The Glasgow Housing Struggle Archive (GHSA) is an evolving project to document, share and learn from our city’s long history of housing movements. The past decade has seen the emergence of tenant and community unions like Living Rent that continue this radical tradition, and the GHSA also aims to record this ‘history in the making’ by working with union members and organisers. We believe that social change happens most effectively when the working class gets to know – and tell – its own histories from below, and a core part of the GHSA’s project is to activate historical material through popular political education, discussions, workshops, walking tours, film screenings, exhibitions and publishing. We want to show how over a 150 years of rent strikes, demonstrations, occupations and campaigning people have fought and win in the city, and can continue to shape it today.
The GHSA initially emerged in 2021 from a course on post-war housing struggles in Glasgow run by Living Rent members for the Workers’ Educational Association, leading to the creation of the GHSA website with support from the Lipman-Miliband Trust. Since then, GHSA members have organised a number of talks, workshops, exhibitions and film screenings alongside Living Rent, the MayDay Rooms, the Glasgow Women’s Library, the Govanhill Baths Community Trust and others to promote the work of the archive and share skills and knowledge.
In 2024, the GHSA received funding from the University of Glasgow’s Knowledge Exchange Fund to create a series of digital ‘Tools for Tenant Power’, recording interviews with tenant organisers from Glasgow, Barcelona, Los Angeles and Bristol, and to also put in place a formal collective to take the work of the project forward. This phase of the project was launched at the Glasgow Women’s Library in July 2024.
The GHSA now aims to solidify a collective capable of directing the archive’s work over the coming years.
This could include identifying and digitising new archival material; building stronger links with Living Rent and other radical archives; promoting the website as a space for new writing and sharing existing resources on housing history; training new members in oral history and archiving skills; and organising public events, workshops, film screenings and exhibitions.
If you have skills to contribute and would like to get involved, we would love to have you!
CURRENT COLLECTIVE
Joey Simons
Kirsteen Paton
Kate Wilson
Kirsten Lloyd
Frances Lingard
FOUNDING MEMBERS
Joey Simons
Frances Lingard
If you have skills to contribute and would like to get involved, we would love to have you!
Please contact glasgowtenantsarchive@gmail.com or fill in the form below.
GHSA led by Living Rent members, supported by the Lipman-Miliband Trust and the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) Scotland.