On 10 May 1976, two families moved into their new homes in the Lanarkshire town of Stonehouse. Four years earlier, in 1972, it had been decided that Stonehouse would become Scotland’s sixth post-war new town, following on from East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld, Livingston and Irvine. The houses completed in May 1976 were intended to be the first of many: the masterplan set out a programme of development into the 1980s. However, just two days after the first families arrived, it was announced that the plans were being abandoned. Stonehouse was not going to become a new town, after all. The money and effort which would have been spent on the new town would instead be redirected towards regeneration in Glasgow.
Architectural and planning history is full of ‘might have beens’. Studying the plans for buildings and places which were never constructed is often as revealing as looking at proposals which were carried out. In fact, looking at ‘the unbuilt’ can sometimes be even more revealing, because the reasons why something didn’t happen shed light on wider themes. What, then, do the plans for Stonehouse – and the way that they were scrapped – tell us about Scotland’s new towns programme in the 1970s?
The idea to build at Stonehouse was rooted in the same concerns as Scotland’s earlier new towns. First, a perception that Glasgow was overcrowded, meaning that new homes were needed elsewhere, to allow the city’s population to be reduced and redevelopment to occur at lower densities. Second, a belief that Scotland needed to provide large sites for modern industry and employment in order to boost its economy. By the early 1970s, the first of these concerns – Glasgow’s apparent overcrowding – was being challenged by new population projections, which showed that the population was not growing at the same rate as before. However, the idea of an ’economic growth point’, to use the term of the time, still attracted many.
The Stonehouse area had first been identified as having potential for development in the mid-1960s. At that time, work had just begun on Livingston new town; plans for Irvine were also being developed. However, initially, Stonehouse was not to be developed as an ‘official’ new town. It would not be the creation of central government; its development would not follow the processes laid down in the New Towns acts, which would have involved the creation of a public-sector ‘Development Corporation’. Instead, the idea was that Stonehouse would be developed by the County of Lanark council, perhaps with the support of the Scottish Special Housing Association (the SSHA, which provided houses for rent across the country). This way of working would have made Stonehouse akin to Erskine, where new housing was being built by the SSHA and the County of Renfrew.
However, in 1971 the then Prime Minister, Edward Heath, was persuaded to make Stonehouse a new town ‘proper’ – partly to make sure it actually happened. Impending local government reorganisation meant that the project might have stalled, as Lanarkshire was to be replaced by a new ‘regional council’ (Strathclyde) in 1975. Stonehouse was officially designated a ‘new town’ in 1972, and plans for expansion were prepared.
Already, then, the idea of Stonehouse had evolved – from a local authority project to a new town. The plans themselves also were subject to change, with various different population targets. Unlike the bold megastructure being proposed for Irvine’s town centre, or the carefully theorised plans for the English new town of Milton Keynes, then also being drawn up, the plans for Stonehouse were pragmatic. They were drawn up by the same Development Corporation which had been overseeing nearby East Kilbride since the late 1940s. Distinct neighbourhoods were to be clustered around the town centre, which in some versions of the plan was to be little more than a hypermarket (in the early 1970s, this would have been a new type of shopping environment). This approach to planning echoed earlier new towns, but also meant that the town would feel complete at each stage and whatever its eventual size. The neighbourhood plan was thus a response to uncertainty about how big Stonehouse would become.
Alongside the M74 motorway, and also to the west, were to be ‘employment parks’, carefully landscaped. Public transport routes were to be threaded through the town (as in Irvine). Unlike earlier new towns in Scotland, there was to be an extended role for the private sector in planning and building the neighbourhoods, and more houses would be available for sale than in earlier new towns.
The Development Corporation consistently talked up the proposals, and there were reports of the employers who might come – including European and Japanese car manufacturers. Stonehouse was to be a ‘centre for success’, as one promotional film put it. However, as it became clear during 1974 that there was no need for Stonehouse on population grounds, further doubts about the project began to grow, and the economic crisis of the mid-1970s added weight to the critics’ arguments. In particular, Strathclyde council’s planners argued against it. There were calls for the money to be spent on Glasgow on the basis that the city’s population and employment base could not be reduced indefinitely – an argument made in particular by Strathclyde’s new Convener, the Rev. Geoff Shaw. Scottish Office civil servants put forward a range of views in response, but without Strathclyde’s support (and investment in essential infrastructure) the project could not go ahead.
The cancellation of Stonehouse has often been seen by a historians as part of a pivotal shift in planning history: a moment when the idea of decentralisation (to new towns) was replaced by a new focus on urban regeneration. Certainly the late 1970s did see a change, and Stonehouse is part of that story. Yet to make that argument without comment ignores the complexity of things as they actually happened: the debates and arguments, the people and organisations. Stonehouse was not the inevitable casualty of changing ideas about planning, nor was it scrapped unilaterally by central government (neither in Edinburgh nor London). Rather, the decision not to proceed with the new town was the result of particular debates about how and where to deploy scarce resources at a time of local government reorganisation, and here the arguments of Strathclyde were key. In this way, Stonehouse allows us to think about where power lay in 1970s Scotland: the balance between Edinburgh and the ‘regions’ at a time when the new regional councils were being created. Furthermore, to focus only on the cancellation of Stonehouse ignores the plans themselves, which illustrate a range of evolving options and new ideas for what a new town of the 1970s and 1980s might have been.
Alistair’s new article on Stonehouse new town discusses the proposals in more detail. It has been published in Urban History, and can be accessed here: https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S0963926822000281
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