Here’s a rare sight! The building of the Blantyre Sports Centre. Taken in 1981, year or so before it opened. Homes in the background are John Street. The tenement to the right was one of the final buildings to be demolished on Glasgow Road redevelopment of the late 70s and early 80s. The building of […]
This is a great little booklet highlighting the facilities at Blantyre Sports Centre immediately after it opened in 1982. The booklet also lists all the prices, which looked affordable even for those times. As far back as August 1972, consideration was being given to the provision of a pool and sports hall in Blantyre. However, […]
July 1982. It may have been summer in this photo, but you wouldn’t know it due to the lack of trees, by comparison to the green scene today. The Sports Centre had just been built, new paths constructed back off the road and new roundabout at the top of a realigned John Street completed. In […]
Going back now to 1982 to Glasgow Road and the Sports Centre looks almost brand new, its clean brickwork matching the cleanliness of the opposing new shopping centre. This must have felt very futuristic. (Anybody leaving Blantyre just 3 years earlier, would not recognise this scene at all if coming back in 1982!) The photos […]
Continuing a pictorial look at some pre-Google Earth old photos from around the Millennium. Almost 2 decades ago, a photo of Blantyre Leisure Centre on Glasgow Road, (when it was still known as Blantyre Sports Centre.) This photo was taken around 2000, well before the colourful ‘fitness billboards’ on the side of the building. The […]
To be published on 6th May 2018 In December 1978, the first completed drawings and plans for the proposed Sports Centre were revealed at a meeting of the Hamilton District Council’s Leisure and Recreation committee. Councillors greeted the plans favourably. District Council Architect, Mr Edward Hawke went through the drawings for the site proposed across […]
After the opening of the Sports Centre in June 1982, extensive landscaping took place to either side of the widened Glasgow Road. Brick planters with topsoil, intended to make Blantyre come alive with flowers, a far cry from the old boarded up dereliction so prevalent on this street in the previous decade. Here in […]