Red Road demolition dropped from opening ceremony

The simultaneous explosive demolition of the five 30 storey Red Road blocks of flats in Glasgow will no longer be a feature of the Opening Ceremony for the 2014 Commonwealth Games being staged at Celtic Park football ground on 23 July.

D&Ri understands that the decision comes as a result of police fears that the demolition could potentially become a target for potential activists or worse. This meant that to address this, the resources that would have to committed by the police and the necessary scale of the security operation would be far greater than normally required at a standard blowdown and hence its removal from the programme by the Glasgow 2014 organising committee.

Safedem managing director William Sinclair told D&Ri that the simultaneous demolition of all five blocks will be rescheduled to take place at a later date following consultations with the key stakeholders, and it will still be probably the single largest explosive demolition event ever carried out in Europe – and still a nice one to watch.

There had been some public opposition to the plan to include the blowdown in the ceremony, with more than 17,000 signing a petition against its inclusion in the Opening Ceremony, and it also sparked considerable debate in local and national press concerning the message that the blowdown would send to the global audience that was to watch the live TV broadcast.