LIVINGSTON - Scotland’s fifth & final planned town
My enthusiasm for ‘New Towns’ has been well documented, since the pandemic of 2020 I have spent a lot of my time exploring documenting and learning about these grand utopian, sociological infrastructure experiments. Along with Irvine in Ayrshire and Stonehouse (scrapped), Livingston was the last phase (Mark Two New Town) of Scotland’s planned town initiative, brought about by the New Towns Act of 1946. Livingston was the last new town to dissolve it’s development corporation in 1997. It is the only planned town I hadn’t visited; until now…
The concepts of New Towns in the modern era seems, so far fetched and pie in the sky. With capitalism so dreadfully engrained in our culture and municipal projects the utopian ideas, of cheap, plentiful and spacious housing, with green space, amenities, walk ways and good transport links now seems almost laughable. In the dog eat dog realm of globalism any kind of socialist ideal of everyone pulling together to enable upward mobility is now just a sad joke. I’m not going to say the Scotlands’s New Towns have been a resounding success, but when you consider what existed in this country between the wars and what existed 10 years after WWii the change was rapid and largely positive. I think there are many reasons that New Towns have failed, but the main reasons appear to be greed, laziness and incompetence on behalf of those in power… The establishment, planning and building of these new towns were founded on traits that are the opposite of what caused their demise.
Ground was broken for Livingston New Town in 1962 with the building of the development corporations head quarters Pentland House, which was demolished in 2018. An article I found on the demolition states.
“Few will morn the passing of Pentland House. The building and its surroundings have appeared sad and shabby in recent years, and the accommodation it provided no longer serves modern needs. It is unfortunate however to lose a further link with the brave and distinctive vision that once existed for the new town, as Livingston dissolves into faceless fields of retail parks that might be anywhere in the world.”
- https://www.scottishshale.co.uk/stories/farewell-pentland-house/
There were two main reasons for establishing Livingston where it is. It’s proximity to Glasgow and Edinburgh and it’s Shale Oil Industry. The development spans the width of the Almond valley and the road flyover that crosses this valley was one of the largest to have been built at the time, mirroring the victorian viaduct that was built in 1842 further up the valley. This behemoth, concrete super structure forms the backbone of the town and utilises incredibly disorientating exit ramps which run in spiralled loops giving access to most of the housing estates. The Livingston Development Corporation did a good job of making the New Town profitable and it transitioned well from Shale Oil becoming one of the bastions of ‘Slicone Glen’ attracting large electronics companies like Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Raytheon 💀, IBM, Texas Instruments and Motorola to name a few. Although the micro electronics industry is much depleted it does persist, though most economical benefits to the area and indeed Scotland have been obfuscated by globalism, private equity and successive blunders by national and local government not to mention leaving Europe of course. The manufacturing sector in Silicon glen grew to such an extent that at its peak it produced approximately 30% of Europe's PCs, 80% of its workstations, 65% of its ATMs and a significant percentage of its integrated circuits. Livingston was also home to the futuristic MOTEC (automotive engineering) training college, which had a swimming pool, a boiler that looked like a fusion reactor and very stylish brutalist halls of residence. I have found a repository of vintage photographs online if you’d like to have a look at them, they are here.
Technically most of the buildings were built in a more modernist style, though a few brutalist gems remain like St Andrews Roman Catholic Church, lessons had been learnt from the first wave of new towns and as such Livingston provides an interesting time capsule to the evolution of Scottish Town Planning. As far as I can tell there are no high rises in Livingston and the construction though heavily reliant on concrete, employs a lot of red brick, painted steel, fine aluminium gauze panels and interestingly the transparent roof of the centre now appears to be made of some sort of acrylic. Originally the building had very few windows and was described as a ‘shopping bunker’. In 1995, in step with the demise of the semiconductor industry the centre of the town was remodelled into the strange cut price Disneyland, abandoned theme park, wizard of oz look that it has today. In 2008 along with the pivot to establishing the town as a retail centre the Livingston Designer Outlet was added to the Livingston Regional Centre (The Centre) adding a prominent steel and acrylic dome. Like the town centre super structure of Cumbernauld the layout is disorientating, hard to navigate on foot externally and smacks of piecemeal, idiotic, money led planning, i’m not even sure who the architects were but it seems clear that the decisions were arrived at by gaggles of local government officials, design by committee nearly always breeds this kind of incompetent, confused melange. It’s not totally unsuccessful, the boulevard for the bus way is pretty well done and of course the addition of windows probably made a huge difference. The civic centre on the other side of the river in my eyes is an absolute triumph of modernism and also appears to function well. The walk along the river is nice and well laid out, with sculptures, little forested areas, playparks and of course the famous ‘Livi Skate Park’.
Livingston Skate Park is actually world famous, it is heralded by many at the top of the sport as one of the World’s best skateparks and thankfully in 2024 it was acknowledged by historic scotland and has been category B listed. I’ve included a documentary below which tells the story of the skate park and gives a great insight to the town itself. Skaters the World over make pilgrimages to this place and it is regarded as the most pioneering skateparks of it’s era. Built in 1981 this park was conceived by a local architect Kenny Omond and is a shining example of the difference one person can make, with vision, aptitude and a focus on community. It’s just immeasurable what skate culture has done for the youth of this country (me included).
