The Tower Block UK project is a Heritage Lottery-supported initiative led by Miles Glendinning, Professor in Architectural Conservation at the University of Edinburgh. It brings together public engagement and an open licensed image archive in an attempt to emphasise the social and architectural importance of public mass housing, and to frame multi-storey blocks as a coherent and accessible nationwide heritage.

The Tower Block UK image archive, a database of around 4000 images of every multi-storey social housing development built in the UK in the post-war decades, has now been made available through Edinburgh DataShare. Edinburgh DataShare is a digital repository of research data produced at the University of Edinburgh, hosted by the Research Data Service in Information Services Group. These photographs, mostly taken in the 1980s by Miles Glendinning, have been shared under Creative Commons Attribution licence to enable them to be reused by the public.  As many of the blocks documented in these photographs have since been demolished, the archive functions in part as a repository of information on an important aspect of national and local heritage that is now vanishing.

The project to import the archive to Edinburgh DataShare was led by Pauline Ward, Data Repository Operations Officer, and Stefano Bordoni, Research Data Support Assistant, with technical support from John Pinto.

You can explore the archive on Edinburgh DataShare here: Tower Block UK complete collection, and visit the project website here: Tower Block UK

Header image: Glendinning, Miles. (2023). Tower Blocks UK: Glasgow City Red Road, glw6-05.jpg, 1984 [image]. University of Edinburgh. Edinburgh College of Art. CC BY 4.0. https://doi.org/10.7488/ds/4470.