A new book chronicling the history of Scotland’s twentieth-century new towns has been made available free of charge via Open Access, thanks to the work of a team headed up by Dr Alistair Fair and Professor Miles Glendinning of Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA).

Alistair tells us more about Building Modern Scotland: a Social and Architectural History of the New Towns, 1947-97:

“I’ve recently co-authored a new book about the history of Scotland’s twentieth-century new towns, working with a team of architectural historians at ECA and social historians from the University of Glasgow. This book grew out of a two-year project which was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. It looks at the towns of East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld, Livingston, Irvine and Stonehouse. Between the 1940s and the 1970s, these places were developed as ‘new towns’, with housing, schools, shops, community facilities and employment.

“Our interest in the new towns relates to the ways that they illustrate bigger stories. For the policymakers who oversaw the new towns programme, these places were a way to attract new jobs to Scotland and to retain a skilled, aspirational population who might otherwise have moved away. They were also places where exemplary, high-quality housing would be built, allowing the population of Glasgow to reduce and enabling its own reconstruction. There was a strong desire to build a new Scotland, and the new towns would be a symbol of that for the world.

“At the same time, for planners and architects, the new towns were the opportunity to build a new world. Although it’s easy to think of the more radical parts of the new towns, such as Cumbernauld’s megastructural town centre, as a team we were as interested in the everyday: the ‘mainstream modernism’ of new housing, schools and workplaces. 

“And we were keen also to understand the experience of those who moved to the new towns. We’ve explored themes including home, family, work and community, considering how people made new lives for themselves. 

“The book has been published by Bloomsbury in print and as an Open Access ebook. We hope it will be of interest to historians and also those who live in the new towns, as well as those who are planning and designing new towns today.”