On the 9th of March 2005, managers of the Glasgow Housing Association (since 2003 the registered social landlords for Red Road, and hereafter referred to as GHA) announced a ten-year £60m redevelopment strategy for the Red Road site. This included the demolition of 153/183/213 Petershill Drive. Although no announcement has been made about the fate of the remaining highrises at Red Road, it is clear they no longer have a place within the new vision for the planned low-rise development. In this chapter we look closely at the beginning of the end of Red Road. That end is not a dramatic ‘catastrophic failure’ but rather a long and slow demise. Our aim is not to account factually for why Red Road failed, but to give an account of how the fact of Red Road as a housing failure gained currency in the context of redevelopment visions. This fact secures itself by way of a range of translations of the socio-technical event that is Red Road: some of these sought to confirm that Red Road should be demolished, others sought to defend Red Road and return it to the system as a viable housing solution.

We begin by analysing the announcement of the ‘regeneration scheme’ that entailed the demolition of Red Road and the way that event – through a range of inscriptions such as letters, media releases, and the location of the main media event – translated Red Road into a fact of failure. We then examine a meeting of tenants and housing campaigners, held in April 2005, whose aim was to generate a set of robust alternate facts about Red Road, so countering the official narrative of failure.