For all that Glasgow's radical council housing programme was internationally famous in both the interwar and post-Second World War years, its treatment by academics is underwhelming. While the basic economic, social administrative and constructional aspects of local housing policy in this period have been dealt with adequately, detailed housing history seems to have almost disappeared from the general area covered by the rubric of ‘Urban Studies’. Insofar as it has been retained, it has been left to architectural historians, which some might see as a fate worse than death given their propensity to talk only in design terms, use impenetrable jargon, and their apparent ignorance of the fact that a house is meant to constitute a home for human beings as opposed to Le Corbusier's bombastic ‘machine for living in’.

The controversial and politically important story of the development of Glasgow's council housing, particularly in the interwar years, has simply not been told systematically. In other words, that story has been depoliticised. But this will not do. The story of council housing in Glasgow is the story of class-struggle, and the intensity of that struggle, and its potential for disruption at the level of both the local and national state, can be gauged from the following apocalyptic quotation from a 1923 book. Although it is not unknown to serious students of Glasgow's interwar housing, it is worth repeating: