Sadness and Gladness: The Films of Glasgow Corporation, 1922-1938

Abstract

Thus Hill, a founding member of the ‘movement’, the Charitable Organisation Society, reports a decisive moment of social reform through its visual representation. The photographs commissioned by the Glasgow City Improvement Trust in preparation for the clearance of unsanitary housing under the Glasgow Improvement Act of 1866, were most likely those taken by the Glasgow photographer Thomas Annan, and provided a preparation for Hill’s tour of the cleared districts. Annan’s photographs were collected in a large bound volume, stamped with the Corporation Crest, to form an institutional record of political achievement and also one of time past; of the lives of those who had lived in the vanished but, thanks to the photographs, not forgotten neighbourhoods. However, for Hill, already a famous reformer, the photographs commissioned by the Corporation’s notables were secondary to an evangelical discourse, appealing not to those whose neighbourhoods had been pulled down, but to a progressive reading bourgeois public: