Did anyone watch Mark Bonnar’s recent documentary Meet You at the Hippos on BBC Scotland?
It’s a nostalgic look at the public art embedded into the Scottish New Towns like Glenrothes, East Kilbride, and Cumbernauld.
It turns out Bonnar’s dad was actually one of the town artists who built the concrete hippos and elephants.
It really made me feel sad about how far Scotland has declined in terms of what we offer people to live a full, dignified life.
The New Towns were a massive socio-economic experiment, obviously not without their flaws, but the intent was pure.
The corporations didn't just throw up cramped brick boxes as cheaply as possible for profit.
They hired the full-time "Town Artists" explicitly to add soul to the surroundings. They built segregated, traffic-free walking paths, embedded local community centres, preserved green space to play, and ensured leisure facilities were central to the blueprint.
They were trying to build a society where ordinary working-class families had art, leisure, safety, and jobs on their doorstep.
Compare that to the soul-destroying reality of what we are building across Scotland today.
Look at any modern housing development springing up outside our major towns and cities—whether it's the sprawling commuter estates in West Lothian, the endless fields of identical detached houses straddling a motorway, or the new builds choking the outskirts of Glasgow and Edinburgh. What do we get now?
We get hundreds of houses, but no shops, no community halls, no pubs, and certainly no public art. If you want a pint of milk, you have to get in a car and drive to a corporate-owned retail park.
Our roads are narrow, choked with parked cars because there's no proper public transport strategy, leaving zero safe space for kids to just go out and play. If there is space it is a bare minimum of effort with developers doing everything they can to cut costs.
In the New Town era, a facility I spent a lot of my youth in was East Kilbride's Dollan Aqua Centre, it was built as a centre we could be proud of and had amazing facilities, I don’t see anything as groundbreaking as that today, just a load of facilities such as swimming pools and ice rings closing with a lot more ‘Pure Gym’ style industrial units taking over.
We seem to have completely retreated into a purely for-profit society. The Scottish Government and local councils have outsourced the entire concept of community-building to private volume housebuilders (the Persimmons, Taylors Woodrows, and Barratts of the world). Their only metric of success is profit-per-square-foot.
We used to believe that all Scots deserved a rich, full life integrated with art, recreation, and community infrastructure. Not just those who can afford to live in cultural hubs.
Now, they are treated as consumers who just need a place to sleep between shifts, parked in a dormitory suburb designed entirely around car dependency and private wealth.
Have we just accepted this decline? Why did we stop demanding that our built environment actually create happy souls instead of healthy balance sheets?