The focus of this book is on the Scottish Borders and how the process and practice of town and country planning emerged from being a fringe activity of local government in the 1950s to become the driving force for change in the 1980s and 1990s. During the period 1946–1996, the subject of this book, this peripheral rural region was transformed from a quiet planning backwater, largely overlooked by central government, to become a beacon for rural regeneration, at the forefront of the development of rural development policy in Scotland.

The book provides a comprehensive appraisal of the changing role of town and country planning within a unique area of Scotland over a period of fifty years, examining continuity and change in policies and proposals for land use and development. It explores the relationship between planning and economic development in stimulating growth within a rural region of Scotland. It illustrates how town and country planning in the Scottish Borders developed from a simple land use control mechanism to a proactive, multi-disciplinary activity. The book is based on primary sources, including agenda, papers and minutes of the four original county planning authorities and the Borders Regional Council, official publications and the personal accounts of staff. It draws on the author's expert knowledge of town and country planning in Scotland at both central and local government level.

The book combines scholarly analysis with a practitioner's perspective on the journey that town and country planning has taken in the Scottish Borders over a period of fifty years from its origins in the 1940s. The book has been written not by an academic researcher but by someone who has fifty years’ experience working in both central and local government in Scotland. With an honours degree in geography, a postgraduate diploma in town planning and five years town planning experience at Doncaster CBC, I joined the Scottish Development Department in 1969 to assist in the preparation of government guidance on the new structure and local plan system introduced by the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1969.

INTRODUCTION

The Scottish Borders stretches from the environs of Edinburgh in the north to the English border to the south and from the rolling Tweedsmuir Hills in the west to the rocky North Sea coast in the east; an area of 1,820 square miles (4,714 square km). Through it, the River Tweed flows for 90 miles (145 km) from its headwaters near Tweedsmuir, through Peebles, Galashiels, Kelso and Coldstream to the sea at Berwick-upon-Tweed in neighbouring Northumberland. ‘The Borders’ is a long-established entity, epitomised in the Border Ballads and the writings of Sir Walter Scott, James Hogg (the Ettrick Shepherd) and John Buchan.

The Scottish Borders, as an administrative unit, was created when the Borders Regional Council (BRC) was established with the reorganisation of local government in Scotland in 1975. It is one of the most sparsely populated regions of Scotland, with an estimated population of 115,000 persons in 2020. The region comprises the historic counties of Peeblesshire, Selkirkshire, Roxburghshire and Berwickshire (and a small area of Midlothian), traditionally an area synonymous with woven cloth (tweed), high quality knitwear and agriculture. It is an area with a rich past as evidenced by its ruined towers, castles, abbeys and historic houses, and remembered in its common riding ceremonies.

The peaceful tranquillity of its landscape, however, gives little indication of the challenges faced by this area during the twentieth century as a result of the decline in its traditional industries and the loss of population (from a peak of 130,000 in 1881–1891 to less than 100,000 in 1971). Rural depopulation over a prolonged period of time resulted in a shortage of labour for traditional industries and the loss of young people led to an ageing population with its own demands on services and facilities. Furthermore, the region's population is dispersed throughout the area with no single town providing a focus for industry and commerce. The largest towns of Hawick, Galashiels, Peebles, Selkirk, Jedburgh and Kelso have their own hinterlands, but the lack of a dominant centre and a history of strong, independent Border burghs has been a hindrance to the development of the region.

INTRODUCTION

Chapter One explores the origins of town and country planning in the UK and describes how planning was put into practice in the Scottish Borders in the 1940s and 1950s. Planning committees were established in the 1940s and were advised by the county clerk assisted by the county surveyor or county architect supported by technical staff. In the 1950s, most staff in Scottish county planning departments was unqualified in planning, or architects who might have taken an addi-tional course in ‘Town Planning’. Sir Frank Mears was responsible for Scotland's first Town Planning course, introduced at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1932. Architecture students successfully completing the one-year course were awarded the Diploma in Town Planning and exempt from the final examinations of the Town Planning Institute (TPI). It would be 1948 before a separate School of Town Planning was established at the College of Art, awarding diplomas in town planning similar to the schools of town planning in the universities of Liverpool, London, Manchester and Durham.

There were only eighteen qualified town planners working in Scotland at this time, most of whom were in the Department of Health for Scotland (DHS). Local government had been slow to appoint ‘Planners’ to head their new Planning Departments; instead, entrusting the task to their road surveyors or architect's departments. John Somerville (Jack) Baillie, appointed County Planning Officer of Midlothian County Council in 1948 and Frank Tindall, appointed County Planning Officer of neighbouring East Lothian County Council in 1950, would be two of the first fully qualified county planning officers in Scotland. John C. Hall, and subsequently his son John B. Hall, trading as J & J Hall, Architects of Galashiels, would act as county planning officer for Selkirk County Council (SCC) providing planning advice to the county clerk. Peebles County Council (PCC) would be advised by Jack Baillie and Assistant County Planning Officer, Charles Ross (Charlie) Mackenzie, of Midlothian County Planning Department. In Roxburghshire the county architect provided advice to the county clerk, and in Berwickshire the county surveyor was appointed county planning officer. It would be the late 1960s before Roxburgh and Berwickshire County Councils appointed qualified county planning officers.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines the role of the Planning and Development Department leading up to the reorganisation of local government in 1996, when the BRC and its four constituent district councils were replaced by the Scottish Borders Council (SBC). During the early 1990s, four district-wide local plans were produced to replace the twelve local plans adopted in the 1980s. They were prepared in tandem with the new structure plan, The Scottish Borders 2001: The Way Forward, approved in November 1993. The replacement local plans applied in detail the policies and proposals incorporated in the approved structure plan, in order to provide a basis for co-ordinating public and private investment and for the control of development up to 2001. The procedure for the preparation of the replacement local plans followed a similar path to that adopted for the first local plans. The Berwickshire Local Plan was adopted, subject to several modifications, in March 1995. The Roxburgh Local Plan was adopted, subject to several modifications, in May 1995. The Ettrick and Lauderdale Local Plan was adopted, subject to several modifications, in July 1995. The Tweeddale Local Plan was adopted, subject to several modifications, in June 1996. A substantial number of policies in the replacement local plans were unchanged from the previous local plans but new policies reflected the economic, social and environmental changes outlined in the approved structure plan. Many of the proposals in the previous local plans had been implemented and new allocations for housing and industry were required to reflect the strategic proposals in the approved structure plan (Figure 9.1).

The BRC was one of the leading local authorities in Scotland campaigning for a stronger voice for rural communities. For more than two decades, perceived to be at a considerable disadvantage compared with the Highlands and Islands, the regional council, strongly supported by its Members of Parliament, particularly Sir David Steel, had sought more recognition by government of the problems of rural areas like the Borders Region. Under the umbrella of COSLA, the regional council brought the problems of rural areas to the attention of government through the gathering of evidence on the extent of rural disadvantage in Scotland. The regional council and other rural local authorities argued that more coherent and integrated policy making was required at government level.

INTRODUCTION

Modernity came to the Borders in various guises: milk bars and tearooms, supermarkets, illuminated advertisements, pedestrian crossings and roundabouts. Architects and builders experimented with new forms of design and construction; new housing schemes, inspired by the innovative New Town designs, sprang up in Galashiels and Hawick. At Church Square, in Galashiels, a scheme designed by architect Peter Womersley for Galashiels Town Council was considered by the Saltire Society to be the best designed housing scheme in Scotland in 1963. Peter Womersley also won awards for his ‘brutal’ concrete design for the Gala Fairydean Football Club stand and for the Bernat Klein Studio, located at High Sunderland, near Selkirk.

The rate of development, as measured by the number of planning applications received across the four counties, fluctuated during the 1960s before increasing from about 1,000 per annum in 1967 to over 1,300 in 1974. The vast majority of applications related to residential development, principally rented housing by the various town councils, supported by the SSHA, and an increasing number of private housing developments. Applications for PFSs and related signage in town and country reflected the growing car usage for leisure, as well as travel to work. The ‘swinging sixties’ also brought with it such diverse proposals as discotheques and youth clubs, bingo halls and a plethora of chewing gum machines outside corner shops in Galashiels and Hawick. The number of applications refused was relatively low; for instance, in 1972, only 7 per cent of the 540 applications received by RCC were refused, reflecting the practice of seeking to achieve a compromise rather than a refusal.

There was a more positive attitude towards urban development with the establishment of technical working parties in Jedburgh, Melrose, Kelso, Hawick and Galashiels. However, most development proceeded by way of amendments to the increasingly out-dated county development plans. Through such formal amendments, land was allocated in all the main towns for both industry and housing in an effort to stem depopulation. Non-statutory plans were prepared for the redevelopment of town centres in Hawick, Jedburgh, Kelso, Melrose, Eyemouth and Duns.

INTRODUCTION

Under the 1947 Act it was the duty of every planning authority to carry out a survey of their area and, within three years of 1 July 1948, the date the Act came into force, prepare a development plan based on the survey and submit it for the approval of the SoS. Planning authorities were also under an obligation to review their development plans at five-yearly intervals and could put forward amendments for approval by the SoS at any time. The Midlothian County Development Plan, which included the Gala Water valley north of Bowland incorporating the villages of Stow, Fountainhall and Heriot, an area that would be included in the Borders Region in 1975, was submitted to the SoS in 1952, the first to be produced in Scotland, and approved in May 1955. The Selkirk County Development Plan was approved by the SoS in April 1955 and the Peeblesshire County Development Plan in December 1955 but it would be February 1965 before the county development plans for Berwickshire and Roxburghshire received his approval. Other than the Quinquennial Review of the Selkirk County Development Plan, approved in January 1968, which excluded Galashiels Burgh, there would be no other attempts to review the approved development plans; they would be modified as required by formal amendment to enable major developments not in accordance with the approved development plan to take place.

The 1947 Act stipulated that the development plan should indicate the manner in which the authority proposed that land in their area should be used and the stages by which any development should be carried out. Development plans had to include a survey report, a written statement summarising the authority's proposals, and a basic map defining the sites of proposed roads, public buildings and so on and allocating or ‘zoning’ areas of land for particular uses such as residential development, industry and open space. Regulations stipulated a wide range of details, from the contents of the survey report to the number and type of accompanying plans and the colours to be used to depict the different land uses.

INTRODUCTION

Following the reorganisation of local government in 1975, the development planning system was composed of National Planning Guidelines, regional reports and structure and local plans. The impetus for the establishment of guidance from central government came from the environmental problems emerging as a result of the demand for sites for oil-platform construction yards in the north and west of Scotland. The Coastal Planning Guidelines, published in 1974, were followed by National Planning Guidelines (NPG) on a diverse range of develop-ment circumstances and types, including agricultural land, housing land, nature conservation, rural planning priorities and forestry, guidelines of much more relevance to the Scottish Borders (see Appendix 4). NPGs were widely acknowledged as an innovative and helpful mechanism to planning authorities in defining national interests in selected topics. However, according to Begg and Pollock, ‘they tended to be rather bland and fall far short of representing a comprehensive compendium of government policy interests or in providing a national framework for land-use planning’.

The requirement for regional reports stemmed from the government's desire to establish a regional framework for policymaking and for determining resource priorities as quickly as possible following reorganisation. The foresight of the constituent counties of the Borders Region meant that a regional report for the Borders Region was prepared within the stipulated time of one year. Although regional reports had the potential to be a vehicle for corporate planning, they were intended primarily as a physical planning document. The SoS only offered observations on the submitted regional report; formal approval was not required. The production of regional reports was the subject of debate and controversy and there followed considerable speculation on their future. In 1982, the SDD informed all regional and island councils that there would be no requirement to review regional reports in view of the progress on structure plans; the range of other policy documents that had been developed, such as Housing Plans and Transport Policies and Programmes; and because of the increasing financial and manpower constraints under which central and local government was operating. According to many, an opportunity had been lost to continue the co-ordinated working within authorities that the process of preparing regional reports had encouraged.

COUNTY PLANNING IN THE SCOTTISH BORDERS

The first planning legislation, the 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act arose from the campaign for higher quality living environments, led by the Garden City Movement. Urban sprawl and ribbon development during the inter-war period created new challenges, and the need for large-scale reconstruction after the Second World War led to a number of studies on land utilisation and the future control of development, resulting in the Town and Country Planning (Scotland) Act 1947. This Act, combined with the New Towns Act 1946 and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, created a system designed to fulfil the social, economic and environmental objectives of reconstruction and provide a long-term basis for land management. In Scotland, regional planning was pioneered by Patrick Geddes and taken up by the likes of Robert Matthew and Frank Mears. Mears's Regional Plan for Central and South-East Scotland, published in 1948, was the first study to highlight the plight of the Scottish Borders, with its dependence on the textile industry and agriculture and its problems of rural depopulation, which contrasted starkly with the problems of urban sprawl and suburban expansion in the urban areas, which were the driving forces behind the British town planning movement.

The four county planning authorities in the Scottish Borders, established after the Second World War, were under-staffed and under-resourced. Planning committees were advised by the county clerk, assisted by the county surveyor or county architect. The lack of qualified planning staff restricted their ability to produce the development plans required under the 1947 Act and consultants were appointed to undertake this work. It would be 1965 before there was total development plan coverage of the Scottish Borders. Throughout the 1950s, planning activity was centred on development control with emerging issues related to the growth in car ownership and leisure time. The county development plans, updated by formal amendments and augmented by non-statutory studies and reports would provide the framework for development decisions until 1975 and the reorganisation of local government. Development plans were based on the optimistic assump-tion that the continued loss of population in the landward areas would be offset by growth in the textile industry in the burghs supported by an expanded programme of local authority housing for incoming workers. However, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the population of the region continued to decline; by over 10,000 people between 1951 and 1971 to below 100,000 people.

INTRODUCTION

The 1980s were a period of economic volatility. The Conservative government, elected in 1979, pursued a host of free-market reforms, including privatisation, reducing the powers of trade unions, deregulation and lower income tax rates. Despite considerable lobbying from the regional and district councils, the government withdrew Assisted Area Status from the Scottish Borders in 1982, which resulted in the region no longer being eligible for government or European Community regional economic development funds. This meant that financial inducements were no longer available to incoming firms and for investment projects by existing companies. Compared to the rest of Scotland, the Borders had a relatively low proportion of overseas manufacturing investment, reflecting its lack of success in attracting inward investment.

Despite continuous lobbying of government, supported by local Members of Parliament, particularly Sir David Steel, the Conservative government would not be persuaded that the Scottish Borders deserved development area status. The government's attitude is amply illustrated in the views expressed by George Younger, former Scottish Secretary on a visit to Hawick in 1987 when he suggested that: ‘The Borders is a good example of how an area can fend for itself. With a certain amount of help from the local authorities and the SDA, the Borders people have done their own thing successfully’. His comments incensed Galashiels Councillor Drew Tulley, who would subsequently become Chairman of the Planning and Development Committee, who demanded that a further attempt should be made to put forward a case for the reinstatement of development area status.

In April 1985, the Borders lost priority status for European Social Fund (ESF) assistance, which limited the amount available for vocational training. However, the Borders, along with other rural areas in the UK, remained eligible for assistance under the Guidance Section of the European Agricultural Guidance and Guarantee Fund (EAGGF), which was used to provide support for the agricultural industry through initiatives such as the Less Favoured Farming Areas, Farm/Woodland Initiative, Set Aside and Farm Diversification Scheme and direct support for projects involving the processing and marketing of agricultural and fishery products, such as grain drying and storage, potato grading and storage, egg packing, vegetable and fish processing.

Late Summer

Some of the grasses at this time of year, heading into August, have grown to almost waist height, and there’s one spot where we see the purple dots of melancholy thistles amongst the green and yellows and hay-coloured grasses. The early harebells are already flowering purple and thick dewdrops hang from their stems. In these Scots pinewoods of Abernethy, the blaeberries are already ripening and there are patches of the forest where the bushes are laden, and when you walk through, the cuffs and shins of your trousers are stained purple. We’re trying to think about what the weather was like last year in what felt like a bumper year for blaeberries, but we’re not quite sure what the differences are between one year and the next, or why one year has a better crop than the last, though I am sure there are those we could ask. Our neighbour walked past with intent the other day, scooper in hand, and perhaps she’ll drop by later with a jar of jam for us. It’s the time of year for creeping lady’s tresses to push their way up, their slender stems a brighter green that seems to better fit to springtime, and they peek so delicately up through the heather and blaeberries they’re easy to miss, and often I miss noticing them till their flowers are already fading.

Autumn

The year’s moved on again and now the blaeberries are past their best, their leaves have turned yellow and are mottled with browns and blacks, and the heather’s turning from its varying shades of purple to the mauves of its dried-out husks. The yellow rattle has turned to the papery shells that give it its name. Someone reminded me the other day that the term in old Scots language for yellow rattle is the gowk’s shilling, gowk being a Scots word for cuckoo, and if you shake their stems you’ll surely see why both names are appropriate. How quickly the season has turned, and it’s into autumn. The air feels different. Has its nip. The sun has lost some of its warmth, sits lower, rises later, and casts longer shadows that reach out into the day. The bracken’s turning to rust, and the birches that sit amongst the pines are more easily identified from afar by their yellow tinged countenance.

The problem of privilege and exclusion hinders the ethical credentials (and range) of new nature writing. This issue is being addressed with increasing urgency, by publishing houses as well as by ecocritics, and it receives direct treatment in several contemporary books about walking in nature. A subgenre is thus emerging which represents a new chapter in a long tradition of established literary connections between walking and wonder and enlightenment, as well as vagrancy. Yet the element of privilege in this tradition persists, a fact pointedly highlighted in Kathleen Jamie’s observation about ‘the association of literature, remoteness, wildness and spiritually uplifted men’, in her review of Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places. The most obvious consequence of such privilege is white dominance. In the introduction to a prominent recent collection of nature writing oriented towards the Anthropocene, editor Tim Dee laments his failure ‘to find anything other than white contributors’. But there is an equally long and commonplace experience of finding rejuvenation and repair through retreat, and an established practice of walking as protest: both of these resources inform and reinvigorate the contemporary literature of nature walking. The politicised literature of nature walking in the British archipelago is often deemed to begin with Wordsworth, who ‘linked walking with nature, poetry, poverty and vagrancy in a wholly new and compelling way’, as Rebecca Solnit puts it. This essay is concerned with this Romantic legacy, and how Wordsworth’s particular constellation of ideas (walking, nature, writing, and social justice, understood as an indissoluble nexus) informs the contemporary literature of nature walking, written in the context of climate change, and fashioned by mutating forms of interconnected impoverishment. The defining textual effects and narrative features of this literary mode are my particular focus, but I want to keep its familiar topical concerns in view, the better to demonstrate how content infuses the form of this subgenre of nature writing.

Walking in nature as a form of protest is associated most strongly, perhaps, with the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in the Peak District in 1932, a ‘protest for a greater right of access to the moors’. As Nick Hayes points out, the significance of the trespass itself was symbolic rather than material in effecting change; and this points to the configuration that concerns me, in which narrative spawns imaginings or re-imaginings of access to the countryside, which might in turn have a bearing on political praxis.

Extinction Rebellion’s ‘fifth principle’ states that ‘We value … [f]ollowing a cycle of action, reflection, learning, and planning for more action’. This chapter will examine what this may mean in relation to literature (and the teaching of literature) and what implications it may have outside the class-room. XR activist academics have argued that the environmental emergency demands, as Tema Milstein says,

The Extinction Rebellion Universities group similarly states in its ‘Declaration of Rebellion’ that

The urgency of the issues at stake inevitably militates for such a language of effect and affect and morality. However, as Timothy Clark argues in The Value of Ecocriticism, such aims have embedded in them both the language of a neo-liberal agenda of agency, impact, choice, voices, story, and experience, which are elsewhere held to be deeply implicated in the production of the environmental catastrophe. Helena Feder, in her introduction to Close Reading the Anthropocene, similarly warns that ‘[i]n the Age of “Man,” the question of signification may all too easily reify the systems it claims to challenge, if not describe’. This article will discuss what is less often raised about the trap of reification: the question of representation, frequently assumed to be the grounding for activism, literary reading, and pedagogy. Representation also tends to operate in tandem with the critical languages of affect, especially in relation to empathy, attention, and imagination.

Merseycene Hauntings

At the University of Liverpool, we teach a module called ‘Literature and Place’ in which first-year undergraduates read a horror short story by one of our alumni, Clive Barker. ‘The Forbidden’ is a tale of urban decline, where an ambitious academic researcher visits a dilapidated housing estate and discovers that the city is haunted by a hook-handed killer, who smells of sweets and whose rotting torso swarms with honeybees. This monstrously saccharine horror is known as the ‘Candyman’. ‘The Forbidden’ might seem an odd choice of text for a module designed to encourage students to think about their degree programme and their chosen city of study in relation to questions of environment and decolonisation. They tend initially to see the Candyman as an overdetermined metaphor for the dangers of desire: for sexual fulfilment, for academic success, or, for those who pick up on the story’s nods towards Merseyside’s 1980s heroin crisis, for drugs. But there is, hiding in plain sight, another way to interpret the Candyman’s candy. As Barker himself later explained, the Candyman’s apian torso draws inspiration from the bee-infested lion’s corpse on the front of tins of Golden Syrup, a product manufactured by the most famous corporation from Liverpool: the sugar behemoth, Tate & Lyle. So perhaps the walking hive of the Candyman is a horrifying body politic: a beehive version of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, but with a distinctive additive? Maybe the Candyman is the spectre of sugar which haunts Merseyside: its original sin, its one-time sustenance, and, perhaps, its future doom?

This chapter takes Barker’s image of a commodity-haunted city as entry point (and exit wound) to show that Merseyside is a particularly compelling site through which to think about the trans-scalar dimensions of environ-mental crisis, where the slow violence of political and infrastructural histories haunts landscapes, bodies and climate. As Elizabeth DeLoughrey argues, it is necessary to ‘provincialize’ the geological and ecological transformations of the Anthropocene, because a ‘planetary scale needs to be placed in a dialectical relation with the local to render [both] their narratives meaningful’. Such a dialectical relationship between part (place) and whole (planet) must be diachronic as well as spatial, necessarily ‘entangled with the longue durée of empire and ecological imperialism’. With its extensive relationships with both sugar plantations and the oil industry, Merseyside is more entangled than most.