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Three bodies were found at the base of 63 Petershill Drive on a Sunday morning in March 2010.
A documentary on Glasgow's Red Road Flats: from 1960s steel-framed visionary towers, through asbestos hazards and decline, to demolition by 2016.
Key Takeaways
- Red Road's ambitious modernist design was undermined by material choices (asbestos) and inadequate long-term social investment.
- Good early living conditions did not prevent decline once residents with alternatives left and maintenance faltered.
- Estate stigma ('towers of terror') often overshadowed the full lives and community that existed within the blocks.
- Demolition ended the estate, but its history reflects broader failures in Glasgow's housing policy.
What the video covers
- Opens with the 2010 deaths of a Russian family who jumped from a Red Road tower block at 63 Petershill Drive.
- Red Road was eight tower blocks in northeast Glasgow with 1,326 flats housing around 5,000 people at peak; the first opened in 1966 as the tallest residential buildings in Europe.
- Architect Sam Bunton championed steel frames, partly aided by industrial lobbying that benefited Scotland's underused steel fabrication industry.
- Asbestos was used as integral fire protection throughout the buildings, making removal impossible without demolition; health risks were recognized by the late 1970s.
- Early residents, many moving from Glasgow's worst tenements, found the flats a genuine improvement, with heating, hot water, and amenities such as the Brig pub and a large underground bingo hall.
- Decline set in during the 1970s as those with options left; CCTV and concierge staff could not solve underlying social problems, and some blocks were declared unfit by 1980.
- A fire in an empty flat caused structural damage and a child's death, and the 23rd-floor flat was never let again.
- Overcladding was added to cover deteriorating asbestos; the estate later housed asylum seekers, drawing criticism over the conditions.
- Demolition was announced in 2005, the estate condemned in 2008, and the final dispersal of residents occurred in 2015.
- The final tower was demolished in 2016, leaving an empty site; the video also features a separate section on a drug-trafficking case linked to Jamie Stevenson.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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A Russian family had jumped from the 15th floor together, tied to one another by rope. Sergei Serik, his wife Tatiana, and her son Stepan.
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A Russian family had jumped from the 15th floor together, tied to one another by rope. Sergei Serik, his wife Tatiana, and her son Stepan.
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still packed with people the city couldn't find anywhere else to put. That is where this story starts.
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The block they fell from was 31 stories of steel and asbestos, part of a complex that once housed 5,000 people in the northeast of Glasgow. Red Road. By 2010, it was already condemned, already earmarked for demolition, and somehow still packed with people the city couldn't find anywhere else to put. That is where this story starts.
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floors, 89 m. On a clear day, you could see them from 10 mi away.
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Eight tower blocks, strung across Balornock and Barmulloch in the northeast of the city. Eight blocks, 1,326 flats, 5,000 people at their peak. When the first three were formally opened in October 1966, they were the tallest residential buildings in Europe. 31 floors, 89 m. On a clear day, you could see them from 10 mi away.
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structurally ruined that a 1945 report called them the worst slums in Western Europe, that promise meant something [music] real. It meant lifts. It meant windows that didn't rattle. A bathroom. Space.
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The man behind them was an architect called Sam Bunton. He had a phrase he used. He wanted to build Manhattan-style skyscrapers in Glasgow. And in a city where most people were still living in Victorian tenements, so overcrowded, so structurally ruined that a 1945 report called them the worst slums in Western Europe, that promise meant something real. It meant lifts. It meant windows that didn't rattle. A bathroom. Space.
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started to matter. Bunton wanted steel frames instead of the reinforced concrete everyone else was building with. Steel let him go higher. That was part of it. But Bunton's own letters to the Glasgow Herald in February 1963 make something
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Something most of these families hadn't had before. But the problem with dreams on that scale is that someone always decides the details. And the first decision made about Red Road was one you'd only understand decades later, when the walls started to matter.
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The city's housing scheme was being shaped, at least partly, by industrial lobbying. Glasgow's steel industry needed work. Red Road gave it some.
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Bunton wanted steel frames instead of the reinforced concrete everyone else was building with. Steel let him go higher. That was part of it. But Bunton's own letters to the Glasgow Herald in February 1963 make something else clear. He argued the steel frame would benefit Scotland's steel fabrication industry, which was at the time working at one-third of its capacity.
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It was packed into every column and every beam in all eight blocks. The construction workers who built the towers were coated in [music] it as they moved through the half-finished floors.
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The city's housing scheme was being shaped, at least partly, by industrial lobbying. Glasgow's steel industry needed work. Red Road gave it some.
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You couldn't remove it without dismantling the buildings. When the health risks became properly understood in the late 1970s, the council's response was to put notices on the walls telling tenants not to drill into them, not to hang pictures without
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Here's where it gets serious. Steel frames need fire protection, and the fire protection of the 1960s was asbestos.
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Families who moved in from the condemned [music] tenements found themselves 20 floors up looking out across the whole city. They had heating, hot water, a real kitchen. One former resident recalled buses coming from all over North Glasgow at the weekends. People
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It was packed into every column and every beam in all eight blocks. The construction workers who built the towers were coated in it as they moved through the half-finished floors. They came out white. People in the area started calling them the white mice. The asbestos was structural, integral. You couldn't remove it without dismantling the buildings.
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There were facilities. That's the thing most people never knew. Underneath the towers, dug into the foundations, there was an entire complex, a pub called The Brig, nautical themed, kitted out with ropes and porthole decor. Next to it, a
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When the health risks became properly understood in the late 1970s, the council's response was to put notices on the walls telling tenants not to drill into them, not to hang pictures without asking. The buildings that were supposed to give people a better life were quietly instructing them, "Don't make this a home." And yet people did.
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evening, and never leave the complex. [music] That was the original vision. A self-contained world that gave you everything you've never had. The people who moved in from Glasgow's worst slums were glad to be there. For a while, it
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That's what gets me about Red Road's early years. Families who moved in from the condemned tenements found themselves 20 floors up looking out across the whole city. They had heating, hot water, a real kitchen. One former resident recalled buses coming from all over North Glasgow at the weekends. People arriving just to use the facilities. Those early years, for a lot of families, were genuinely good.
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By 1979, the council had issued formal guidance to remaining tenants. Do not drill into the walls. Do not disturb the asbestos.
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There were facilities. That's the thing most people never knew. Underneath the towers, dug into the foundations, there was an entire complex, a pub called The Brig, nautical themed, kitted out with ropes and porthole decor. Next to it, a Mecca Bingo Hall with a thousand seats, underground, below a housing estate in Balornock. On weekend nights, it drew pensioners in from across the city. If you lived at Red Road, you could go to school, do your shopping, go out for the evening, and never leave the complex.
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[music] It was an early rehearsal for what the whole estate would eventually become. Unwanted by some, passed on to whoever [music] would accept it.
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That was the original vision. A self-contained world that gave you everything you'd never had. The people who moved in from Glasgow's worst slums were glad to be there. For a while, it was enough. Things began to fray in the early 1970s as those with other options left.
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Anti-social crime reportedly reduced for a time, but those underlying problems couldn't be fixed by a camera in a foyer.
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By 1979, the council had issued formal guidance to remaining tenants. Do not drill into the walls. Do not disturb the asbestos.
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Tables still set, decor intact, everything preserved under decades of neglect. By then, almost nobody left in the flats could remember it had ever been open.
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In 1980, 10 Red Road Court and 33 Petershill Drive were formally declared unfit for family accommodation and handed over to students and the YMCA.
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By the 1980s, it had a nickname in parts of the Glasgow press, the towers of terror.
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It was an early rehearsal for what the whole estate would eventually become. Unwanted by some, passed on to whoever would accept it.
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The first real signal of where Red Road was heading had arrived in August 1977.
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The council installed CCTV and hired concierge staff. They fitted the remaining blocks with metal overcladding in the late 70s and early 80s, covering the deteriorating asbestos exterior. Anti-social crime reportedly reduced for a time, but those underlying problems couldn't be fixed by a camera in a foyer.
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Vandals broke in and set the flat alight. It caused serious structural damage. A 12-year-old boy died. [music] The flat on the 23rd floor of 10 Red Road Court was never let again.
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The Brig and the Bingo Hall closed for good in the late 1990s. A photographer who later gained access described the interior as a latter-day Pompeii. Tables still set, decor intact, everything preserved under decades of neglect. By then, almost nobody left in the flats could remember it had ever been open.
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Glasgow Corporation converted the site of a death by arson into a memorial of sorts. Not a plaque, not a garden, but a usable space.
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The estate had become something the architects hadn't planned for and the city didn't want to admit was happening.
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By the early 1980s, Red Road was carrying two different reputations simultaneously and they didn't quite match each other. The press called it the towers of terror. There were drug dealers on the stairwells, muggings in the lifts, things that should not have
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By the 1980s, it had a nickname in parts of the Glasgow press, the towers of terror.
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Blackhill is a low-rise estate right next to the Red Road complex. Its history of organized gang crime is documented and serious.
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Drug dealing on the stairwells, muggings, things that didn't get fixed because the buildings themselves were deteriorating beyond the point where fixes worked. Something was taking hold in the towers and in the streets that surrounded them.
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Red Road's crime was real, but calling it Glasgow's most feared estate was always more media label than recorded fact.
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The first real signal of where Red Road was heading had arrived in August 1977.
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What got overlooked in the coverage was that people lived full lives in these blocks.
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23 floors up in an empty flat on the most recognizable block in the complex, 10 Red Road Court. The one with the red cladding that made it stand apart from every other block on the estate.
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Children who walked to school along Petershill Drive every morning and came home to a flat with a view stretching halfway across Lanarkshire.
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Vandals broke in and set the flat alight. It caused serious structural damage. A 12-year-old boy died. The flat on the 23rd floor of 10 Red Road Court was never let again.
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But people built something real inside these towers, and that matters if you want to understand what the estate's collapse actually [music] cost.
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After the fire, after the structural damage, after the boy's death, the council refurbished it and turned it into a community drop-in space for the whole estate. A room where people could meet. Glasgow Corporation converted the site of a death by arson into a memorial of sorts. Not a plaque, not a garden, but a usable space.
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The blocks declared unfit for families in 1980 filled up with students and YMCA tenants. The original working class families who'd moved in from the slums were aging or moving on or dying.
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I find that detail quietly striking. It's not a gesture you'd normally associate with a city council. It suggests someone understood that what happened in that flat was not simply a crime. It was a rupture.
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that couldn't be removed without dismantling the structure, maintenance costs that kept rising above what the rental income could cover, a built environment that had been structurally compromised before the first family ever moved in.
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By the early 1980s, Red Road was carrying two different reputations simultaneously and they didn't quite match each other. The press called it the towers of terror. There were drug dealers on the stairwells, muggings in the lifts, things that should not have been normalized and weren't by the people who lived there.
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Springburn, Easterhouse, the low-rise schemes as [music] well as the towers. Red Road wasn't uniquely devastated, but it wasn't exempt either. The stairwells that already had a reputation became places people avoided after dark for reasons that went beyond antisocial
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But look at what was happening two streets away in Blackhill.
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By the early 1990s, the estate's population [music] was changing again. Kosovo refugees arrived first, families fleeing the Balkan [music] conflicts, placed in the towers because that was what the city had available. Then, in 2001, the UK government launched a
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Blackhill is a low-rise estate right next to the Red Road complex. Its history of organized gang crime is documented and serious. Arthur Thompson, one of Glasgow's most established criminal figures, was from Blackhill. One source from the period describes it plainly as an estate long dominated by ruthless crime gangs.
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The reasoning was civic and charitable on the surface, but the solicitor and activist Aamer Anwar, who was marching with asylum seekers by 2001, described it in less charitable terms. A deal that involved the city claiming hundreds of millions from the Home Office for
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Red Road's crime was real, but calling it Glasgow's most feared estate was always more media label than recorded fact.
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arriving were being placed in a building the council had already decided to knock down. Nobody publicly asked whether a condemned tower block was appropriate housing for families who had survived wars.
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The actual gang infrastructure in the northeast of the city was concentrated elsewhere. Red Road was what it looked like, a place of poverty, antisocial behavior, and creeping neglect. That is frightening enough without embellishment.
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The city with the highest number of asylum seekers outside London was housing them in buildings riddled with asbestos.
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What got overlooked in the coverage was that people lived full lives in these blocks.
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Through all of this, the deterioration, the changing populations, the creeping institutional abandonment, the towers kept producing people.
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There were families who stayed for years because they chose to, because this was their community.
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Former resident Raymond Shaw could still recall busloads arriving for weekend [music] bingo even years after he left.
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Children who walked to school along Petershill Drive every morning and came home to a flat with a view stretching halfway across Lanarks
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That is what a community sounds like when it remembers itself. That is what was built here, and then quietly dismantled, floor by floor.
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One person who grew up in these towers took something else entirely. He'd been born a couple of miles away in Townhead, on a street called Monkland Street. His family moved to Barmulloch when he was a child, and he grew up
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inside these blocks. By the time he was a teenager, he had a reputation for violence and for using a knife, and for never being someone you pushed around twice.
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By the time he was an adult, Jamie Stevenson was building something inside Glasgow's criminal underworld that would eventually reach from Ecuador to a fruit market two streets from where he was born.
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They called him the Iceman. The Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency spent four years building a case against him.
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Four years of electronic surveillance, undercover officers, forensic accountants tracking where the money went and where it came from.
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They called it Operation Folk Law. And what they found was not a man who'd outgrown his postcode. Stevenson was still operating across North Glasgow, still connected to the streets around Red Road, still running money through businesses that looked, on paper, like
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ordinary commerce. His public-facing cover was simple. Car valeting. That's what he told people he did for a living when pressed to say anything at all.
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Beneath it, he was described in Russell Findlay's 2010 book on the case as the biggest drugs trafficker Scotland had ever seen, suspected of involvement in a string of murders.
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Those murder allegations were never proven in court. What was proven was serious enough. In April 2007, Jamie Stevenson stood in the dock at the High Court in Glasgow alongside his stepson, Jerry Carbin, who was 26 at the time.
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Both admitted charges relating to concealing and receiving criminal property. The SCDEA had planted listening devices in both men's homes.
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What those devices recorded gave investigators enough to recover nearly 600,000 pounds in cash and 55 luxury watches valued at 307,000 pounds.
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Stevenson had also been trying to set up a taxi firm. Not because he had a sudden interest in transport, because a legitimate business moves dirty money more cleanly than a carrier bag of cash.
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The judge who sentenced him [music] was Lord Hodge. He did not mince his words.
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He told Stevenson, "It is clear that you occupy an important position in the world of organized crime. Money laundering provides an essential service to the drugs trade and contributes materially to its profitability." 12 years. Carbin got five and a half.
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Here's what you need to understand about that sentence. 12 years was supposed to end it. It didn't come close. Stevenson served less than 6 years. He was released and almost immediately Operation Chillon was tracking him again. This time in connection with a
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cocaine seizure in Southern France worth over 30 million pounds. He was recalled to prison for breaching the terms of his license. But a breach of license is not the same as a new conviction. It is not the same as dismantling an enterprise.
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Stevenson came back out and the enterprise came back with him. Meanwhile, across the 2010s, something was happening in the way serious organized crime groups communicated.
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Encrypted messaging platforms were becoming the infrastructure of choice. [music] EncroChat was one of the biggest. Tens of thousands of users across Europe.
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Criminals who believed, genuinely believed, that their conversations were sealed off from any outside view.
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Stevenson was on it. [music] His handles were Elusive Ale and Big Tasty. If you know anything about how he was eventually caught, the first handle in particular will seem either very funny or very apt.
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The plot he was building in early 2020 was the largest thing he'd ever attempted. Cocaine imported from Ecuador, shipped in consignments of bananas addressed to a fruit merchant in Glasgow. To manage it from the legitimate side, he needed a company
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with a credible trading history in imported fruit. So, he bought one. On EncroChat, he sent a message saying he'd acquired the business and attached a picture of the Glasgow Fruit Market Limited website to confirm it. The company's address was Kennedy Street,
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Townhead. Townhead, where Monklands Street was. Where he was born. The registered director of Glasgow Fruit Market Limited at the time of the operation was a vulnerable person who had no idea their identity was being used. The judge at the eventual
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sentencing noted this specifically. Stevenson had put someone else's name on the front of his operation, someone who couldn't have understood or consented to what was being done in their name. His right-hand man was a 32-year-old from Menock Road in Glasgow called Lloyd
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Cross. On EncroChat, his handle was Shaggy Goat. Cross liaised between Stevenson and the fruit merchant, arranging the actual banana consignments. A 67-year-old trader called David Billsland, who used the handle Trendy Mutant [music] and had met Stevenson at a hotel in
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Alicante, Spain on Valentine's Day 2020 to work out the details of the scheme. Ecuador, Alicante, Southern France, a fruit market in Townhead. Between May and September 2020, 18 consignments of bananas left Ecuador addressed to Glasgow Fruit Market Limited. Border
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Force officers at the Port of Dover seized all of them. Inside, 119 foil packages, 952 blocks of cocaine, purity at 73%.
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Street value, 76 million pounds. Nearly a ton of cocaine that never made it past Dover.
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Stevenson had also been running something else in parallel, a pill factory in Rochester, Kent, producing etizolam, street value the drug that had been devastating Scottish communities for years. The factory was capable of churning out 258,000 tablets an hour. When police raided it
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in June 2020, they seized 13.5 million pills. The operation had planned to deliver over 28 million.
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French law enforcement cracked the EncroChat network in April 2020, which meant that by the time the banana shipments were arriving at Dover, investigators were already reading [music] Stevenson's messages.
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They watched the operation unfold in real time from the inside. Every conversation between Elusive Ale, Big Tasty, Shaggy Goat, and [music] Trendy Mutant. Every logistics discussion. Every reference to delivery schedules and cash collection.
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When they moved, Stevenson was arrested, released on bail, and gone 6 weeks later. Fled to the Netherlands.
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His handle had told you exactly who he was. The man who slips away. Added to most wanted lists, a fugitive with a near ton of cocaine [music] and 13.5 million pills on his account, he had simply walked out.
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Back at Red Road, the estate he grew [music] up in was by now down to its final years.
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The people still inside [music] it were running out of time in ways that had nothing to do with drug cartels.
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But both countdowns were closing. By 2003, the flats had been formally transferred to the Glasgow Housing Association following a ballot of remaining residents.
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The writing was on the wall. Literally, in the sense that it had been there since the late [music] 70s advising people not to drill holes in it.
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Plans for demolition were announced in 2005. The estate was formally condemned [music] in 2008.
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And yet, people were still being placed inside the buildings for [music] years after that condemnation official.
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The asylum seeker dispersal program had been running since 2001. Glasgow had taken on a significant share of those being relocated [music] from London and the Southeast.
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By the time of the Serek deaths in March 2010, the Home Office counted 2,485 asylum seekers in the city, the highest number outside London.
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A large proportion of them were at Red Road. The blocks offered something Glasgow's authorities needed [music] at that moment, available units, enough of them, physical space to absorb numbers.
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Even if the buildings themselves were already structurally finished and legally condemned. The contested allegation made by solicitor Aamer Anwar, who was marching with asylum seekers as early as 2001, was that the financial arrangement between the city and the Home Office was
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the real driver. Glasgow claiming housing payments from the government for filling condemned tower blocks with people the system had nowhere else to put.
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The council disputed that framing. What is documented is the outcome. People who had survived wars and persecution were being housed in buildings that Glasgow had already formally decided to destroy.
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The conditions inside the final years of Red Road were unlike anything the original families who moved in during the '60s would have recognized.
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The underground complex had been sealed off for years. The brig and the bingo hall sat untouched beneath the estate, a preserved ruin below a crumbling one. No shops running as they once had, no weekend buses bringing pensioners in
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from across North Glasgow. The blocks were being stripped back section by section as demolition preparation began on the parts already emptied. And inside the remaining inhabited towers, people from Eritrea, Afghanistan Zimbabwe Sudan and Russia, from nearly every country that
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produces refugees, were making do in buildings that were structurally and institutionally done. One man, an Iraqi asylum seeker named Jamal, lived alone inside an emptying block for eight months, just two canaries for company. Local people started calling him the Birdman of Red
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Road. Eight months alone in a condemned tower in Balornock with the rest of the estate being dismantled around him because nowhere in Glasgow would take him.
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Nobody wanted him in their area. Nobody had an answer. So, he stayed in the building with his birds while the city made other [music] arrangements.
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In February 2010, a Russian family was placed on the 15th floor of 63 Petershill [music] Drive. Sergei Serykh, 43 years old, his wife Tatiana, and her son Stepan, 19 or 20. They had been in Britain since 2007 and had applied for
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asylum on arrival. Their claim had been refused. They had recently received notice that they would also have to leave the flat. The countdown had reached its end. On the morning of the 7th of March, 2010, the three bodies
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were found at the base of the block, tied together by rope. They had jumped from the 15th floor. Police found no suspicious circumstances and treated the deaths as suicide. That same week, fellow asylum seekers from the complex held a candlelit vigil at the spot where
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the bodies were found. A march was organized to the UK Border Agency offices in Glasgow. Signs were carried.
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Names were written on paper. Other residents came out and stood with them. It was the kind of response you see when people understand, at close range, exactly what has happened.
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The Serykh case was not as straightforward as the initial reports made it seem. The Guardian cited sources at the time who believed Sergei had been a former member of the Russian Security Services. The exact nature of his original asylum claim, why he left
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Russia, what happened during the family's time in Canada before they came to Britain, was never made public in any detail. A year after the deaths, his stepdaughter Karina Derevianko spoke to the press. She said the family in Russia
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did not believe the deaths were suicide. She told reporters that a year had passed since the deaths and the family in Russia had received no information from Scottish authorities about what actually happened. A fatal accident inquiry into the case was reportedly
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being considered by the Lord Advocate. No conclusion from any such process appears in the publicly available record. I am not going to tell you what happened in that flat. I don't know.
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What is documented is that a family with an unresolved background in Russian intelligence was housed in a condemned building, refused asylum, told to leave, and found dead beneath it on a Sunday morning, tied together. The Scottish police investigated and found no
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suspicious circumstances. The family in Russia found that impossible to accept. The question is still open. The building is not. Red Road survived its own demolition schedule because the remaining blocks kept filling with people no other part of the city would
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accept. By the end of 2014, several hundred asylum seekers were still inside the last inhabited tower at full capacity.
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No local area wanted to absorb them. The estate endured past its own death because of people with nowhere else to go.
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In spring 2015, the final dispersal happened. The last asylum seekers were relocated to other parts of Glasgow. The last remaining block was emptied.
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48 years of residency at Red Road ended without ceremony, without a named date [music] that anyone marked, without anyone in authority saying what had been done.
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The people who finished the estate's history [music] were not the kind of people the city was building commemorations for.
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The towers still stood, but not for much longer. In early 2014, Glasgow City Council and the Commonwealth Games Organizing Committee came up with an idea.
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The remaining Red Road blocks were due for demolition anyway. The 2014 Commonwealth Games opening ceremony [music] was going to be broadcast to a projected global audience of 1 billion people.
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Why not combine them? Blow five of the six remaining towers live on television. 1,250 kg of explosives. What they were calling Europe's largest ever single detonation.
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A spectacular beginning to a sporting event and a symbolic full stop for the estate that in the city for 40 years.
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The organizers' logic was straightforward enough. Destruction signals renewal. Glasgow had reinvented itself before. The waterfront, the culture, the merchant city.
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Red Road coming down in a cloud of dust before the world's cameras would show the planet what the city had made of itself since the shipyards closed.
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The council called it a demonstration that Glasgow was a city proud of its history that doesn't stand still.
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The public response was something else entirely. Former residents, campaigners, people who had grown up in the towers or lost family members in them. People who thought it was obscene to turn a community's demolished home into an opening ceremony spectacle, they
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organized a petition, protests. Enough noise that within weeks the plan was formally canceled. The official reason given was health and safety.
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Whether that was the genuine reason or a face-saving exit is not something any document I've found establishes conclusively.
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What is clear is that Glasgow City Council wanted to make a statement about its future by publicly destroying its past. And enough people said no loudly enough that they had to stop.
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The demolition happened anyway, just without the cameras and not entirely on schedule. The first two blocks had come down in June 2012. Then 21 Bernie Court in May 2013. [music] The remaining six were set for October 2015.
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On the 11th, the charges were detonated. Four of the blocks fell. Four dropped cleanly, became rubble, raised a cloud of dust over Balornock that residents watched from behind the exclusion zone.
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Two didn't. [music] The upper sections of 10 Red Road Court, the red-clad block, the one from the beginning, the one whose 23rd floor contained the flat where a 12-year-old had died in 1977, and one other block remained tilting at
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an angle. Bottom halves destroyed, top halves leaning. [music] Social media named them the leaning towers of Balornock within the hour.
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The demolition crew had to come back. Mechanical work, floor by floor, section by section, until the last of the eight towers was finally gone in 2016.
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The estate that had refused to be only what the city said it was, turned out to refuse the ending, too.
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[music] The rubble was cleared. And then something happened with it that I think is the cleanest summary of what Red Road meant to Glasgow's [music] institutions.
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The crushed material from the demolished blocks was recycled, used as aggregate, laid as foundations for roads and venues connected to the 2014 Commonwealth Games infrastructure.
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The estate the council had wanted to blow up as a symbol of new Glasgow, became [music] literally the ground beneath new Glasgow's showcase event.
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Red Road went underground. [music] In a sense, it's still there. Now, January 2022, the Netherlands. A man out jogging.
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Jamie Stevenson had been a fugitive for 18 months. Bailed after the initial arrests connected to the banana shipments, he had walked out of Scotland six weeks after his release, and kept going.
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He was on the National Crime Agency's most wanted [music] list, wanted in Spain. His name on briefings and alerts across European law enforcement. He was 56 years old and had survived longer in Scotland's criminal underworld than virtually anyone. Two major
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investigations and one serious prison stretch [music] already behind him. They arrested him while he was out for a run.
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He was extradited and brought back to face trial in Glasgow. Operation Pepperoni, the Police Scotland and NCA investigation running since the EncroChat crackdown, had documented everything.
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The Valentine's Day meeting in Alicante, the messages between Elusive Ale, Big Tasty, Shaggy Goat, and Trendy Mutant.
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The 18 banana consignments. The pill factory in Rochester, capable of 258,000 etizolam tablets an hour.
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Stevenson denied everything until the fifth day of trial in August 2024, when he entered guilty pleas to two charges: directing the importation of cocaine and involvement in serious organized crime through the production and supply of street valium. [music]
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On the 2nd of October, 2024, at the High Court in Glasgow, Judge Lord Eric sentenced him. He told Stevenson directly, "You directed a complex operation for the importation and supply of cocaine.
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20 years, 12 for the cocaine, eight for the etizolam." Across all six defendants, the total [music] came to 49 years combined. The Crown Office described it as drug trafficking on an industrial and global scale.
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In February 2025, his lawyers secured a reduction on appeal. 16 years and 3 months. He'll be in his mid-70s when he gets out, if he serves the full term.
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That is what Red Road produced. A man who grew up in the towers, carried knives as a teenager, built a cartel that eventually connected Ecuador to a fruit market on Kennedy Street in Townhead, two streets from Monkland Street, where he was born, and who will
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spend a significant portion of whatever years remain to him in a Scottish prison. The operation looped back to his birthplace. The drugs were always going home.
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The ground in Barmulloch is empty now. Eight towers gone. The underground bingo hall, the community flats on the 23rd floor, the lifts, the views out across Lanarkshire gone.
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The rubble is in the roads. You might have driven over it. The man who grew up inside the towers is in a cell. And the city that built Red Road to solve one problem, watched it become another, and
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eventually blew most of it up, has moved on. Almost everything from this place was recycled into something else. Almost nothing was acknowledged.
Topics:Red RoadGlasgowRed Road Flatssocial housingasbestosbrutalist architectureSam Buntondemolitionurban declineScottish history
