Clune Park - Abandoned housing estate in Port Glasgow
The area was once a thriving community of shipyard workers in the 1920s Inverclyde but has fallen into a desperate state.
Inverclyde council have plans for a 31m transformation of the derelict Clune Park estate in Port Glasgow but many of the flats are are privately owned.
The local authority has been battling for over a decade to gain control of privately-owned flats on the eyesore estate, so that it can send in the bulldozers.
Over the years vandals and arsonists have targeted the estate, leaving many homes beyond repair.
The preferred option for the site's regeneration, would include the construction of 135 new homes in a mixture of flats, cottage flats and houses.
Of the 400+ flats it is estimated that only 6 are inhabited.
The area was once a thriving community of shipyard workers in the 1920s Inverclyde but has fallen into a desperate state.
Inverclyde council have plans for a 31m transformation of the derelict Clune Park estate in Port Glasgow but many of the flats are are privately owned.
The local authority has been battling for over a decade to gain control of privately-owned flats on the eyesore estate, so that it can send in the bulldozers.
Over the years vandals and arsonists have targeted the estate, leaving many homes beyond repair.
The preferred option for the site's regeneration, would include the construction of 135 new homes in a mixture of flats, cottage flats and houses.
Of the 400+ flats it is estimated that only 6 are inhabited.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC]
00:10 [MUSIC]
00:37 Well, I'm Marshall Craig.
00:39 I've been here for 15 years.
00:41 To be quite honest with you, John, I'm quite happy here.
00:44 I don't want to move.
00:46 What was Clune Park like 15 years ago?
00:48 It was a bit busier.
00:50 It was a bit noisier.
00:54 Because there's more people here, naturally.
00:57 Out of the 480 flats that are here, you reckon six are occupied?
01:02 Six in this block, if you like.
01:07 Perhaps seven.
01:09 There's another couple further on down near the school.
01:13 I don't know them so well.
01:15 You pass by them, "Huh, how you doing?"
01:18 Maybe eight or nine out of 480.
01:21 There's a lot of transients.
01:24 People come and go, like you do.
01:29 Perhaps a bit more here.
01:31 I've stayed because I like it here.
01:33 When you were here 15 years ago, were the shops open?
01:37 Oh, yes, the shop.
01:39 Chippy was open.
01:41 Pizza Parlor was open, John.
01:45 The swing shop, the Factor, Robert, he's still there.
01:51 It's still open at this very moment, actually.
01:54 There's a lot of fires.
01:55 There are a lot of fires here.
01:59 I've been affected by one myself.
02:01 How were you affected by the fire?
02:03 Was it close?
02:04 I had to go to hospital.
02:06 I was in hospital.
02:07 I smoked inhalation.
02:09 Sunday morning, 7 o'clock, you're in your jammies,
02:12 trying to get your cup of coffee.
02:14 Somebody had set fire to a downstairs flat.
02:17 How long were you in the hospital for?
02:19 It was only a matter of days, John.
02:22 Then you come out and you can't go back to your flat.
02:25 I did try to go back to the flat.
02:28 But it was that, you see, smoke.
02:30 Smoke does things to fabrics and clothing and what have you.
02:37 It was covered in, I think, smoosh or whatever.
02:42 Smoke.
02:43 You don't just smell it.
02:44 I mean, I actually see it.
02:46 It's a greasy substance.
02:47 It's on everything.
02:48 For a guy my age, this is nice and quiet.
02:52 Great neighbours, upstairs, downstairs.
02:55 This is the quietest it's ever been, John.
02:57 Do you get many people just coming to visit the estate?
03:02 Well, yeah, there's a lot of--
03:05 Well, not a lot.
03:07 There's a few that come down from Glasgow, like the other day,
03:10 last night, rather.
03:12 They come down, "Oh, Scotland's terrible, what have you.
03:16 "How can you live here?"
03:18 I mean, look at it.
03:19 It's quite nice.
03:21 I mean, there's a lot worse places.
03:23 How often are the fire brigade here?
03:25 Oh, God, I'm like--
03:28 You can call it once a fortnight, once every three weeks.
03:32 You smell it before you see it.
03:34 And we used to look at--
03:37 I mean, we're that used to it now.
03:40 We don't even bother looking at it, do we?
03:43 Because you just go like--
03:44 There's more 999 calls on that phone down there
03:49 than there is on your family and friends.
03:52 You've already been involved in that fire.
03:54 Do you think that there'll be another fire in this place?
03:57 Yeah, it's at the back of your mind, John.
04:00 I've got my escape method worked out,
04:03 and so has my neighbours.
04:05 What can you do?
04:06 I like my house.
04:08 If there's a fire there, I know what to do.
04:11 Do you ever get lonely, Marcia?
04:13 No, not at all.
04:14 No.
04:15 I love this.
04:17 I love the quietness.
04:18 When you get to a certain age,
04:21 you want your peace and quiet.
04:23 I'm looking to knock down the estate.
04:25 Would you hope that they would keep this part of the estate?
04:27 Well, there's another bone of contention, John.
04:30 Why don't they knock down the old bit?
04:32 I mean, you wouldn't put a dog in there.
04:34 I mean, I've seen my old house,
04:36 and to be quite honest with you,
04:37 you wouldn't put a dog in there.
04:39 Here, it's iconic.
04:41 This block, because it's like living in a castle,
04:45 to be quite honest with you, John.
04:48 They pay a fortune for this.
04:50 It's a beautiful-looking building.
04:52 Do your new build.
04:53 You've got your shopping area.
04:55 It's more or less in situ, if you like.
04:57 And leave this.
04:59 There's the best of both worlds.
05:01 Don't need to scrap the whole lot.
05:03 How often do you see the police?
05:05 Once or twice a week, they come round.
05:08 They can make their presence known or not known
05:12 depending on how they feel about the situation.
05:16 There are decent people in here.
05:19 They live here.
05:20 I intend to live my life out here
05:25 rather than a new build.
05:27 I'm fed up.
05:28 I'm fed up flouting to be fair.
05:31 So there you go.
05:33 John Thompson.
05:34 I was born in here, the Glasgow Road, as I knew it.
05:38 Stayed here for 17 years.
05:40 You were brought up here?
05:41 That's correct.
05:42 As far as I can remember,
05:44 the first house was along number 27,
05:48 just along the road from here.
05:50 We stayed there for a few years.
05:53 Don't know how long.
05:55 Then we moved from there to 29.
05:58 And from 29, we moved to 31.
06:03 And then we moved back from 31 to 29 again.
06:11 It was a great place to live up.
06:13 This was the main road.
06:14 What you see here is actually the main road
06:17 that came out of Port Glasgow.
06:19 All the stuff coming into the port by road
06:21 came in this way and went out this way.
06:24 And we actually just played in the pavements
06:26 round about here.
06:28 Just here, this was always a dirt pavement,
06:31 as it is now still.
06:34 And that was an ordinary pavement across here.
06:37 And we just played there.
06:38 Also along there is Mackhoe Street.
06:41 And the various streets, side streets in the scheme,
06:45 they were all playgrounds for the kids,
06:48 except when the police turned up.
06:51 And on the GFU, you weren't allowed to play football
06:54 in the streets, but everybody did.
06:57 And the police, I think, they came along
07:00 and shouted at you.
07:02 Cuffed your ear if you were cheeky.
07:05 Things like that.
07:06 You never told your dad you had your ear cuffed
07:08 because you were getting battered.
07:10 There was a lot of shipyard people in here.
07:13 My father worked in the shipyards.
07:16 It was just a normal living place.
07:19 Not what it's been in the past couple of years,
07:22 a few years, before it actually started to shut down
07:26 to the way it is today.
07:28 It was a local school, Clune Park School,
07:30 which is just along the road there.
07:32 School was great.
07:33 Well, yeah, it was. It was good.
07:36 It was a good...
07:38 People say about them days,
07:40 this teacher, she was great throwing dusters.
07:44 This one, the other one was throwing pointers at you.
07:47 But, well, I mean, nobody was ever injured.
07:51 You saw some changes in your time here, John.
07:54 You saw the introduction of electricity.
07:56 Yeah. I can remember my mum and dad getting the electricity in.
08:01 And maybe, I think, they were scrabbling around
08:04 looking for the £60 to get the house electricity in.
08:09 And they finally got it in.
08:12 And the wee electrician, I can always remember him,
08:16 he came in and said to my mum and dad,
08:18 "That's it. You're ready to go.
08:20 "All we need now is permission to see from the electricity board
08:27 "to switch the electricity on for you and get it set."
08:30 So that's it.
08:32 My dad says, "Can we not see it?"
08:35 You know, there was one single lamp hanging from the centre of the living room
08:40 beside the old gas lamp.
08:42 And he says, "I'm not allowed," he says,
08:46 "but, oh, hang on, it's the way out."
08:48 He says, "Don't you tell anybody."
08:50 And he went out and he switched on the electricity.
08:53 He came in and he switched on the electric light.
08:58 Ooh! Ah! Look at that.
09:01 Oh, that is magic, you know.
09:04 It really was.
09:05 It was so bright in comparison with one old gas mantle.
09:10 We didn't have a bathroom.
09:12 We just had a toilet at the end of the corridor.
09:17 Round the back, there was wash houses, one for each close.
09:22 And your mother got her day every week.
09:25 And she went into the wash house, so she got up early in the morning,
09:30 set a fire underneath the boiler
09:33 and started to fill it up with water,
09:37 boil up the water, get the clothes out of the house.
09:41 This was her day.
09:43 Nobody else was allowed into the wash house.
09:46 She'd done her washing and hung it all out in the back.
09:50 That whole backyard was covered in washing.
09:54 Were the houses in Clunpark, were they sought after?
09:56 They were quite sought after.
09:58 It was quite a sought-after scheme to come out here.
10:01 People wanted to come out here and live.
10:04 They were well-built houses,
10:06 but people also wanted to get up the hill to the new houses
10:11 where they had bathrooms and toilets and gardens,
10:16 just like anywhere else in Scotland.
10:19 When that started happening, the houses fell away.
10:23 They started selling houses on to landlords
10:27 who weren't the kindest people to the scheme.
10:30 It was lost then.
10:33 That's when I started losing it.
10:36 The rot set in from the late '70s, '80s,
10:41 and then it just fell away completely to what you see today.
10:45 In no way whatsoever is this Scotland's Chernobyl.
10:50 I can tell you right now I've seen worse in my travels.
10:55 I'm sad to see it going the way it's going. Really, I am.
10:58 What do you think should happen to them, John?
11:01 I think it's got to be raised.
11:04 It's just got to be knocked down and give the whole place a new start.
11:10 Can you tell people why these houses were built?
11:13 They were built for the shipyard workers, Lithgows, as it was in the early days.
11:19 They owned it all,
11:22 and it was all factored in every week to Princess Street,
11:28 Pager Rent and Brodie's.
11:30 I can always remember Brodie's.
11:33 They were the factors.
11:35 I don't think the rents were extortionate.
11:38 It was an affordable rent.
11:42 They were social housing by private landlords
11:49 built for the people who worked in the shipyards.
11:53 The women all worked in the mill.
11:57 At the end of the road there was a big Birkmeyer mill.
12:01 This was a great place to live. That's all I can say.
12:05 Do you associate the decline, the Kloon Park, with the decline of the shipyards?
12:09 To a certain extent, but it wasn't just that.
12:13 I put it down to the private landlords who took it over
12:22 and put people who just didn't care.
12:28 Drugs.
12:30 Was that in the 80s, the drugs?
12:33 From the 80s onwards, yes.
12:36 I just think of my childhood as a happy childhood here.
12:40 It really was. You couldn't ask for better.
12:45 We'd come out of here, walked a quarter of a mile up the road,
12:50 there's a wee slip road that goes down,
12:52 there was a beach there.
12:54 It wasn't like a... don't get me wrong.
12:58 It wasn't like going to the Caribbean or anything like that.
13:02 It was an old stony beach with rocks and stuff tipped in and all the rest of it.
13:08 You could go down there and play.
13:10 We played off what was known as an old wooden boat,
13:13 a ship that had been beached there by Smith & Houston, the shipmakers.
13:19 And we played off there, we fished off of there.
13:23 The sculptures of fruit at either end of the estate, why is that?
13:27 This used to be known as the gardens.
13:31 This was... what was it? They had orchards here.
13:35 This is why the railways came here,
13:38 because they needed to get the fruit from Port Glasgow down to London.
13:43 The trains would pick in here every day,
13:47 picking up apples, pears and things like that,
13:51 strawberries, blah, blah, blah.
13:54 That's all part of this place's history.
13:57 Clune Park School, Clune Park Church.
14:00 Clune Park School just got burnt down six months ago.
14:04 Things like that, you know.
14:06 It's just... the place is just gone.
14:10 They used to call it the Dirty Weep Port.
14:13 It's no longer the Dirty Weep Port,
14:15 but it is the port,
14:18 and the whole of the port is a great place to stay.
14:22 I don't care what anybody says, I keep coming back.
14:25 I kept coming back here, you know.
14:27 My name's Ronnie Givens. I was born in Port Glasgow.
14:31 What do you think should happen to Clune Park?
14:34 Well, it's been around for a long time now, quite a few years now,
14:37 and the council's been trying to get rid of it,
14:41 knock it down for this or that amount of time.
14:45 But they really should...
14:47 I saw the private landlord that's holding them in the back,
14:50 and they...
14:52 But it should be demolished,
14:54 and they had a survey a good while ago.
14:57 They were going to show us what it was going to look like,
15:00 and it looked really nice.
15:02 So these houses should come down now.
15:05 It makes you miserable when you pass here every time, you know,
15:08 and you see it. It's not too nice looking now.
15:11 It's not Chernobyl or anything like that,
15:14 and it's, for people to say it's a dangerous area to be in,
15:18 it's not dangerous at all now,
15:20 because there's nobody here.
15:22 It's very quiet, because there's nobody about.
15:26 How do Portonians view Clune Park?
15:28 They're disappointed in it, and they're probably upset.
15:32 Just the same as me.
15:34 I don't like the area at all now.
15:36 I feel sorry for the people that stayed at the end road,
15:39 but they're quite happy there.
15:41 But, do you know, it's quite a miserable place now.
15:44 Was it a decent area?
15:46 Oh, it was a nice area. It really is nice, you know.
15:50 People are proud to stay here, actually, you know,
15:54 and what I can remember of it,
15:56 because I was never up here that often,
15:59 but I knew people that stayed here,
16:01 and they were proud of the place, you know.
16:03 It's a well-respected place, and people wanted to come here.
16:08 When you come on the train or pass by in the car,
16:12 that's your first impression of Port Glasgow,
16:15 and you say, "Oh, goodness sake,
16:17 "is it going to be like that all the way through?"
16:20 But it's just this part here that gives the wrong impression
16:23 of Port Glasgow, you know.
16:25 The first day of the graze, I think,
16:27 they're out practically every two or three times a week now,
16:31 and there was a fire just a few days ago.
16:34 They sort of built a top flat.
16:36 So they're out here quite regular now, and it's a shame.
16:40 They could be doing something else
16:42 instead of coming out here all the time.
16:44 To me, they should just let it burn down.
16:46 That's my opinion.
16:48 Don't come out here. Just let it burn down.
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