Learning from the past to build a stronger community

Issued: Mon, 07 Nov 2011 08:18:00 GMT

In the 1950s East Kilbride new town was regarded as the chance to start a new life. Glasgow researchers look at the long-term experiences of social housing tenants to inform housing association policies.

For many people in the West of Scotland in the post-war decades, finding an adequate home was extremely difficult. Tenement life, although much eulogised for its community spirit, was still overcrowded and sometimes insanitary. No wonder East Kilbride new town, with its brand new homes, was regarded as the chance to start a new life.

Lynn Abrams, Professor of Gender History in the School of Humanities received funding from the University's First Step Awards scheme to collaborate with East Kilbride and District Housing Association to research the long-term experiences of social housing tenants in East Kilbride. A series of in-depth oral history interviews with women and men who moved to the new town in the early decades after it was founded in 1947 sought to assess the extent to which the avowedly 'modern' homes succeeded in promoting a sense of wellbeing amongst residents.

In contrast to surveys which assess satisfaction at one moment in time, the project investigated how people's relationships with their homes have altered in response to changes in residents' shifting needs in respect of family structure, income and age and also in response to the changing character and infrastructure of East Kilbride since 1947.

East Kilbride is a Scottish success story. One of five new towns in Scotland, it was originally envisaged as a self-contained town of around 45,000 people, containing all necessary social and civic amenities and surrounded by greenbelt. Today East Kilbride is home to almost 85,000 people.

For many newcomers in the 1950s and 60s East Kilbride was perceived as a rural idyll, green and clean, despite the fact that it was a building site for the first two decades. In contrast to Glasgow and some of the other west of Scotland towns the new town had the gleam of wellbeing, the perfect place for those wanting something better for their children and for themselves. In a 1970 survey 75 per cent of those asked agreed that they had 'bettered themselves' by moving to East Kilbride. And it was relatively easy to make comparisons with what they had left behind: the tenement flat, the flat in a scheme, could not compare with one's own front door, a garden and modern amenities. As one of our respondents who grew up in the new town said, 'Everything was brand-spanking-new'.

According to Linda Fleming, the project's researcher, 'the early residents really valued the quality of the housing, the space, the fresh air and more than anything else, their own front and back door.'  In the words of Shirley, one of our interviewees: 'There was really a lot of flats in Castlemilk, there really wasn't a back and front door as such... so I never would have thought of moving out of this high rise flat except we'd heard you could get a house in East Kilbride, and at that time East Kilbride was the place to live, I mean as my mother used to describe it , 'you'd need to wear a hat when you were going to East Kilbride'.

In 2011 questions about quality of life and wellbeing remain salient. 'It was striking how the people we spoke to expressed their pleasure in living somewhere special' says Professor Abrams. 'They felt different. They knew they were lucky.'  However, many regretted recent changes: the loss of green space, the effects of the 'right to buy' policy, the increase of sub-letting, the loss of neighbourhood facilities, the more mobile population, the decline of public transport; which had resulted in East Kilbride losing its special identity. All of these changes were seen as contributing to a loss of community cohesion and that sense of being special as well as contributing to social isolation for some. East Kilbride, in the views of many of our respondents, is in danger of becoming a town like any other with all the accompanying social problems experienced elsewhere.

• Professor Lynn Abrams
• East Kilbride and District Housing Association
• Centre for Gender History
• First Step Awards