Mark Chalmers

For several months, they stripped out the Maxwelltown tower blocks.  Towards the end, workers with Kango hammers weakened the shear walls on each gable, punching out huge holes at intervals up through its height.  The towers were skeletons now, and from Sandeman Street you could see straight through them, towards the snow-blink of the river and the glittering pagoda roofs of St Mary’s Forebank.

At 12.30 on the final day of July, the sirens sounded.  With a series of stentorian booms, the towers crumpled.  Mad birds took flight, and a roiling mass of disturbed air rose up to meet the falling masonry.  For the next quarter of an hour, a fine dust settled over the Maxwelltown.  Trees, setts and roofs turned a pale porcelain colour, and a hanselling of tin cans, broken timber, scraps of plastic and pages from the Tele whirled down from the sky.  If the blow-down was a volcanic blast, the dust which settled over everything was a finely-graded pumice.  Safedem’s giant banners lay, half-hidden, under brickwork and crumpled cladding.  Job done.

Safedem are the anti-Gray, they’ve spent the past two decades demolishing many of the buildings which contractors Charles Gray built during the 1960’s and ‘70’s.  Charles Gray (Builders) Ltd. are lodged in the folk memory of the city, a locally-owned contractor which became one of the largest in Scotland.  I remember several visits to Francis Street with my father during the late 1980’s, when the firm was at its height: Gray’s main offices were a warren, and in those days packed with surveyors pricing up multi-million pound jobs.  It was rare for large projects to be built by firms from outside the city.

Grays built the Maxwelltown tower blocks – from their sub-contractors McLennans driving overburden off site, and Cementation doing the piling through the winter of 1964-5, through to the scheme’s completion in May 1968 – and a particular story from construction sticks in my mind.  One of Gray’s mechanics, Jim Hill of Dundee Plant Co., was at the top of a tower, working on dismantling the mechanism of a builder’s lift.  The lift’s safety brake should have held, but something failed, and it plummeted from the very top of one of the towers with him inside.  From 23 storeys, 210 feet up.  Jim Hill survived, miraculously: the Courier featured his battle for life each day for many weeks, then followed his slow recovery and gradual rehabilitation.

The Maxwelltown multi’s were designed by the architectural practice of Ian Burke and Hugh Martin, another home-grown firm which became one of the largest in Scotland, although by the time the scheme was complete Burke and Martin had split.   Burke & Martin designed the whole Maxwelltown CDA (Comprehensive Development Area), which included deck access housing, and a shopping centre on the Hilltown itself.  It says something for the city that three of Scotland’s largest architectural practices – Parrs, Baxter Clark & Paul, and Ian Burkes – grew up in Dundee at that time.  The city’s post-war building boom boosted them into the big league, and between them they re-shaped the city.  Now all these names have gone, respectively subsumed into Archial (Ingenium), JF Stephen, and Manson Architects – and Charles Gray with them.  

Like Safedem, it seems the city council is set on destroying much of what Grays built.  I am not going to dwell on their policies, because folk who confess to enjoying these blogs never select the political stuff first, even though it seems to get hits.  However, I’m surprised the council didn’t work on the basis of what could be done to save the tower blocks, rather than the more exciting (ego-boosting?) job of pressing down the explosive plunger.  So instead I’ll consider what the Council have swept away.  The directorate in the city council responsible for City Development (environment and planning and transportation and development and so forth) seems determined to reshape Dundee’s skyline – from the perspective of urbanism as well as social improvement.  The housing may have been below standard – though it could have been refurbished – but case has still to be made for changing the city’s silhouette.

The “Zeilenbau” slab blocks at Ardler have already gone, despite needing care and maintenance more than dynamite.  Menzieshill has also lost a cluster of towers on the slope above Ninewells Hospital.  The Bison blocks at Trottick were dismantled, then the two multi-storey courts in Whitfield – which commanded the hillside above Longhaugh Quarry – were blown down despite relating better to the local topography than most others.  This destruction of value (many of the tower blocks had yet to be fully paid for) marks a sharp contrast to the approach in Aberdeen – which I wrote about in Leopard magazine.

Another thing to note is that for the most part the Dundee tower blocks were well built – few adopted the compromised plattenbau systems such as the “Anglian” which was implicated in the collapse of Ronan Point.  Large panel systems like “Skarne” were certainly used for low-rise deck access blocks in Whitfield, but largely avoided for multi storey building in the city.  Early constructional problems with no-fines in-situ concrete in the South Road multi’s were rectified long before they became dangerous.  Despite the novelty of buildings over 200 feet high mushrooming throughout Dundee, Grays deployed tower cranes to suit and during the late 1960’s Dundee’s skyline was spiky with jibs and counterweights, as portrayed in Joseph McKenzie’s wonderful photographs of a city in transition.

As tower blocks go, the clusters here are well-considered.  Each group on the Hilltown was part of its own CDA (Comprehensive Development Area) set up in the early 1960’s, and they sat as groups which related to each other, and to the landscape.  The pattern of four at Dallfield, at the foot of the hill, sits end-on to the Tay and doesn’t break the skyline.  The Maxwelltown towers, halfway up the hill, presented their broad faces to the river.  Derby Street, above the Hilltown Clock at the top of the hill – the tallest tower blocks on the east coast of Scotland at 240 feet – are of a scale and stature that sit happily relative to the cold volcanic mound of the Law.  As a composition, they leant weight to the notion that Dundee is a vertical place, a city built on seven hills which has always stretched upwards, pace Cox’s Stack.

These condemned tower blocks were presented as an architectural failure – but the demolition of Maxwelltown has more to do with politics.  Just as the worst of the pre-war slums in Dundee were targeted in the 1950’s because they were “tenements”, so many of the post-war schemes are being cleared because they’re “deck access” or “tower blocks”.  When they state a building typology is a failure, what they often mean is that their letting policy was a failure.  They installed the wrong sort of tenants, people on short tenancies who didn’t care about their flat, who had their own demons to conquer.  Nor did the council look after the building fabric: sometimes they didn’t provide security or a concierge service from the outset, in other cases they didn’t upgrade inadequate heating or insulation.

It isn’t that the city doesn’t need these houses: far from it.  Despite an untypically ill-informed comment in a recent issue of Blueprint, Dundee isn’t a shrinking city.  Were it not for its gerrymandered boundaries, the city’s population would be stable at 300,000 souls within a 30 minute radius of the centre, and its footprint is increasing.  Invergowrie, Auchterhouse, Liff, Kellas, Wellbank and Monifieth are suburbs in everything but council tax receipts.  Functionally, they are part of the city and are equivalent to the Michigan tract housing which absorbed the “white flight” from Detroit’s inner city.  So it is that the buildings have been condemned – perhaps council policy was worthy of condemnation, too, because the 440 homes in the old Maxwelltown may be replaced by 240 in its regeneration.  Will they last any longer?  The answer has little to do with architecture but an understanding of the reasons behind it has a great bearing on architects.  Live, work, socialise in and research the city!  That’s the only way to know it.

That’s why the lazy characterisation and lack of basic research in that article about Dundee is a problem.  To render things down to “Dundee threw all its hopes of industrial prosperity into the 3 Js [jute, jam, journalism] and when they depleted, the city was left crushed and helpless,” betrays total ignorance of the city’s industrial history.  The J’s were only a fraction of Dundee’s 20th century economy.  It was a great shipbuilding city, where Europe’s largest transformer maker grew up, huge foundries like ULRO and TC Keay turned out every kind of machinery, and which developed the cash machine, modern roofing membranes, and radar.  As for, “…the city centre continues to be cruelly fragmented by vast empty sites of exclusive territory”, there are no gap sites in the city’s core: Site Six and Yeaman Shore were plugged a decade ago and Allan Street is being built on as we speak.  Similarly, “how the brutal North Sea winds have defined the urban grid.”  The centre is not built on a grid: Dundee is the only Scots city which retains its haphazardly medieval plan.  Neither does this flat contradiction help – “it is a shrinking city, where high density has become the worst nightmare … yet its area is now double as suburbia sprawls into fields.”

The piece is so full of canards that you can hear them quacking as you cross the Tay.  Meantime, Dundee has always felt the need for action: think of the mammoth efforts to build both road and rail bridges, the slum clearance in the old Overgate and Wellgate, and even the Timex dispute.  On July 31st 2011, doing something meant creating a great spectacle for the folk from the Tap o the Hill.  All the local worthies turned out, including an echelon of wee jaikies on BMX’s, and the grumpy old churl who wanders around the Hilltown wearing a dark 1960’s suit with the cuffs turned up, a brown-paper-wrapped bottle of Grouse clutched in his paw.  A group of young gallants in kilts en route to a “do” was joined by a phalanx of locals with digital cameras, temporarily evacuated from their homes.  When the charges went off, cushie doos poured out from the belfries at St Marys Forebank, a chorus of dogs and car alarms sounded, and old folk shook their heads.

Of course, this was all pre-destined.  When the crocodile of deck-access housing which sat around the bases of the Maxwelltown towers was cleared several years ago, it was inevitable the towers themselves would follow.  What will follow them?  Another set of anodyne flats and townhouses perhaps, like the buildings which crowd the old Delta Capillaries factory across the road, once the Maxwelltown Carpet Works.  Just behind them lies a city park with a series of huge tiled arches, seemingly created for the sake of whimsy.  Beyond lies Bonar’s Astroturf plant, the retail park at Bowbridge, and the Maxwelltowns’ bigger brothers, the Derby Street multis… 240 feet of solid architecture, which are next in line for the Council’s skyline purge.

My companion piece, about Dundee’s new £27m council offices, will appear in print in the next issue of Urban Realm.

Text and images copyright Mark Chalmers, 2011, all rights reserved.