A wartime street scene photographed at the intersection of Craigmuir Road and Gleddoch Road, Penilee, in 1942.
Penilee was brought into the city of Glasgow with the boundary extension of 1938, and work began on a planned community to house workers at the nearby Hillington Industrial Estate. Some evidence of modernist architecture can be seen in the houses illustrated here, such as the flat roofs, horizontal windows and ship-deck balcony rails.
Although most council house building was suspended for the duration of the Second World War, an exception was made in the case of Penilee because of the demand for homes for workers at the numerous armaments factories at Hillington. Shortage of traditional materials meant that many of the wartime flats at Penilee were built of prefabricated materials such as foamslag.
The war also caused the cancellation of the 1941 census, but it is likely that wartime saw Glasgow's population reach its highest level as workers flooded in to take jobs in the city's numerous essential industries.
Reference: D-AP9/7/3/43A
Reproduced with the permission of Glasgow City Council, Libraries, Information and Learning
Keywords:
armaments, bicycles, children, council houses, flats, foamslag, Glasgow Corporation, Hillington Industrial Estate, Housing Department, housing estates, housing schemes, modernist architecture, prefabricated houses, Second World War, streetscenes, telephone boxes, tenements, women
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