The haunted spectres of the city's aborted ring road

Someone once told me a story about a friend of theirs going on a first date on one of Glasgow’s bridges to nowhere. I like to think it started off as an ironic suggestion: “Wouldn’t it be hilarious if we went on a date on the M8?”. Anyway, they did, or so the story goes. They took with them a picnic blanket, snacks, some booze, and made an evening of it. In fact, they hit it off so well that they, err, became well-acquainted with each other, right there on the unfinished pedestrian overpass. 

It sounds apocryphal, but humour me. Two lovers under the night sky, limbs entangled, 13 lanes of traffic whooshing past, the drivers oblivious to the romantic scene unfolding behind a tangle of overlapping concrete. Questions of veracity aside, the fact that such a story is told about an unexecuted section of a motorway overpass tells us something about the space these structures occupy in the psyche. They are a reminder of a grim future that never came to pass, yet one that haunts us to this day. Glasgow city centre was once meant to be entirely encircled in an inner ring road. Instead, it’s only half enclosed by the motorway, rejoice! 

Glasgow’s bridges to nowhere are the half-finished business of the city’s grand plan, first laid out in the 1945 Bruce Report. The report proposed building a ring road system around the city centre, a “box” motorway with arterial routes feeding into it. The terrifyingly Modernist vision also included flattening almost the entirety of the city centre: Glasgow School of Art; the Mitchell; the City Chambers, you name it. Ultimately, the Bruce Report was not implemented. It was abandoned in 1949 in favour of Abercrombie’s Clyde Valley Plan of 1946 (which depopulated the city centre, displacing residents to new towns like Cumbernauld).

Plans for the ring road galloped forwards throughout the 1960s, under the framework of the Highway Plan for Glasgow of 1965. But as the ring road lost public support and momentum, the eastern and southern flanks were abandoned, while the constructed northern and western flanks of the ring road were later incorporated into the M8. Along with high flats, the radical changes to the road network are the legacy of Robert Bruce, the master of works and city engineer. He died in a car crash in 1956. 

Glasgow’s bridges to nowhere are great monuments to the failed blueprint of the Bruce Report, to the unrealised plans of the city fathers and the postwar planners. I also like to think of them as quirky anomalies, abstract art pieces that make you stop, stare, and sometimes laugh at the ridiculousness of what was once considered a pioneering vision of the future. The bridges — or in many cases roads — to nowhere are tangible evidence of the incomplete and abandoned sections of this road system. Either that or they were built to link up with deserted or bungled accompanying buildings, adjacent to — or in one case built directly on top of — the new motorway.