Glengarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland c.1950s

Description

These workers houses were home to many of the Lithuanian steel workers in Glengarnock Works, including memers of the Mikeviecz family, a descendent of which later migrated to Wales.
These streets or 'Rows' have now been demolished at the edge of Kilbirnie Loch, Scotland.

Looking north from the embankment of the old Caledonian Railway line towards 'The Raws' at Glengarnock. The houses of the Corn Park are on the left (known as 'The New Buildings'). The New Buildings were built between 1900 and 1910 and look like terraced houses with upstairs and downstairs rooms, as we might expect today. They were in fact very densely inhabited flats. There are two front doors side by side which were the entrances to separate ground floor flats. Each flat had only one window to the front. There was also a back door to the downstairs flats, and a rear window.

The upstairs flats only had a rear entrance, via an exterior staircase (see GLG026).



These houses originally had no piped water supply. There were standpipes in the street. When this photo was taken, piped water had been introduced to the houses.



The row of single storey houses in the centre and to the right are the Railway Cottages, built in the later half of the 19th century to house the families of employees of Glengarnock Ironworks. The row on the right faced on to the main railway line to Glasgow. The two rows were separated by the 'Dummy Lane'. The low extension at the back of each house is the toilet. The small free standing buildings with chimneys in the back gardens are the wash houses.



The houses of Long Row were situated between the winding track in the right distance and the main line. One row backed directly on to the railway line, the other row ran parallel to the first, the front doors facing those off the row opposite. They had been vacated in the 1930s and only the foundations remained at the time of this photo. Many of their inhabitants were rehoused in new houses at Longbar.



The semi-detached cottage at the top of the street, perpendicular to the New Buildings, housed Jean Nelson's shop.



Kilbirnie Loch is in the far distance. The remains of the original 1840s blast furnaces of Glengarnock Ironworks are in the middle distance, on the southern shores of the loch. There are rugby pitches here now. At the time of this photo the Ironworks had long closed and had been rebuilt as Glengarnock Steelworks, located in the distance to the left, on the western side of Kilbirnie Loch.



The storage tank on stilts in the middle distance is part of the old ammonia works. Ammonia was a valuable by-product of steelmaking. The ammonia works was established by the Glengarnock Chemical Co. - a subsidiary of Colvilles, set up in 1894 to recover sulphate of ammonia and tar from the blast furnaces gases.





Photograph taken in 1955.