The Circle, Present and Future - The Stones and the Stars: Building Scotland's Newest Megalith - page 291

about the origins of astronomy and the Great Wall (see Chap. 3 ).
Around the same time, I was invited to lecture on the stone circle
using the Zeiss projector at the Scottish Power Planetarium in the
Glasgow Science Centre (see Chap. 2 ), and that drew more offers
of support from community organizations in Sighthill. But then a
major political setback arose.
The city of Glasgow was about to undertake a major new
initiative to resolve its social housing problems. The mount-
ing financial burdens of the outlying estates and the multi-story
developments that had been created in the 1960s, in a misguided
attempt to resolve the overcrowding and deprivation of previous
schemes like the Gorbals tenements, had brought about a crisis
in which (for example) household repairs had been frozen for 2
years because the budget for them had been consumed by interest
charges. Glasgow's entire stock of social housing was shortly to
be turned over to a new, nonprofit Glasgow Housing Association
with an entirely different financial structure. But there was a way
to get a head start on the problem of the high-rise flats.
Glasgow has a long tradition of absorbing refugees - for
instance, at the time of the potato famine, and from Europe, par-
ticularly from Jewish communities, before, during and after the
Second World War. None of those absorptions has been trouble-
free. But during the Astronomy Project, and during a wave of anti-
immigration riots in England, the late George Hay came up to
lecture at the High Frontier exhibition and said to me, in the queue
for a taxi at Central Station, “There's nothing you can show me
that will convince me you don't have the same problems here.”
I walked across to a newsstand and came back holding open that
night's Evening Times at the front-page headline “SCOTLAND
WELCOMES THE BOAT PEOPLE.”
Due to the conflict in the Balkans, in 2002 Britain was expe-
riencing a new wave of asylum seekers, as refugees were now
pejoratively termed. The government was offering large financial
incentives to cities willing to take them, temporarily, and it cre-
ated a major opportunity to improve Glasgow's housing stock. At
its peak, about 6,000 refugees and asylum seekers were housed in
flats regenerated from central funds; but, inevitably, those were
in areas of deprivation, particularly Sighthill. It created great
resentment among local residents, who had been told for years