I’m back in East Kilbride, near Glasgow, for Christmas at the family home. I’ve not been back here for more than a few days for ages and it is all very odd. The house here still feels like home even though its all been redecorated and my sister has moved into my bedroom and also filled the spare room with a drum kit…yet the town does not feel like the place I grew up in at all. I don’t know whether it is that I see it through different eyes now, or whether it truly is more run down. In any case, in the drab December weather East Kilbride is not a pleasant place to walk through.

Today I walked from my Mum’s (in the nicer of the not-rich bits) to the town centre and noticed gates rotting, the playpark  (where I spent so much of my youth) destroyed and generally just litter/neds lining the streets. Although the town centre itself has recently been redeveloped the old part is more run down than ever with boarded up shop fronts and hoards of neds staining the walls with their fags. Its pretty gross, but yet once I got past the Princes Mall I found myself in a Buchanan Gallery style shopping centre teeming with shoppers. I wonder why they don’t use a bit of the money to sort out the Princes Mall which is the first thing that you see when entering East Kilbride centre by bus. But then again, its not like a town like this could attract tourists anyway. Another odd thing about the place is that there is no main street. The centre was built so quickly that it did not lend itself to a main street, just a massive undercover monstrosity. East Kilbride can never been a pretty place as it has no history just a mass of grey cubes and endless round-a-bouts and underpasses but at least it could be made to be pleasant?

East Kilbride is one of those ‘new-build’ towns created to take the overspill from Glasgow. Although it once prospered when all the skilled workers moved here in the 1950’s and 1960’s, slowly the 80,000 population town that popped up out of nowhere in a matter of years is decaying. However the council are doing some things to improve the place; the six high schools have all been knocked down and replaced with 3 super-schools and nearly every primary school is being upgraded too. There is a new college about to open in 2008 but of course it only caters to those wanting to study media studies for a year or something and probably wont make much of a difference to the number of skilled people in the town. Maybe once these huge new builds are completed they will concentrate on the little things that seem to make all the difference. Rebuild my desolate playpark!