They were once the tallest residential structures in Europe and a beacon of hope for residents of Glasgow’s slums. Now, after becoming a byword for the failure of high-rise housing, and following a dramatic U-turn during the Commonwealth Games when a proposal to blow them up on live television caused an outcry, the remaining structures of the Red Road flats will, at last, be demolished.

Their demise, announced earlier this month, has been met with mixed emotions. Built in the 1960s on Glasgow’s north-eastern edge, the flats were intended to house almost 5,000 people as part of an effort to ease overcrowding and combat slum conditions. But in the decades that followed, they were plagued by a range of problems, social and structural.

Two of the original eight blocks were levelled in controlled explosions in 2012 and 2013. The six remaining structures are to be brought down simultaneously later this year.

In 2014, Glasgow’s council proposed to bring five of them down as a centrepiece of the Commonwealth Games opening ceremony. The plan sparked an outcry. Some former occupants argued that the spectacle would be undignified and disrespectful to those who had called the flats their homes.