Since the 1990s, Glasgow has taken great effort to boost urban generation with architectural references to the industrial era at the turn of the twentieth century, when it was dubbed the “Second City of the British Empire” for its significance as a seaport and centre of the shipbuilding industry.

This paper will look at the Crown Street redevelopment in Glasgow’s New Gorbals, a residential and commercial neighbourhood that was completed in 2000 after a master plan by Piers Gough of the London firm CZWG. Built on symbolically contested grounds that were previously occupied by the Gorbals tenements (1870s-1960s) and the high-rise Hutchesontown flats (1960s-1990s), the new development is a typical example of neo-traditional design. At the same time, plan and buildings convey a historic narrative through tropes and character types. The Crown Street redevelopment is thus an effort to re-write Glasgow’s industrial history and inscribe a harmonized account of the past into the urban fabric.

The historiographic dimension of the Crown Street redevelopment works on three levels. There is the site, which in various moments in the twentieth century came to signify the urban “other” - the city’s underbelly of crime, plight, and misery – and which, as a result of both gentrification and architectural redesign, is now apparently pacified. There are carefully chosen historic references such as tenement façades, bay windows, underpasses, courtyards, and rues corridors, which communicate certain conceptions about the city’s economic heydays. And there is a municipal strategy for Glasgow’s economic revival, of which the re-writing of industrial history is a part, and which, among others, makes use of the Crown Street redevelopment’s architectural imagery.