Building Modern Scotland: A Social and Architectural History of the New Towns, 19471997

(Hardback)

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Combining architectural and social history, this open access book tells for the first time the in-depth story of Scotlands new towns. One of the most significant episodes in postwar architectural, urban and social history, the building of Scotlands postwar new towns offered new housing, new ways of life and new jobs. Begun between the late 1940s and the late 1960s, the new towns East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Cumbernauld, Livingston and Irvine were a key element of the planned Welfare State and attracted international attention and widespread publicity. They transformed Scotland, housing 20% of the nation's population and remaining key centres within the Scottish economy to this day. Building Modern Scotland tells a new history of the new towns, combining architectural and social history to illustrate what was planned, what was built, and how these places were experienced by the diverse communities who lived and worked in them. It positions them at the heart of Scottish modern history, showing how they represented an ambition to make a modern, transformed nation, and revealing much about society and politics in 20th-century Scotland. Drawing on archives and oral history, the book will appeal to historians of modern architecture and design as well as readers interested in modern social history, providing a new account of modern Scotland, its buildings, places and people, and showing how a better understanding of the new towns history and value could be used to inform present-day decision-making. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the University of Edinburgh.

Author Bio

Alistair Fair is Reader in Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Lynn Abrams is Chair in Modern History at the University of Glasgow, UK. Kat Breen is Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Miles Glendinning is Professor of Architectural Conservation at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Diane Watters is an independent scholar. Valerie Wright is Lecturer in Modern Scottish History at the University of Edinburgh, UK.