Glasgow By Tram

Perhaps best known for his extensive body of work on industrial archaeology; in this book, John Hume shares the photographs he took himself of Glasgow trams when the network of routes was contracting. From the mid-1950s, John used both trams and his bicycle to explore the network and began photographing the trams firstly with his pre-war Brownie Box Camera, then from 1960 with a 35mm camera. Time was short, as only 18 months later, the Last Tram Procession took place. The author sees this as the harbinger of great swathes of the city being flattened and communities lost with their population displaced to 'multi-storey filing cabinet blocks' and a general de-humanisation of the city, with the loss of the tram as symbolic of what is fundamentally wrong with society.