https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/08/motherwell-a-girlhood-deborah-orr-review

A searching memoir from the late Guardian journalist, which lays bare her upbringing and the evisceration of her Scottish industrial town

Idealism in British architecture has much to answer for, yet we like the idea that optimism mixes well with fresh cement. Housing estates were built on a sort of visionary, infectious hope, drawing on particular memories of bombed-out tenements and overcrowded room-and-kitchens. I once saw some letters sent to David Gibson, Glasgow’s messianic early 1960s housing convenor – “he took seven sugars in his tea”, his wife said – which came from citizens desperate to escape the slums. “Please put us down for one of your high-rises and all the clean air up there,” one woman wrote. The poet Hugh MacDiarmid tapped into a modernist hankering, a common wellspring of the better life, when he wrote that “there are ruined buildings in the world, but no ruined stones”. Outside the cities, just by Nirvana, they were building perfect “schemes” for those who knew how to live.

Deborah Orr’s mother knew all about that, or felt she did. Like many Britons of her generation and her class, she made something of a religion of keeping up appearances. She wasn’t from the slums herself, she was from Essex, but her husband was local and she loved their new house for being much more than a house, initially feeling they were renting a big new idea as much as a dwelling. “The people of Motherwell were used to being part of something much bigger than themselves,” her daughter writes. “When it went, so quickly … [it] became a town without a purpose.” Set in the Lanarkshire countryside south-east of Glasgow, Motherwell at its height made trams, heavy engineering parts, and produced 3m tons of steel every year, employing 14,000 people (more than half the town’s adult population), many of them at Ravenscraig, which was targeted through the 80s and closed in 1992.