The editor of the Spectator magazine, Fraser Nelson, is from Scotland. This week, in an argument with him over press regulation, the comedian John Cleese took an ad hominem position by wondering on Twitter why it was that “we let half-educated tenement Scots run our English press”. Was it “because their craving for social status makes them obedient retainers”? Later, replying to the predictable flurry of complaint that followed, Cleese tweeted again: “It’s not casual racism, it’s considered culturalism.”

As a famous person was involved, it became news. Cleese wants to be Dr Johnson: “the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees, is the high road that leads him to England …” and so on. Despite all his tweeting, he seems cut off from modern life. In 1902, the unpleasant English satirist TWH Crosland wrote that “Hoo are ye the noo?” was the conventional greeting in newspaper offices, Scots figuring disproportionately in a profession “into which you can crawl without inquiry as to your qualifications, and … in which the most middling talent will take you a long way”. But the Scottish domination of London journalism ended long ago, even before the disappearance of blue pencils and copy boys. (When I arrived on a national paper in 1970, only two other Scots worked on it, both elderly; one had covered political campaigns by Ramsay MacDonald.) What persists still, in Scotland as a diminished fact and elsewhere as a pejorative, is the tenement.

The word comes from the medieval Latin tenementum, meaning a property held by tenure; a house divided into separate, rented homes became known a tenement house. In the walled cities of medieval France and Italy, separate dwellings arranged over several floors of the same building were a vertical solution to the problem of limited space. Edinburgh built some spectacular examples in the 17th century – at 12 storeys, they were among the tallest buildings in Europe – but it was Victorian Glasgow that made them its own. Tenements became the defining feature of the townscape, shaping the nature of the city and the lives of the people in it more than any other single factor, diet apart.

They had a modest start, arriving with Glasgow’s first manufacturing industry, cotton, as brick-built barracks for mill workers, but landlords were quick to adopt their basic form – two or more storeys divided into flats, reached by a common entrance or close and a common stair – as the easiest solution to the housing needs of the thousands of migrants who moved to the city from Ireland and the Highlands to find jobs in shipyards and engineering works. Glasgow’s population was 77,000 in 1801 and 762,000 a hundred years later; it had swollen by a factor of 10. Families crowded into apartments of one room (“the single end”) or two (“the room-and-kitchen”), which were the two most common types of accommodation.

Between 1872 and 1876, boom years for the Glasgow economy, the city authorised the building of more than 21,000 tenement houses. Long canyons of four-storey terraces created new working-class suburbs of yellow sandstone that were soon turned black by factory and household smoke. This was the period that created what you might call “peak Glasgow” – the Glasgow of popular memory and imagination that suffered little wartime damage to its fabric and lasted more or less unchanged until the last tram ran in the 1960s. But in all that time the tenement’s reputation had grown more soiled and squalid, so that there was little opposition when plans were made for the demolition of entire neighbourhoods to make way for tower blocks and a motorway.

The reputation was in part unfair. Many solid and spacious homes had been built on the tenement principle until, in 1910, new legislation bit into the profits from building them. There was an informal league table of desirable tenement types. At the top stood those built of red sandstone with decorative tiles in their closes and grass flourishing in their backyards, and at the bottom those with blackened yellow stone and an infrequently whitewashed close.There were several gradations in between, but below them all lay the abyss of single ends and room-and-kitchens, with their curtained-off beds and communal WCs accessed from the common stair.

Externally, even these tenements could have a kind of nobility: according to the architectural historian Frank Worsdall, the inspiration for many early tenement elevations lay in the Renaissance palaces of Rome and northern Italy. But even the Corinthian pilasters of the Palazzo della Cancelleria could scarcely compensate for the poor health, disease and early death that came with bad sanitation and a 14ft by 12ft room that catered for the waking and sleeping needs of a family of six.

By the mid-19th century, bad housing had become Scotland’s most notorious social problem: two thirds of the population lived in homes of not more than two rooms and many one-room homes had no access to natural light. England did better. The census of 1911 showed that 45% of Scots lived at a density of more than two people per room, while the figure in England was only 9%. Two thirds of Glasgow’s population lived in one or two rooms, but only a third of London’s.

Come the Bolshevik revolution, this had consequences. Outbreaks of popular unrest in Glasgow – “the red Clyde” – made Britain and America anxious about the future. According to the writer William Bolitho, sent on assignment to Glasgow in 1924 by New York World, “the smouldering danger … had ceased to be a local anxiety, and become an interest and alarm to the whole civilised world”. There was “something deeply wrong with the Clyde; the whole middle-class of England knows it, though hardly in detail”. What was this wrong thing? Bolitho decided that the root grievance was housing … “a simple term for a cancerous condition which, starting from the lack of space and light in the homes of the workers … has developed into a political movement, quite apart from Marxianism [sic], which threatens to harden into almost as rigorous an extremism as Leninism itself”.

As it turned out, the tenement’s legacy was less straightforward. It began to feature in newspapers as the home of the criminal rather than the political. In No Mean City, the notorious 1935 novel about razor gangs, the action moves in and out of decrepit Gorbals tenements. The protagonist’s family of 11 shares a room and kitchen, and in the opening scene he rises from his cavity bed to have a pee in the kitchen sink. Before the novel appeared, the Gorbals was unknown beyond Glasgow. After it, the Gorbals and Glasgow were synonymous.

“Born in a tenement in Gorbals Cross / Of all the teddy boys he was the boss,” we sang in 1956 to the tune of Davy Crockett. To those who knew no better, the word had come to mean slum – a meaning that Cleese expanded to include the suggestion that ignorance and servility were common in the Scottish population as a whole, not excluding the Spectator’s editor, who grew up in the tenement-free Highlands and went, like Cleese, to a private school.

But we know who the ignorant one is in this case. Long ago – perhaps it was the same year as Davy Crockett – I woke up in a tenement for the first time. I lay in the recess bed in the kitchen and watched the activity around me. A fire was already burning in what my aunt called “the range”, a large and complicated piece of black ironwork with hinged doors and hotplates. My uncle was getting ready to leave for work. My aunt and two cousins sat at the kitchen table drinking tea and eating morning rolls. Sun streamed through the window. Looking back at this scene, I conclude that the tenement’s reputation has been badly traduced, but of course not included in the picture but invaluably there just out of shot are a sitting room, two bedrooms and a long narrow bathroom – here was a tenement fit for a king.