IN February 1976 the Evening Times looked at the redevelopment of the Woodside area of Glasgow, which had begun in 1964 and was halfway through its £30 million programme.

A little history, first: Woodside, the paper reminded its readers, derived its name from the remnants of a forest which had belonged at one time to the bishops of Glasgow. The earliest settlement seems to have been on the east bank of the river Kelvin, but the district didn’t really start to grow until 1774, when the Glasgow branch of the Forth and Clyde canal was opened,

With the redevelopment, the old pattern of streets and tenements had largely disappeared, and the population would drop from 18,000 to around 6,000.

Some of the new housing aroused interest.

Cedar Street, the first housing development in the new Woodside, had tower blocks “with associated low-rise housing and nursery school ... and was almost a village in itself as 2,000 people now live there”.

And in nearby Raglan Street (above), it was of note that the architects, Boswell, Mitchell and Johnston (which in 1963 had developed one of the city’s largest new-housing developments in Pollokshaws) “had moved away from the tower-block or low-rise type of building to something more like the traditional tenement of Glasgow”.

Read more: Herald Diary