The Red Road flats in Glasgow were demolished this Sunday. The demolition didn’t go very well. Two of the towers were left only partially demolished, endangering the locals. It should have been a fitting end to a housing scheme characterised as symbolic of civic stupidity.

But it wasn’t. The classic Glaswegian supercilious shrug was ruined by the controversy over the Commonwealth Games.

In the quest for a London Olympics-style opening extravaganza, it was suggested that the demolition of the hated Red Road flats could be carried out in a floodlit ceremony. This would symbolise the end of the old decaying city, and the birth of new Glasgow.

As soon as it was announced, the plan was met with howls of protest and online petitions. The argument against was convoluted: the flats should not being blown up as entertainment, but rather the demolition should be “dignified”. The truth, long hidden, was that a lot of people liked the flats. They liked what they symbolised. They had enjoyed living there. This outpouring was very was unexpected. The flats were bad. They had always been a byword for overarching civic ambition and stupidity.

A botched demolition: the fall of Glasgow's Red Road towers – in pictures Read more

Almost as soon as the first residents moved in, the flats were controversial. Stories abounded about ridiculous mistakes in the design. The fire exit at the top could only be accessed through someone’s back door. There was no community, no shops, no playgrounds. Clear sightlines in the corridors made them perfect for drug dealing. The lifts weren’t big enough for a coffin, so undertakers had to stand dead people upright to get them downstairs. They were not popular.

When the first phase of demolitions in the Red Road occurred in 2012 the roar from the crowd was triumphant – you can hear it on the YouTube footage.

Reporting from the flats for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, I was given a tour by the caretaker. The people living there at the time were refugees, many with applications pending. We were welcomed into the homes of families, some from Iraq, some from Somalia. They liked the flats. The houses were all sparsely furnished and immaculate. What was startling was the generous size of the rooms. If current new housing is indeed, as the land economist AW Evans calls it, all Rabbit Hutches on Postage Stamps, these were of a very different generation. Many people who lived in the flats loved them, were happy there, raised families. Compared to the stock they replaced, with crumbling walls and outside toilets, for many people the flats were a wonderful improvement.

While researching my novel The Red Road, I spent a lot of time up there within the carcass of the old flats. The glass, the walls and panelling had been stripped out, leaving a giant rectangular Wickerman looming on the horizon. It was left like that for a year because a peregrine falcon, a protected species, had nested on the 24th floor and laid an egg. One day I got talking to a local man out walking his dog. He had lived in the Red Road and said he liked the flat, but said that the neighbours on his floor were a bit rough. They’d all had asbestos and it was a pain to get out. He pointed up to the new development of low-level houses. He’d been moved up there. It was pokey. From his front room he could hear the neighbours two doors down boiling a kettle.

Glasgow's Red Road flats come down – but not without a fight Read more

Glaswegians love protesting against things. Being “agin” is taken as a mark of integrity. Talk, Fanny Ambjörnsson’s anthropological essay, analyses girls talking about being fat. Fat or thin, the girls said they were fat. Not because they though they were fat but because “Expressing dissatisfaction with one’s body becomes … an important way of performing one’s identity as a girl.”

This happened because girls and women, long ignored by popular and academic media, were first represented as people with problems. That victimisation discourse resulted in the “normalisation of dissatisfaction”. Exactly the same can be said of the historic representation of Glaswegians. Maybe being against things is an important part of the identity of a Glaswegian. But as the Red Road flats show, there’s a lot more going on.