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These are house tickets bearing the cubic contents of a tenement flat and the maximum number of occupants allowed. From 1866 onward, Corporations in Scotland sent their sanitary inspectors to the most overcrowded 'slums' to survey the tenements and attach these to their doors ..
The slums were overcrowded; a majority of people in Scotland lived in only one or two rooms. They were also insanitary as many of the quickly-built or house-farmed buildings were without running water, making it difficult to clean the flat, never mind the entire tenement ...
Insecure work, low pay, long leases, lack of monetary assistance and lack of oversight in the house building industry all contributed to these conditions. Middle-class Victorians refused to see it this way. They blamed the poor for their own squalor - as George Bell did, below ..
Investigations into poverty in Scotland, like Bell's, often focused on the character of the residents of slums over their material conditions which were used almost as a counter-point to the romantic, wild highland imagery popular at the time. The Scottish middle classes ...
... held that working-class people's drinking, gambling, coarse nature and resistance to religious standards and Presbyterian social mores were the cause of their poor living conditions and that for government to intervene in the housing market and improve their conditions ...
... would be an affront to free trade, (conveniently) considered a Christian endeavour. Slums were cleared, but no houses were provided for those made homeless and more slums quickly sprang up to replace them. By the eve of the First World War, a majority of Scots were ...
... *still* living in houses of two rooms or less. Then the Rent Strike came - the middle classes could no longer ignore the pleas to intervene as they had turned to violence, demonstrations and anger. From 1919 onward, local governments were obliged to provide subsidised ...
housing to their citizens. However, the new powers came with a bold sense of municipal oversight. The new schemes would supply their tenants with more space for living, but at the cost of significant social surveillance. Where the slums saw ticketed houses, many of the new ...
... schemes were patrolled by Resident Factors to keep order and the houses visited by Public Health Nurses with the power to rummage through their belongings for any signs of dirt. Sean Damer (sadly not on twitter) has demonstrated in his work that these features were a ...
... direct descendant of the Victorian sanitary inspectors. His work also shows how local government continued to separate working-class people into 'deserving' and 'undeserving' through housing allocation and differences in provision. Newer schemes also began to attract ...
... negative reputations for gang-violence, criminality and poverty - following the residents of the slums to their new abodes. This did not stop in the post-war years and even to this day negative images of council-built areas of Scotland proliferate. Perhaps the best example...
... of this phenomenon in modern times is the BBC Scotland programme 'The Scheme', shot on the Onthank scheme in Kilmarnock. It followed residents in their daily lives, including a community group fighting to keep their community centre open. But the focus of the programme was ..
... the alcohol drinking and drug taking habits of several of the main cast who were often intoxicated during filming. It presented a vision of the council estate as drug ridden, miserable and violent - 150 years on from George Bell's excursions up the Canongate ...
This is probably the most striking discovery in my research so far. Much-needed conversations around housing in Scotland are constantly beset by imagery and stereotypes taken almost word-for-word from the pages of Victorian social reformers. Class ideology surrounds housing ...
... and prevents serious action from being taken to tackle the crisis in rents and affordability. By presenting the problems of the poorest tenants as in-born, genetic or personal, those in power create an effective barrier between 'bams' and the 'respectable' working-class.
