Original subtitles

Scotland is a breathtakingly beautiful country.

No more so than from the air.

It boasts one of the most photogenic landscapes in the world.

With our mountain glens

and romantic lochs, it is no wonder it is one of the most photographed.

Ever since the invention of flight,

photographers have taken to the air.

Their photographs are a unique window into our past.

And a record of our constantly changing way of life.

The aerial view has transformed

how we understand and plan our towns and cities.

From the graceful design of Edinburgh's New Town

to building a motorway

right through the middle of Glasgow.

I mean, can you imagine them putting a motorway

through the heart of Edinburgh?

Bringing archive photography to life,

and recreating places that exist only as photographs.

We'll show how planners have used the view from above

to play God with our towns and cities.

Defining how we live our lives, our homes, where we work,

and how we get there.

This is the story of our great cities from above.

This is the story of Scotland from the sky.

It is a story we start here,

in one of Glasgow's best loved green spaces.

Bellahouston Park.

And I'm going to try to float a camera

up to 300 feet in the air.

I have got my balloons, I am ready to reel them out.

I am not sure this is going to work.

OK, here goes nothing.

This is us passing 200 feet now.

And we're going to keep going.

80 years ago, visitors to Bellahouston Park

could see views of their city from this great height

for the very first time.

Between May and December 1938,

the park was the home of the Empire Exhibition.

It's hard to believe today,

but 170 acres of this park

were transformed into a remarkable display of new architecture.

And although nobody knew it at the time,

there was something here that would come to define how tens of thousands

of Scots would live over the next half century.

Aerial photographers captured the park's dramatic transformation.

The centrepiece of the exhibition was this tower,

300 feet high and with three observation decks

perched right at the top.

It was dubbed the Tower of Empire.

But it was actually Scotland's first skyscraper.

Alex Keith went to the top of the tower as a nine-year-old.

The tower dominated the whole site.

You must have been excited to go up it.

Well, one particular Saturday morning,

my parents decided that it was about time that we did go up the tower.

I can't remember now whether they gave me the money

or whether it was a free ride

in the two express lifts that took you to the top of the tower.

That was as exciting as you'd ever want to be, the speed of these...

..actual lifts went at.

And what do you remember from your view from the top of there?

A different world. Looking all over Glasgow,

you could see the shipyards,

you could see literally for miles around.

You could see the hills away towards Loch Lomond side.

A vast area.

It was... You could see for about a 90-mile radius.

Have you ever been up a taller building than that?

No. No, that was the tallest, and I think, in all probability,

I would have had to have gone to

America, New York, to go up anything higher.

So, could you believe that there was a site like this in Glasgow?

No, I think we took it for granted.

Glasgow can do anything, if we put our minds to it.

A staggering 12 million people from around the world came to visit

the exhibition in the six months it was open.

They came to enjoy the bandstand, cafes, pavilions,

and remarkable custom-made palaces.

The designer of its tower was

the visionary modern architect Thomas Tait.

For Tait, the future was a life lived high in the sky,

and his building was a symbol of a new Scotland,

raised up to look down on the old one from above.

But this Scotland would take another few decades to arrive.

When the exhibition closed, most of the buildings were soon taken down.

Tait's tower had been built to last,

designed as the first new icon of a modern Glasgow skyline.

But it survived just one year.

It too was demolished,

out of fear that its height would attract

German bombers in World War II.

Nowadays the tower is nothing but a memory.

Even its foundations are overgrown by the trees on top of Ibrox Hill.

The city of the future was gone, but not forgotten, and not for good.

The record of how our towns and cities have changed

over the past century is kept here,

in the archives of Historic Environment Scotland, in Edinburgh.

It's home to Scotland's national collection of aerial photography,

the biggest resource of its kind in Europe.

They are literally millions of photographs in the collection.

And for over a decade, I've worked in this vast archive,

delving into its hidden corners,

exploring its history, and its secrets.

Each photograph, like this beautiful shot of Aberdeen from 1989,

is a window into our past, showing us how we lived.

But these pictures are more than just mute images.

The information they contain has transformed

how we see and change our urban landscapes.

Our workhorse is this trusty little Cessna.

We fly all over Scotland in it,

carefully documenting the world below.

Every year, we head to the air to take

thousands of new photographs to add to our collection.

But before the invention of flight,

there were huge gaps in our understanding of the country.

300 years ago,

the country's mountainous terrain

was unknown territory to many Scots.

And to those who ruled them.

For outsiders, the Highlands were

a mysterious and intimidating landscape.

After successive Jacobite rebellions,

the Government realised they needed a more complete picture

of the lay of the land.

So they hatched an ambitious plan,

to accurately map the Highlands of Scotland for the very first time.

To complete this Herculean task,

the Government turned to a maverick map-maker from Carluke.

He was just 21 years old, and his name was William Roy.

He began his survey here, at the tip of Loch Ness in the summer of 1747.

Roy set off with a surveyor's wheel,

marked the first and second bends with two poles,

and then measured the distance between them with metal chains.

And on and on he went.

Over and over again.

He repeated this for every new bend in the road.

You've got to wonder how many bends he measured.

Rather him than me.

Roy charted not just distances, but also the features of the landscape.

Over the next five years,

Roy and his team mapped a remarkable

15,000 square miles of the Highlands.

Every single road, river, loch, mountain,

glen and village was translated into

a spectacular patchwork of northern Scotland.

They're beautiful ink and watercolour maps.

They really are a phenomenal achievement

given the basic equipment Roy used,

the hostile terrain and the limited manpower available to him.

And you can see just how accurate his maps are

when you match them with the real view from above.

It revealed an incredibly detailed view of the landscape,

as if seen from the sky.

Once you understand a country's landscape, then you can change it.

Armed with the knowledge Roy's maps gave them,

the Government could now make plans for how to, in their words,

improve the Highlands.

Roads, bridges, jobs and industry -

all were on the drawing board.

But how was all of this going to be achieved

in such an unforgiving landscape?

Step forward, some of Scotland's world-famous engineers,

like Thomas Telford.

He thought if you could open up travel

and trade in this tough terrain,

you could forge new communities,

you could engineer a future for the Highlands.

One man who has made it his life's work to study the history of the

Highlands is Jim Hunter.

The notion of actually creating things,

settlements, towns, from scratch, that was entirely new.

And, of course, the main difficulty was to engineer

enough economic activity to make these places viable and worthwhile.

And how big a role did Thomas Telford play

in the transformation of this landscape?

Thomas Telford was key to this.

He played an enormous role in the development of the Highlands

in the years around and just after 1800.

He didn't always hang around to oversee the details, as it were,

but in the beginning it was Telford that was

designing these communities,

designing the facilities that went along with them.

So he was absolutely critical to

what was happening in the Highlands at that time.

Telford's mission was to tame the wild landscape.

To make it accessible.

And so he built new roads and bridges.

Like this beautiful crossing here in Dunkeld.

This new bridge could carry an army

if the Highlands rose up again in rebellion.

But it could also carry cattle and grain,

and help bring money into the economy.

In the late 1780s,

Telford was asked by the British Fisheries Board

to help design and build, from scratch,

new fishing towns and villages in the Highlands.

Ullapool is nestled on the edge of Loch Broom.

And it is hard to think of a more picturesque spot to build on.

When you look down from above,

you can see it's a cleverly arranged pattern

of neat little streets.

Work was completed in 1798, and even to this day,

little has changed with the layout.

This street, Shore Street,

runs parallel to the waters of Loch Broom.

And originally it was reserved for public buildings

and storehouses for the fish.

The workers' streets were placed behind, going east to west,

and its beauty was its compact simplicity.

These planned ports were built to bring prosperity

to the people of the Highlands for generations to come.

Ullapool's neat and ordered streets

became the model for later fishing towns, like Pultneytown, in Wick.

But in Ullapool's case, despite these best laid plans,

as a fishing port it was a crushing failure.

Within a few years, local herring stocks had vanished,

and the town's economy collapsed for the best part of a century.

The herring may have fled, but Ullapool survived.

Today it's a tourist hot spot and gateway to the Outer Hebrides.

It's testament to the vision of the original planners

that over 200 years later,

Ullapool's practical design has endured.

30 years before Ullapool's construction,

a new urban order on a much grander scale

was emerging in Edinburgh:

the New Town.

At the time, it was the largest

planned city development in the world...

..spreading out over the empty fields to the north of the castle.

For many of its residents today,

there's nowhere better to live.

Walking around here, it is easy to see why.

It is a masterpiece of thoughtful planning, a monument to order,

rationality, elegance,

full of grand townhouses and sweeping crescents.

For me, the New Town has always been a kind of architectural poem,

written in stone.

It's even more beautiful when viewed from above.

In the days before planes and drones,

there was one eccentric Edinburgh resident who was fascinated by high

viewpoints over the city.

His name was Patrick Geddis,

and he would often be seen leading groups

up to the tall tower at the top of the Royal Mile.

"Perhaps you are wondering why

"I hurried you up here from the street",

he would ask the group.

"Simply because the exertion of climbing gets the

"blood pumping, clears the fog from your brain,

"and prepares you for the mental thrill of these outlooks."

The tower was one of the highest spots in the whole of Edinburgh.

And right at the very top was a camera obscura.

It's like a giant camera laid on its back,

with a mirror this size on top of the building,

directing light down onto this wooden table.

It allowed the viewer to look down on the city and the landscape from

above, charting the relationship between the two.

It offered views in every direction,

but it also showed you more than just scenery.

Geddis liked the view so much that he bought the tower

and its camera obscura.

He was entranced by the high vantage it offered.

Because it allowed him to understand the city

in a completely different way.

And from his beloved Outlook Tower,

he could see the old town and the new town

set opposite each other like two pages of an open book,

telling a remarkable story of urban history.

He could see the past but also,

crucially, he could imagine the future.

The Edinburgh of Patrick Geddis's era

was very much a city of the mind,

graceful and refined.

And a world away from her brash and unruly neighbour, Glasgow.

Here it was all about the muscle.

A rapid industrial growth, which began in the late 18th-century.

By the mid-1800s, it was Scotland's biggest city.

The old centre was the medieval cathedral.

But as the Industrial Revolution powered onwards,

it was left isolated on the city's fringes.

And factories and tenements spread like a rash, moving westwards.

In 1853, the writer Hugh MacDonald memorably wrote,

"The great city dims the autumn sky with its canopy of smoke."

By this time, Glasgow was on its way to becoming one of the greatest

manufacturing machines the world had ever seen, a city of iron and steam,

fire and steel.

Workers flocked to the city in their hundreds and thousands from the

Highlands and Lowlands and across the sea from Ireland.

They were packed into slum tenements.

Overcrowded and dirty, disease and suffering were rife.

Living conditions may have been tough,

but there was a welcome escape at the weekends - the football.

Over the course of the 20th century,

the football stadium gained a unique status.

Nowhere else could compare to it as a place for mass gathering.

Not churches, not markets, not civic squares, not cinemas, not parks.

And nowhere is more hallowed than this place,

our national stadium, Hampden Park.

When it was finished in 1903,

it was the biggest football stadium in the world.

You can see from this photograph taken in 1927 that Hampden Park was

largely surrounded by green fields and a scattering of houses.

The empty fields have long since been swallowed up

by the advancing city of Glasgow.

In little over a century,

both the stadium itself and the surrounding area

have changed beyond all recognition.

At the time of Hampden's construction,

Glasgow was still a city of chaotic growth,

where planning was an afterthought.

But by the 1920s and '30s,

fresh ideas about how to redesign our cities began to emerge.

And this time the planners had a new tool - flight.

Sitting up in the front of a helicopter is awe-inspiring.

Up here, you can look out and spot features

you just can't see from the ground.

To the pioneers of flight and aerial photography,

these views were a revelation.

Paris was the first-ever city to be flown over by an aircraft.

As a student, the French architect Le Corbusier

watched the pilot circling

the Eiffel Tower and became fascinated with flying.

Like Patrick Geddis before him,

he understood the most valuable view of a city was from the air.

But not everything that Le Corbusier saw impressed him.

After one flight, he wrote,

"Fly over our 19th-century cities

"with row after row of houses without hearts,

"furrowed with their canyons of soulless streets.

"Look down and judge for yourself.

"The architects of the past didn't build for men,

"they built for money."

Le Corbusier thought he saw a terrible truth,

that cities were killing the people who lived in them.

"Cities with their misery must be torn down", he said.

"They must be largely destroyed, and fresh cities built."

This God's-eye view transformed Le Corbusier's thoughts

on how to rebuild.

And, like Thomas Tait, he favoured building high.

For Le Corbusier's Scottish disciples,

the cities of the Central Belt were prime candidates for his new vision.

But as Europe went to war in 1939,

the architect's plans would have to wait.

The millions of tonnes of bombs dropped during World War II

caused untold damage.

While Scotland avoided the brunt of the destruction,

the hardships the ordinary people suffered

led to a strong desire to improve living conditions.

It was time to look at the country afresh...

..to examine every inch of land.

When the RAF pilots returned home from the war,

they were given a new mission...

..to make a photographic map of the whole of Scotland.

The same planes, pilots and photographers

who had helped plan and carry out the bombing of mainland Europe

were now instrumental in rebuilding on the home front.

It was an incredibly important job.

But it was also mind-numbingly dull.

As one pilot wrote, "On each trip we would be allocated a block of land,

"40 miles long by 30 miles wide.

"This was divided into ten runs, each three miles apart."

"400 miles of staring at the ground through a bomb sight."

"Tedious in the extreme."

They carried on like this for six years.

In 500 flights, they took nearly 300,000 photographs.

Their work effectively took planners into the sky.

Two centuries after William Roy,

Scotland could once again be viewed from above.

Mosaic maps were stitched together, each one metre square,

corresponding to 25 square kilometres of land.

Putting these mosaic maps together was painstaking work.

It's like the world's hardest jigsaw.

But what could be laid on top was the blueprint

for a post-war nation -

new roads here, new forests there,

could this be the spot for a new dam?

And could we simply redesign the whole layout of our biggest city?

This 1945 public information film

shows Glasgow's Victorian layout was no longer fit for purpose.

1,000 feet in the air,

looking down on a city of congested buildings and narrow roads,

rent with railway viaducts and ships which load and unload at the very

heart of the city's gates.

Down there, a great population,

living under outmoded conditions

which give rise to much confusion, as well as discomfort.

Nowhere else in Europe was as densely populated as this.

Something clearly had to be done.

Planners needed to think fast, and they needed to think big.

In the end, two vastly different visions for the city's future,

both inspired by the God's-eye view, battled it out.

The most radical was contained in this document,

written in 1945 by Glasgow's master of works, Robert Bruce.

A devoted follower of Le Corbusier,

he believed the best way forward was simply to wipe the slate clean.

What he proposed in his infamous 1945 report

was the levelling of the old centre of Glasgow in its entirety.

Nothing would be saved from his savage planning scalpel.

Iconic buildings, like Central Station, the School of Art,

even the City Chambers behind me,

they would all be demolished.

A new Glasgow would arise in its place.

And it would be dominated by skyscrapers.

The plan for Glasgow of tomorrow is taking shape.

The overcrowded and overdeveloped city

will give place to a new and free-flowing city.

An intriguing model of Bruce's plan

was put on display at the Kelvin Hall,

to show the public what this new Glasgow would look like.

It bore little resemblance to the city Glaswegians called home.

Bruce's plan was met with fierce resistance.

His main opponent was a dapper Englishman,

famous for his post-war rebuilding plans for London -

Patrick Abercrombie.

Rather than build upwards in confined spaces,

Abercrombie advocated low-rise living

in a series of brand-new towns, built on open land,

far beyond the city limits.

Glasgow's leaders now had two very different visions

of the city's future in front of them.

Incredibly, they seemed to agree with Bruce.

His controversial vision was approved in 1947.

At the same time, plans were being made for skyscrapers across Glasgow.

Huge swathes of the old tenement blocks were demolished,

knocked down to make way for high-rise flats.

One of the earliest high-rise buildings

can still be found here in Cardonald,

in the south-west of Glasgow.

Work began on Moss Heights in 1950,

and took four years to complete.

For potential new residents,

these flats couldn't be more different from the old tenements.

They were ten storeys high, offering stunning views over the whole city.

And inside was a transformation,

kitchens with all mod cons,

living rooms kept toasty by a revolutionary

coal-powered central heating system,

which was included in the rent.

They were marketed as the perfect place to bring up young families.

In this house, with all its modern amenities,

the mother can care for her bairns

as she's always wanted to.

She's no longer haunted by the fear they may have wandered away to some

traffic-filled street,

or that they're breathing germs of disease

in a refuse-littered back court.

Almost 70 years after they were built,

young families still love living here.

Alison, you've lived in tower blocks for most of your life,

haven't you? Yeah, I have, since I was about seven.

I lived in tower blocks in Ibrox on a side 17 high -

and I'm petrified of heights,

absolutely petrified.

So you could just imagine looking out the windae - never happened.

But here you only have two on a landing.

The one that I stayed in before - you had five houses on the landing,

so it was quite in-your-face, if you know what I mean?

Now you're bringing up a child as well.

How does she enjoy living here?

She loves it here because of the space.

They have a garden club and things like that, homework club.

She loves going to that. She's met quite a few new friends there.

So she enjoys... You get a load of different people turning up and it's

just getting to know your neighbours,

which is something you didn't really do before

in the flats I lived in before. So you have a real community feel here?

Yeah. There's a lot of different nationalities here

so we're trying to bring them together

because other places it'd be, "You're there, we're here."

But here it's we're trying to bring them all in and get to know

your community, in a sense.

If you had to sum up what it's like to live in these blocks,

how would you put that? I've always liked living here.

I've been here, what, 13 and a half year now?

And I don't see myself leaving it any time soon.

The view from the top of Moss Heights

is one that Thomas Tait would approve of.

You can see far out across the city in every direction.

Being set right in the heart of Cardonald is also an advantage.

There are shops nearby and plenty of buses into the city centre.

After a multi-million pound makeover,

these three blocks are stalwart survivors,

still standing proud over the city.

Moss Heights is a useful reminder

that not all Glasgow high-rises were,

in Billy Connolly's memorable phrase, deserts with windows.

Some of them have proved to be great places to live, built to last,

and clearly loved by the residents.

In the years after Moss Heights' completion,

many more high-rises sprung up all over the country.

These huge concrete slabs fitted in perfectly

with Robert Bruce's vision of the modern city.

Streets in the sky, not streets on the ground.

But Bruce had already resigned in disgust

before any of the new tower blocks were finished.

In 1949,

his proposal to demolish the city centre

was dismissed by the Glasgow Corporation

because of its exorbitant cost.

Instead, they ruled in favour of the Patrick Abercrombie's new town plan.

Hi, Ronnie. Morning, Jamie. How are you?

Fine. What's the weather looking like today?

It's looking quite good. The wind's right down the runway,

visibility's 10km and the cloud base is quite high.

So today should go quite well.

Let's get going.

I'm going up in the National Collection of Aerial Photography's

survey plane to have a look for myself at some of these new towns.

It's quite cramped inside.

It's like I'm in a mini with wings.

But the discomfort is worth it.

As ever, the views are fantastic.

Most of Scotland's new towns were built on greenfield sites.

Take this photograph from the summer of 1947.

There are rolling fields and hedgerows,

in the distance a small village,

and at its centre a bright rectangle of corn being worked over by one

farmer and his horse.

It's an idyllic country scene...

Gone forever, buried a few years later

beneath Scotland's first new town, East Kilbride.

Four more new towns were developed in the 1940s and '50s.

The idea behind them was simple,

to provide new homes for up to 350,000 people

in places outside Scotland's biggest cities.

The second of these new towns was Glenrothes in Fife.

The town was custom-designed with curved clusters of low rise housing,

grouped together in separate precincts.

It couldn't have been more different

from the overcrowded tenements that

people had left behind.

And you can see just how much green space Glenrothes enjoys.

For the new town planners,

recreational spaces were essential to quality of life.

From up here you can see how trees and parks flow between the roads and

housing, like rivers of greenery.

Everyone seems to have a decent sized garden, too.

It's no wonder the town has won so many Britain in Bloom awards.

The different areas of Glenrothes

were named after the farms the town was built over.

Some of them don't sound very Scottish.

Each district was to be its own self-sustaining community,

with shops, churches, schools and even public art.

Many of the town's early residents were brought here

to work in the newly-built Rothes Colliery.

The 1951 plan of action for the town

forecast a population of around 30,000.

But building progress was slow.

These maps, each five years apart,

show how the town grew gradually in size over the decades.

Everything here was built from scratch - schools, play areas,

a new shopping centre, administrative buildings,

all set within acres of green space.

Le Corbusier's vision of separating residential and industrial areas was

carried out to the letter.

The coal mines shut down after only a few years due to flooding,

but the town continued to grow

and became a key location for the Scottish electronics industry.

It's now home to 50,000 people.

And Linda Bagnall has lived here for most of her life.

What did you think when you first arrived here as a 12-year-old girl?

Did it feel like you were living in the future at the time?

Oh, I was too young to think about that.

I was just wondering where

the dancing was going to be that weekend!

Yeah. When you build a community from scratch,

how do you generate a spirit around it?

I believe the people that were moving into the town,

they were moving into Glenrothes for a reason.

They were all looking for a new start.

So there was no negativity and that wore off onto everything.

A lot of new towns are often held up

as some of the worst places in the UK to live -

do you understand that?

Having been in some of them, yes.

Having been in this one, no.

It never applied to Glenrothes.

What do you think sets Glenrothes apart?

I think these early town planners

and architects were innovative thinkers.

For instance, the housing in Glenrothes is superb.

Where there was good views over the town,

they put the lounges upstairs and

the kitchen and bedroom areas downstairs,

so they chopped and changed.

They looked at the big picture.

How do you feel about the green spaces in Glenrothes?

I think the green spaces are very important.

Everywhere you go, to Riverside Park, to Warout Park,

to the walkways, to Boblingen Way, to housing schemes,

it's rich in colour.

And lots of roundabouts that are also rich in colour!

Driving round Glenrothes,

what strikes you very quickly is

just how well served the town is by roads.

Transport links were one of the

founding principles of the new town idea.

It was a vision of the future that saw the motor car as a symbol of

movement, of freedom.

It's easy to see the impact of this on Glenrothes today.

Apparently, there are more roundabouts here

than in the rest of Fife put together.

By the 1950s and '60s, cars had become kings of the roads,

and a new transport infrastructure sprang up

throughout our towns and cities to serve them.

This route cuts right across the heart of the central belt.

It's our busiest road, the M8 motorway.

60 miles long, it connects Edinburgh in the east, to Glasgow,

and finally Greenock, in the west.

One of the reasons for building the M8 was to ease the terrible traffic

congestion in central Glasgow.

ARCHIVE: Glasgow's roads were not designed for motorised traffic,

they were built for horse-drawn vehicles.

It is not surprising that congestion of traffic of all kinds,

such as this, could be a daily occurrence,

causing danger and wasting much time and energy.

By 1956, the average journey speed in the city

registered little more than a brisk walk.

The bold solution proposed by

Glasgow's all-powerful planners in the early 1960s

was an inner ring road.

Unlike most ring roads, it didn't bypass the city centre,

it cut right through the middle of it.

It was to be Britain's first urban motorway.

Every day, up to 180,000 vehicles tear along its tarmac.

I'm going to speak to one of its regular users

to find out what he thinks of it.

So, George, what's it like driving every day

on Scotland's busiest road?

Well, actually, most of the time it's all right.

It goes right through the centre of town,

which is, I know, a bit controversial,

and some might say stupid, which it is.

But, at the same time,

you can get onto the motorway,

and get out of Glasgow very, very quickly.

But, as you can see, even here -

now, this is quarter to six, it's a Thursday,

the schools are off, and this is what you get.

The whole of the west of Scotland,

and from the east as well,

all end up on this road.

It's incredible when you think about it.

So everybody from the south,

everybody from the east, everybody from the north,

all end up on this road.

And then as we go along here, it goes down to two lanes.

So do you have a love/hate relationship with the road, then?

Yes, I think that's true.

I mean, most of the time, as I say, during the day,

I absolutely love it and I think it's great.

And then when you get to this time at night, as you can see,

it's an absolute nightmare.

So could you imagine the city without the road?

Yes, it would have been amazing.

We would have had more tourists than you wouldn't believe,

because although Glasgow,

according to Prince Charles,

is the best-preserved Victorian city,

if you could imagine what it would have been like

if they hadn't destroyed half of it.

Of course, you wouldn't get away with it nowadays.

I mean, could you imagine them putting a motorway

through the heart of Edinburgh?

Construction of the M8 began in the mid-1960s

and took over 20 years to complete.

The M8 would rip right through the heart of

thousands of people's homes,

dramatically changing the layout and look of the city.

It was a time of great trauma...

..even for the dead.

Behind this imposing church in Anderston was a graveyard.

It lay right in the path of the new motorway.

And so the human remains would have to be removed.

One by one, the dearly departed were disinterred,

and taken to Linn Cemetery six miles away.

It wasn't a job for the faint-hearted.

But it was work which needed to be done

in order to make way for this,

the busiest urban crossing in the UK - the Kingston Bridge.

It carries the M8 motorway westwards over the River Clyde.

The construction was a mammoth task,

involving 128 hydraulic jacks

lifting the final parts of the bridge into place.

It was a world record at the time.

In this aerial shot from 1969,

you can see the great concrete spans before they joined up.

Hailed as an engineering marvel,

the bridge opened in June 1970.

ARCHIVE: Kingston Bridge, with its 60-foot span, was opened by Queen Elizabeth,

the Queen Mother, making her first visit to Glasgow in five years.

After being greeted by city dignitaries

and performing the official opening by cutting a tape,

the Queen Mother drove across the new bridge.

Building the Kingston Bridge was a huge achievement.

But when it was finished,

only half the inner ring road had actually been completed.

And by the mid-1970s,

public opposition to the other half was growing louder.

Many Glaswegians were worried about the inner road network devastating

even more homes and communities.

The council abandoned the plan in the early 1980s.

The incomplete nature of the scheme

explains strange sights like this one behind me -

the never-built junction of the

unrealized southern flank of the ring road.

It's known locally as the ski jump.

It's not hard to see why.

Despite never being fully finished,

what was built of the inner ring road system

totally transformed Glasgow.

For car users there were direct benefits.

Average speed increased and journey times through the city shortened.

But for lovers of old architecture, there was much to complain about.

A huge motorway had smashed through a large chunk of the city,

changing it forever.

From the sky, it's clear just how much of Glasgow's Victorian

architectural heritage has been erased.

There was a time when we thought that cars and roads would come to

dominate the cities of tomorrow.

But not now. What we once put on show, we now want to hide away.

One of the proposals is this striking plan

to cover up the Charring Cross section of the M8 with a city park.

It remains to be seen if the mistakes of the past

are solved by the planners of the future.

Glasgow's post-war experience of grand urban master plans

has been a very mixed one.

Take high-rise living.

In little more than a generation,

attitudes came full circle.

Tower blocks were heralded as smart solutions

to inner-city housing shortages.

But just a few decades later, they became part of the problem,

monuments to social decay and deprivation.

Lives lived high in the Glasgow sky

have been brought crashing back down to earth.

Over time, new buildings are created

to redefine the character of our urban landscapes.

And our vast collection of aerial photography

continues to record these changes.

Laid out in these pictures from across the 20th century is a graphic

illustration of how our cities never stay still, whether we plan or not,

and they illustrate how the view from above remains the best way of

tracking change.

This is Dundee.

Of all Scotland's big cities,

Dundee is the one currently experiencing the most rapid change.

It's always been a boom and bust city,

creating boom and bust architecture.

And one new structure stands out.

It's a building that's still under construction,

and the best view of it is from the River Tay.

When you first glimpse its unusual form,

it's difficult not to be impressed.

Costing a cool £80 million,

it's the new Victoria and Albert Design Museum.

Just like the pavilions of Glasgow's Empire Exhibition,

this rather wonderful building is

going to present the best of Scottish creative brilliance,

alongside cutting edge designs from around the world.

You get the sense that Thomas Tait would approve.

The harbour has always been key to the story of Dundee.

Like many cities,

it's where Dundee's fortunes have risen and fallen

repeatedly over the centuries.

At the start of the 19th century,

a major harbour redevelopment on reclaimed land,

the work of Thomas Telford,

greatly increased the volume of merchant traffic.

By 1912,

Dundee's new harbour areas occupied

119 acres of land reclaimed from the Tay.

The Victoria Dock was built to serve the trade

in one of Dundee's biggest products, jute.

At the industry's peak,

40% of the city worked with jute,

and there were over 130 mills.

Each one boasted a thin, towering chimney,

signatures of the city's skyline.

Fast forward to this photograph taken in 1942.

The jute industry was in terminal decline.

Undercut by cheaper labour costs in India.

The port fell quiet, the buildings gradually abandoned.

The surrounding area was buried

under a huge expanse of concrete and car parks.

Was the harbour to remain redundant, lost forever?

For decades, this question remained unanswered.

Until now that is,

because this area is currently undergoing a £1 billion,

three decade-long redevelopment.

A grand experiment in cityscaping

that's unparalleled in modern Scotland.

The V&A Museum is at the centre of this new vision for the city.

Its director, Philip Long, thinks it will turn Dundee into a cultural hub

for generations to come.

I think creativity and the creative economy is a very important part of

the UK's future. And here in Dundee,

it builds on some of the historical skills that were here in the city.

The design of the building itself is about re-emphasising a connection

between the city and the sea.

Part of its brief to the architect was to help make that connection and

Kengo Kuma, our architect, does that wonderfully well.

Dundee's not a large city, 150,000 people or thereabouts,

so I think that when one understands that,

and then the scale of a project like the waterfront,

with the V&A Dundee at its forefront,

it is really, really impressive.

This is a structure that wants to transform a whole city

through force of will.

Even in its unfinished form, you can feel its self-confidence.

It shouts, "Look at me!"

And of course you do, you can't help yourself.

And from the air,

you can see how this striking new building fits into the cityscape -

how new and old fit together like a jigsaw puzzle of the city's history.

If you want to understand the stories of our cities and towns,

there's no better place to be than in the sky.

It all seemed so obvious from up here.

You can see the proud or crumbling traces of the past and the present,

you can see cities and towns changing before your eyes.

And feel the restless need to keep on remaking themselves.

And you can imagine their futures,

always waiting somewhere over the horizon.

Next time, the fascinating story of

the mysteries uncovered by pioneering aerial archaeologists.

From hidden Roman camps to a field

where the very concept of time emerged,

how the God's-eye view provides

an extraordinary window into our ancient past.