Livingston lies about twenty miles south west of Edinburgh—the Capital city of Scotland. It is also the largest town in the district of West Lothian and boasts that it is the fourth of the ‘New Towns’ that were built in Scotland after World War II. Livingston started life as a collection of smaller hamlets and villages within eleven residential precincts.
Prior to 1962 Livingston village was a shale oil area which was discovered during the world’s very first oil boom which happened in West Lothian. In 1870 there were more than three million tons of shale oil being mined each year but output began to decline when liquid reserves were located somewhere around the year 1900. Mining did carry on until 1962 but it was largely flattened by then. Livingston Village now occupies the spot known as the Old Town because Livingston New Town was built around it.
Glaziers in Livingston must have thought it was Christmas when the New Towns Act of 1946 came into law. Because of the overcrowding in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and other of the larger towns, it was deemed that strategic parts of the country should be allocated for a series of New Towns to house those who had been evacuated but were overcrowding the already existing cities and towns. Livingston was the fourth, along with other New Towns such as Harlow, Basildon, Stevenage, Milton Keynes, Telford and the like. People were enticed to move north from the south to inhabit these new towns because the rents were low and the cost of buying cheaper. It made people feel better off financially to think they were paying less rent than someone from London or anywhere in the south. People also started to move south from the north and places like Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle, in order to benefit from the fresh start.
Livingston as a New Town
New Towns were built to be self-sustaining and self-sufficient, with shopping centres, hospitals, churches, theatres, pubs and all the social networking that was available in the day. Basically it was down to the people to move in and start getting it up and running and that’s exactly what the residents of each of the New Towns did. One of the ongoing jokes about a New Town is that it is all straight roads and roundabouts and all the straight roads meet up with all the roundabouts, making them extremely confusing to navigate until one gets used to it.
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