Place, memory and the British high rise experience: Negotiating social change on the Wyndford Estate, 1962–2015

The ‘failure’ of Britain’s ‘high rise experiment’ remains one of the most heavily mythologised episodes within popular memory of post-war reconstruction. Despite this, the distinctive experiential, affective and representational dimensions of flatted estates have not been critically examined in recent work on the history of public housing in Britain. Based on the micro-analysis of a major development in Glasgow, this article interrogates this ‘design failure’ thesis, using residents’ personal narratives to develop a more nuanced interpretation of the lived experience of high-rise living, the historical factors shaping residential ‘decline’, and the memory processes by which ‘decline’ is negotiated.