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This Road Is Red
Spanning the five decades since they were built up out of the cabbage fields, This Road is Red is a novel about the thousands of residents who have lived there. Each of their lives are linked to another by a character, an incident or a place with lives overlapping and connecting in a mixture of drama and domesticity. There is a fire, a suicide, a birth, a marriage, a death and a near-death. A couple of ghosts, several fights, a handful of jellies and an overdose. The book is a record of how the events of the last five decades have impacted on a community.
- GenresFiction
320 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
January 1, 2024
This Road is Red by Alison Irvine
The gasworks. The steel. The cranes. The kerby. The families. The mud. The Rag + Bone man. The swaying. The tennis with a brick wall net and asbestos smudged lines. The game 'hunt the cunt'. The hatchets and air rifles. The jumpers. The gangs. The knives. The pylons. The kestrels. The lifts. The rats. The football. The drugs. The pubs. This was the Red Road.
A haunting and ghostly account of Glasgow's Red Road Flats and the people that filled them from their inception in the mid 1960's, to their eventual fall of the last six blocks in 2015.
Irvine portrays the lives in the flats unadorned, raw, and lively. A mix of fiction and reality captures and maps out the promise of a better future to the deterioration of the dream deftly - this book will make you laugh, sigh, distraught, and unnerved all in one. Superb.
The gasworks. The steel. The cranes. The kerby. The families. The mud. The Rag + Bone man. The swaying. The tennis with a brick wall net and asbestos smudged lines. The game 'hunt the cunt'. The hatchets and air rifles. The jumpers. The gangs. The knives. The pylons. The kestrels. The lifts. The rats. The football. The drugs. The pubs. This was the Red Road.
A haunting and ghostly account of Glasgow's Red Road Flats and the people that filled them from their inception in the mid 1960's, to their eventual fall of the last six blocks in 2015.
Irvine portrays the lives in the flats unadorned, raw, and lively. A mix of fiction and reality captures and maps out the promise of a better future to the deterioration of the dream deftly - this book will make you laugh, sigh, distraught, and unnerved all in one. Superb.
October 10, 2022
Really enjoyed reading this. The Red Road flats played such an important part in Glasgow life for so many people, and this book pays its respect to this and gives an insight into why.
August 26, 2011
What an interesting and fun book this is, not only is it based in Glasgow but it is based on the actual high-rise flats at Red Road. They were built in 1964 and were scheduled for demolition in 2010. Alison intertwines true to life characters spanning several decades all of whom lived at Red Road flats. Each character is as fascinating and interesting as the next as we follow their lives in the high rise, spanning over five decades.
In the late 60’s the flats are opened as luxury much sought after flats. Only families who work two jobs are able to afford the rent.
In the 70’s people wanted out of the flats. The previously seen idea of luxury high living was now being seen as a pain. The flats swayed in the wind, often causing damage to the fixtures inside. There were only lifts to access each floor, to get to the stairs you had to go through people’s homes. Not ideal. After a fire on the 19th floor, many used this opportunity to move to out of the area. As Springburn was starting to become more gang and drug orientated.
The upper floors were reopened after the fire in the 80’s they started to rent them out as student accommodation. Stories of the concierge are heard at this stage. The concierge had to make sure the the flats were not being destroyed by the students, but also there to help many of the families still living in Red Road. Drugs become a key point in one of the families. Jennifer and her brother James moved to red road in 1967. Their mother Iris and father used to have to work hard to afford the rent. In the 80’s they still lived in Red Road and Jennifer had become a drug addict. She became detached from her friends and her family.
The mid 90’s the flats were no longer used as student accommodation and there were less and less families living there. Kamil moved there and as one of the few Asians in the area was almost victimised by the local BNP. This signalled a change in the area and in the late 90’s the flats were being used as housing by the GHA for asylum seekers. It started with the families from Kosova and then became Somalian and many more.
In the early 2000 the stories are mainly involve the Asylum seekers. However, you still follow along with Iris and Jennifer. Jennifer now has two children who stay with Iris in the Red Road. In 2006, the GHA started to tell the tenants that the flats were being earmarked for demolition. With the exception of Jim, by now most people were glad to get the chance to relocate. Jim, whose wife had died in their home in the Red Road flats, has no intentions on moving. In 2010, the flats were scheduled for demolition.
Alison’s writing is beautiful and inspiring. This book is a fascinating read of history, lives and relationships in a scheme environment spanning two generations in a Glasgow high rise. I would recommend it to anyone who has visited the Red Road flats, interested in local history or just looking for an interesting read. The Road is Red is book you will get absorbed in and leave you deeply moved.
In the late 60’s the flats are opened as luxury much sought after flats. Only families who work two jobs are able to afford the rent.
In the 70’s people wanted out of the flats. The previously seen idea of luxury high living was now being seen as a pain. The flats swayed in the wind, often causing damage to the fixtures inside. There were only lifts to access each floor, to get to the stairs you had to go through people’s homes. Not ideal. After a fire on the 19th floor, many used this opportunity to move to out of the area. As Springburn was starting to become more gang and drug orientated.
The upper floors were reopened after the fire in the 80’s they started to rent them out as student accommodation. Stories of the concierge are heard at this stage. The concierge had to make sure the the flats were not being destroyed by the students, but also there to help many of the families still living in Red Road. Drugs become a key point in one of the families. Jennifer and her brother James moved to red road in 1967. Their mother Iris and father used to have to work hard to afford the rent. In the 80’s they still lived in Red Road and Jennifer had become a drug addict. She became detached from her friends and her family.
The mid 90’s the flats were no longer used as student accommodation and there were less and less families living there. Kamil moved there and as one of the few Asians in the area was almost victimised by the local BNP. This signalled a change in the area and in the late 90’s the flats were being used as housing by the GHA for asylum seekers. It started with the families from Kosova and then became Somalian and many more.
In the early 2000 the stories are mainly involve the Asylum seekers. However, you still follow along with Iris and Jennifer. Jennifer now has two children who stay with Iris in the Red Road. In 2006, the GHA started to tell the tenants that the flats were being earmarked for demolition. With the exception of Jim, by now most people were glad to get the chance to relocate. Jim, whose wife had died in their home in the Red Road flats, has no intentions on moving. In 2010, the flats were scheduled for demolition.
Alison’s writing is beautiful and inspiring. This book is a fascinating read of history, lives and relationships in a scheme environment spanning two generations in a Glasgow high rise. I would recommend it to anyone who has visited the Red Road flats, interested in local history or just looking for an interesting read. The Road is Red is book you will get absorbed in and leave you deeply moved.
April 24, 2014
This was a timely read. When I heard the Red Road flats in Glasgow were set to be demolished as part of the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony I was shocked. Families have been brought up in these homes for decades and the powers wanted to make a celebration of their destruction. Thankfully the plan was scrapped, after a public outcry and the flats will now come down with dignity. If the organisers had read this book before dreaming up there plan, they may have realised sooner how inappropriate this idea was.
This novel a wonderful collection of stories, mapping the chequered history of actual high rise flats, build in Glasgow in the 1960s to rehouse families from inner city slums. As the tag line of the novel states, "the characters are fiction, Red Road is real". This is a warm, sensitive and sometimes sad book. It pulls no punches when exposing the social problems of the flats, but the warmth of the people whose real life stories this fiction is based on shines bright from the thirtieth floor.
This novel a wonderful collection of stories, mapping the chequered history of actual high rise flats, build in Glasgow in the 1960s to rehouse families from inner city slums. As the tag line of the novel states, "the characters are fiction, Red Road is real". This is a warm, sensitive and sometimes sad book. It pulls no punches when exposing the social problems of the flats, but the warmth of the people whose real life stories this fiction is based on shines bright from the thirtieth floor.
September 7, 2014
The writing in this novel is very impressive, and more remarkable considering it's a first novel. Strong, assured, incisive and human. Beautiful prose. Impressive dialogue. The material may have come from interviews with residents and ex-residents, but Irvine has handled the material masterfully, creating coherent, authentic characters and entanglements over the decades of Red Road. An important addition to the Glasgow canon.
June 29, 2013
I enjoyed this book. It doesn't work as a novel but it is an interesting bunch of anecdotes. I found the violence terrifying and juxtaposed with a fluffy reminiscence didn't work so well for me. People in my book group who had been there in their youth, reported it was 'just like that'. As I say I found it clunky. 6/10
June 23, 2014
I enjoyed this book about the Red Road flats. I didn't know anything about the area when I started reading it. There are some memorable characters - old folk who were so proud of their new houses when they moved in, young families with their weans, junkies and asylum seekers. It's all based on interviews with people who lived there, and there are some great illustrations too.
November 21, 2015
A fascinating insight into the lives of the tenants of Glasgow's famous Red Road flats. Fictional, but often based on real accounts from the 60's right up until 2010. The vastly different backgrounds and lives of the various tenants over the years is really quite amazing.
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December 17, 2013Really enjoying this book after watching the Red Road exhibition at the People's Palace in Glasgow a couple of months ago. Funny, moving and authentic.
August 23, 2015
If you ever lived in a high rise or on a council estate. Read this warm nostalgic diary of the lives you'll recognise. If you are over 40 you'll be on memory lane. Great book. Totally different.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews