamlock Tenant’s Association, under president John Mahon, organised a strike in which said tenants were to withhold the increase.
The folk here were among more than 100, from seven Glasgow areas, who flocked to the City Chambers, with banners aloft, in protest. The cruel irony of it all was that the rents were being sent up by Edward Heath’s Conservative Government in a bid to subsidise housing for those who couldn’t afford to pay. This was the unpopular Housing Finance Act, to be passed the following year.
Whilst most of the faces in this photograph are suitably stony in expression, we can only guess at what the children to the left had spied behind the camera. Perhaps it was a portal to 1975, when a U-turn would reverse the original act?
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