Newton Mearns: Then and Now

In the early 1800s, Mearns was a hamlet with an inn on the road from Glasgow to Ayr. The area was essentially rural except for a bleaching works. One hundred years on, in the Edwardian era, Newton Mearns had become a village. House-building in the area started on a large scale in the 1920s, and by the 1950s the population had swelled to six thousand. The old village was not what the incomers wanted, and by the 1960s it was becoming derelict. In the 1970s it was razed to make way for a large shopping centre and, as the song goes, a parking lot. Page 40 shows a group of children posing on Barrhead Road, their houses in the background. Today they would be mown down by Asda-related traffic!