This great photo was taken by the RAF In 1950. It features the village and Station Road area. My friends Gordon Cook and Alex Rochead and I were recently discussing features in this photograph trying to work out what row of homes were previously called “Glasgow Row” and if they still existed by that time. Unable to work that out, conversation got to few other things noticed:
1. How new the prefabs are, the ground around them still perhaps unmade from recent construction in 1947. Some of the prefabs had sheds in gardens.
2. There’s an abandoned lorry or vehicle at the bottom right, below the sewage pipe crossing.
3. The white picket fences of Blantyre Station are just beginning to show at the bottom left.
4. There’s a huge white flagpole at the entrance to the Livingstone Memorial grounds, on the left as you go in the main gates
5. Ulva Place, the large tenement can just about be seen on the left.
6. This was a time just a couple of years before the suspension bridge was built at the weir.
7. The Braes don’t look too wooded yet. A very different picture from the Clyde Walkway woodland now on the riverbank today.
I was born in 1945 in one of those prefabs 194 Station Rd. it was in the middle street. I remember my Dad Joe Nugent building a bonfire fire on the vacant land behind the prefabs for Guy Fawkes night, some of the kids helped him gather the wood. Happy memories I loved living there. Catherine Nugent