Building a Modern Scotland: Scotland's New Towns, 1947-2017

The project undertook semi-structured one to one oral history interviews with former and current residents of 4 Scottish new towns (Cumbernauld, Glenrothes, Livingston, Irvine) as a means of exploring personal and social experience across the life course. The interviews were conducted by Dr Valerie Wright (with one exception) between 2021 and 2023, some in person and some (owing to Covid restrictions) using Zoom or other online applications.

36 respondents were recruited in Glenrothes (15), Cumbernauld (14), Livingston (4) and Irvine (3) via local publicity and a process of snowballing. Participants were drawn from three generations of new town residents: first generation (so-called pioneers) aged roughly in their 70s and 80s; second generation (children of pioneers) aged roughly in their 50s and 60s, and the third or younger generation now roughly in their 40s.

The interviews aimed to reveal residents’ experiences of new town life and the new town built environment over the long term, and whether these aligned with the visions of planners, the government, and the new town development corporations. In general we wanted to know how residents took the opportunities offered by new town life to break with the conventions of their old neighbourhoods and expectations of gender? Was it easier to pursue new interests and to make new social relationships? Were and are the new towns places where diversity thrived? How did expectations and experiences change across the period in question as the towns themselves grew and the economy that supported them shrank?

Information about the project was circulated to each participant along with the informed consent materials which were discussed with the interviewer prior to the interview commencing. Interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed in full. Respondents are identified by their given names only unless they requested anonymisation. Any identifying names of other individuals named in the interviews have been redacted from the transcripts.

The interview schedule represented a comprehensive topic guide covering details of moving to the new town, settling in, social relationships, sense of community, home and work life and family relationships. Topics covered with the second and third generations tended to focus on education, work, social relationships and views on how/if the new town had changed.

The resulting narratives provided retrospective perspectives across a timespan of 50 years and three generations that were analysed around four themes: community, homes, family, and work and education. In turn these revealed details of personal development, intra-familial relations, family and friendship networks, everyday and cultural practices and opportunities and constraints. By accessing life-story narratives we gained rich qualitative material which is less amenable to quantification and more valuable in terms of the kinds of memory stories people construct around the meanings of new town life and its relationship with the built environment. Nonetheless the oral history material was rich in stories about family life offering insights into the shifts experienced across the UK in this area (divorce, lone-parent families, alcohol abuse etc), regarding opportunities for social contact not determined by sectarian or gendered structures and institutions, the importance of housing and more especially a single family home, and declining opportunities for work in the new towns as the original employers closed in the context of economic slump.

The interviews were analysed alongside archival materials including official new town development corporation records (minutes, policy papers, ephemera including advertisements and newspaper cuttings) dealing with all aspects of new town planning and development), and records of local organisations.

The key findings can be summarised thus:
The pioneers - ie those who moved to the new towns as they were being built - saw themselves as aspirational and keen to make a new life for themselves and their families away from their former communities in urban settlements. They were attracted by the opportunity to rent a modern home, to move to a small town surrounded by countryside and to find work. Many encouraged their extended family to follow them. Many subsequently moved within the new town to a 'better' area and when the opportunity arose, purchased their home.

The second generation, the children of the pioneers, presented happy memories in the main of growing up in a new town, attending a modern school, having relative freedom within the town owing to safe routes to school and leisure and enjoying a large friendship group within their community. Whilst many did eventually leave for work, a good number remained local to the new town.

The third generation are the group who, in comparison with their parents and grandparents, saw less in the new town that encouraged their aspirations. By the 70s and 80s this generation was experiencing the effects of economic decline, the reduction of employment opportunities in the new towns, and they sometimes struggled to identify with a place that had offered their parents and grandparents new opportunities.

Almost all respondents regarded the new towns as changed, usually for the worse, owing to changes in housing tenure (increased private housing and buy to let) and changes in governance (wind up of the development corporations and incorporation of the new towns in local authorities) which, according to residents meant that the new towns lost out in respect of funding and provision of amenity.