Inside East Kilbride, the new town being knocked down and rebuilt ...Middle East

“This is where B block was,” says Tam Mitchell “over there was a cricket pitch…it was like a community for workers.” The 57-year-old former Rolls-Royce engineer is standing on the site of the factory where he once worked just outside of East Kilbride town centre. 

B-block made history in the 70s when workers refused to repair engines which belonged to planes that were being used to take power by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet in a violent military coup.

At its height, the factory employed 2,500 workers. In 2015, the aerospace giant closed its aero-engine repair and maintenance operation here after nearly 60 years, moving hundreds of jobs to a more modern plant 16 miles away near Glasgow Airport, making Tam redundant in his early fifties. 

Today, all traces of this industrial heritage are gone; what’s left of Rolls-Royce’s operation is now located in Derby, and the site of their East Kilbride plant is an enormous housing estate. 

“You wouldn’t know what was here before,” Tam reflects. “But the street signs give it away: ‘Griffon Crescent, Dart Avenue, Comet Way…Merlin Wynd’.”

East Kilbride is one of the original new towns built during the post-war rebuilding drive created by the New Town Act 1946. 

In 1947, the East Kilbride Development Corporation began work to turn what was once a small village with around 2,500 residents into a major business and commercial centre, creating jobs and homes for people to move into out of slums in Glasgow. 

The loss of manufacturing in this Scottish town tells an important part of the story of Britain’s battle for growth.

East Kilbride is not a deprived place, there are some very wealthy areas as well as poorer communities, but it has suffered from losing industry. Like so many new towns, it was built around employment. 

In the town centre there is an enormous brutalist civic centre which houses council offices, a “marriage suite”, a police station and a fire station. Across the road there is an indoor shopping centre – apparently the largest in Scotland.

Locals say East Kilbride used to draw people from neighbouring towns and villages, in no small part because it had a state-of-the-art cinema and an ice rink. Dotted around the outskirts and linked by road, roundabouts and walkways are residential estates which form village-like communities.  The idea was that inhabitants of East Kilbride could easily get from home, to work, to the town-centre and back. 

Like many people who live in East Kilbride, Tam is here because his family moved for work. Tam’s father was a miner who moved to work for Rolls-Royce when the pits closed, starting out as a labourer in 1967 before working as a warehouse operator before his retirement in the mid-80s. 

When Rolls-Royce shut up shop in East Kilbride, Tam described a feeling of “devastation” and “emotion” sweeping through the community. The majority of workers lived within a five-mile radius of the plant – work and home were intrinsically linked.

Today, Tam describes this aspect of the town’s design as “ironic” because “manufacturing has all but disappeared here”.

It’s not just Rolls-Royce exited East Kilbride. From 1969 until 2012, there was also a large Motorola semi-conductor factory here which employed around 2,000 people. 

Tam points out that thousands of jobs could have been “saved” in East Kilbride if either factory had been prevented from closing, if either the Scottish or the British governments had incentivised companies to stay. 

East Kilbride is still somewhere people are proud to live. Indeed, many still sing the praises of the development corporation responsible for its development until it was wound up in 1996.

Glasgow is around 30 minutes away by train and people are increasingly commuting. But, as East Kilbride’s Labour MP Joani Reid points out “the line has only just been electrified!”

Reid, who was elected in 2024, notes that this matters because the Foreign Office is a large employer in East Kilbride, with some workers commuting from London for stints of work. She adds: “This was one of the first places that saw the dispersal of civil service jobs outside of London.”

However, across town, residents repeat similar thoughts to those expressed by Tam – that something has been lost. 

Taxi driver Alan Watson, 55, thinks his hometown is “going downhill like everywhere in the country”. 

“The shopping centre used to be mobbed every weekend …now there’s not even a nightclub, instead we’ve just got a Popeyes chicken fast-food restaurant – there’s nothing for young people.”

From her office in “the village”, the oldest part of East Kilbride, Reid says the problem is that East Kilbride town centre “didn’t recover from the 2008 financial crash”.

“That legacy is very much still felt here,” Reid says. 

Just before Christmas in 2022, East Kilbride Shopping Centre went into administration and there are now plans to demolish more than a third of East Kilbride’s town centre to make way for homes and public areas – cutting retail space by 40 per cent.

The Centre West retail complex, which is among the sites set to be demolished, was not completed until 2001, but, today, many shops are boarded up following the closure of high street giants like Debenhams and Topshop. Marks and Spencer and Zara have also recently left East Kilbride. 

Reid is passionate about “the community” that has been lost. The shopping centre was “such a source of pride for the town because it was so successful,” she says. 

“It’s probably during the general election campaign, the number one issue that came up on the doorstep.

“Now some people say they don’t even come into the town centre…maybe they shop online but we’ve lost those big anchor stores that used to bring people in.”

South Lanarkshire Council has a “bold” £62.2m 10-year masterplan to “radically transform the shopping and leisure destination into a vibrant, high-quality urban environment”.

Just as homes have replaced industry in East Kilbride, homes will soon replace the high street too. 

The plans for Central West include a new “Civic Hub” which will have a building that could be used for arts and education and a square which will create a new meeting place and entry point for the town centre. 

However, around two miles in Greenhills – one of East Kilbride’s several residential areas – the community centre that was built alongside housing, a GP’s surgery and a church has closed down. 

Thanks to fundraising by resident Lesley Davidson, 54, an asset transfer has taken place, and the Greenhills Community Centre is now the Loaves and Fishes foodbank. Lesley also runs Clothes and Dishes at the foodbank, which she describes as “a charity shop where no money changes hands” and people can find anything they need – from artwork for their walls to crockery. 

Lesley says that Loaves and Fishes prepare around 200 food packages a week at the moment but expects this to rise. 

“We’ve been in this building over a month, and we’re delighted to be here,” Lesley says, “but there’s a tragic irony [in the fact that this used to be a community centre].”

“I want to celebrate this opportunity but, ironically, the fact that we live in a new town that was built with services like this at its core, which have now shut…it’s not the same. We’re volunteers doing charity work that the state should be doing.”

Lesley says it’s no longer just low-income people who are struggling. “It’s people like you and me,” she says. “Nurses and teachers… you might drive up here in a nice-looking car and still need help.” 

Since East Kilbride was first built almost 80 years ago, the way Britons live and work have changed dramatically. 

Sir Keir Starmer hopes to recreate places like East Kilbride with a “new generation new towns” as the Labour Government looks to meet its target of building 1.5 million homes.

Reid is optimistic this generation of new towns will be future-proofed.

She notes that there is a big windfarm in her constituency but points out that manufacturing of parts for turbines is done elsewhere – she’d like to see more things made in this area.

“We need to think about supply chains,” Reid says. “It’s about government design and intervention to support industries.”

Does she think Labour has a plan to make that happen? 

“I think we’re doing it with green energy and Keir was near here recently announcing the Defence Strategy… the Glasgow Growth Deal will also provide big investment for this area,” she says. 

“The key to building good communities and having good jobs is that vision that the post-war planners had.” 

Alison Brown, head of enterprise and sustainable development at South Lanarkshire Council, said: “Like in many town centres across Scotland and the UK, the retail environment in East Kilbride is very different to what it was ten years ago. 

“How we shop has changed because of on-line shopping, ‘click and collect’ and out-of- town centres.  This has resulted in vacant shop units throughout the town centre.”

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