Greenock and Stockbridge: A tale of two Scotlands under coronavirus

Chris McEleny, SNP leader on Inverclyde Council, is walking me through a neighbourhood whose turn it is this year to be named the poorest in Scotland. No community deserves this tag and for a day or so these streets piqued the curiosity of the media caravan before it moved on to feed on the misfortunes of some other benighted place.

Our new friend is in trouble and perhaps sees in the councillor something solid and reliable. Soon, he is relating to us the events of the last 24 hours. These have not been vintage ones for our boy and have involved assault, robbery and a quest for medical relief that requires to be resolved in the next few hours. This isn’t a cry for help; it’s a one-act tragedy.

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He needs to get to a council office and then a clinic before the close of business and so we chip in to get him a taxi. He’s mortified about taking our money though, and is only convinced to accept it when the councillor promises to come to his door “after Mass on Sunday night”. He seems more relaxed now and says that we are a pair of “good c**ts”. As the taxi arrives he asks us if we’re behaving ourselves and, with a twinkle in his eye, entreats us to look after ourselves. He has started our encounter four goals down but he won’t be defeated.

This is Greenock Central, which was ranked top of the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation (SIMD) earlier this year. This table measures income, health, employment, education, housing, crime and access to services. It took the title from Ferguslie Park in Paisley which was named third most deprived this time. The statistics are well-intentioned and designed to inform all the concerned agencies about spending decisions and service priorities across 6,976 small postcode areas called "data zones". Yet, every four years when the latest winners and losers are revealed the names at the top and bottom remain largely the same.

Mere statistics, though, can never form a complete picture of a neighbourhood’s worth and needs. We all form pictures of what a community rated Scotland’s most deprived ought to look like and this part of Greenock doesn’t really fit. Councillor McEleny says: “We’ve got a high population of pensioners here, and many of them have been living in poor health for maybe the last 20 years or so of their lives.”

He points to a homeless centre standing between the town and the water. “This place lies at the heart of the data zone and contributes to the statistics. You don’t see places like this in Stockbridge or Bearsden. You’ve got people in there whose needs are numbered in multiple strands of deprivation. They get into patterns of behaviour at a very early age when they leave school and find there are no jobs. That place is a monument to the failure of society. You can’t just keep throwing pound after pound at fire-fighting. You have to have early intervention and prevention. In many of these cases though, the time for early intervention has probably come and gone.”

Councillor McEleny is a well-kent figure on these streets and our walk is punctuated by local people stopping to chat and say hello. Soon, we reach the glass-roofed shopping centre that sits at the heart of the town and the councillor becomes animated in his disdain for it. “This whole area was a handsome and open place with green spaces. As a child I walked through here on my way to the other side of town or down to the waterfront.

“Sadly, the stock solution favoured by planners in places struggling with de-industrialisation and de-population was to get more retail spaces under one big roof. It’s a false economy. Many of the units were quickly occupied by chain-stores and coffee-shop franchises which replaced local shops, unable to compete with their prices. Thus, money was sucked away from the town and into the pockets of distant shareholders.

“This is why I’m passionate about politics: this is where support comes from. We have a budget of £169m in Inverclyde but people want their good roads and their leisure facilities. When they see you spending money on things that only seem to benefit a minority they get disgruntled. This is the test of a decent society: how much are we willing to help those on the bottom rung?”

Alan Coyle is the principal teacher in Pastoral Support at St Matthew’s Academy in Greenock and observes the challenges encountered by his pupils and their little victories each day of his working life. He says. “It’s easy to be negative and hark back to the old days of busy shipyards and full employment. I think it’s remarkable that the area of the town which has emerged as the most deprived is pretty much its commercial centre. This is testament, I think, to the way this area has been decimated due to poor governance.

“But local people are very protective of it and proud of its heritage, but they are also very aware of the challenges it faces. However, you can’t discuss Greenock without placing it in the context of Inverclyde as a whole. When I taught Modern Studies we used to talk about the paradox of Drumchapel and Bearsden separated by only a few hundred metres. Here, we have an equally striking dichotomy between Kilmacolm and the east end of Greenock. The gap between the most and least affluent in Inverclyde is the same as it is in any number of towns across central Scotland.

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“Once, we had the great industrial actions of the 1970s and 80s and the Lee Jeans work-in. And we fans of Greenock Morton FC take enormous pride in the fact that when it came to the crunch, we fought to keep our club back in 2001. The local community support came to the fore then. But I don't think that feeling is there anymore.”

A DISTANCE of 70 miles separates Greenock from the stately arrondissement of Stockbridge, north of Edinburgh city centre, but it may as well be a different planet. This opulent little village was rated the least deprived corner of Scotland in the SIMD table, although it seems bizarre to include a word like ‘deprived’ anywhere near this neighbourhood.

Those who don’t know Edinburgh are inclined to describe it as a posh city, but it’s not really. Refined: maybe; reserved: perhaps, but Edinburgh too has its edgy places. Stockbridge though, is a Brigadoon version of Edinburgh that you happen upon after a long walk down from Princes Street, not noticing it until you’re actually in it. Here, the pace of life seems to slow and you’re invited to leave your baggage at the side of the Water of Leith. It’s an enchanting place that beckons you to linger a little and chill for a while. Running alongside it is an aptly-named district called Comely Bank.

In public buildings and dwelling places are the obvious differences between affluence and penury but you sense these too in the way that people carry themselves. In poor streets there is a sense of people needing to be somewhere soon; ever-alert for some invisible threat. In places like Stockbridge they move with the languor that’s the preserve of those who measure their plans in years; not days.

Today, I encounter Stockbridge in the middle of coronavirus lockdown but you can’t help wondering if much has changed with the social restrictions. The usual middle class caprices of cobbled streets and the neighbourhood watch are here. Not for the first time I wonder why such genteel vigilantism is only seen in those communities that least require it.

Where there are betting shops in Greenock here there are little shrines to interior design selling bespoke kitchens and luxury lights. Next door to a bakery (I think) called Pattiserie Florentin there is a shop which sells something called a “Sublime Replenishing Night Masque”, which in Greenock might equate to a facial. Across the road stands an ample shop-front calls itself a ‘Floatarium’ which I initially took to mean a shop specialising in inflatable paddling pools. On closer inspection though, there was a dizzying and esoteric assortment of treatments some of which, like manicures and pedicures I’d heard of and others such as a Lash Bar and the eponymous Floatarium that toyed with my imagination. You could go your holidays here.

Judging by the number of charity shops here Stockbridge seems to have a big heart too. These though wouldn’t be called charity shops anywhere else but luxury goods emporiums. The estate agents advertise properties in the £450k to £850k price range; in Greenock Central there are decent two-bedroom flats available for £28k. Just over there is a gallery called ‘Doubtfire’. Only in a place such as this would such a name not be considered comically ironic. In the Water of Leith underneath the old bridge stands one of Anthony Gormley’s sculptures. In the streets around it I counted eight interiors shops and five art-shops. They don’t just have delicatessens here they have epicures, which are not to be confused with the products on offer at the Floatarium.

A lady with a Jane Austen accent calls to me across the road. “It’s all very weird,” she shouts, smiling. “But the wine-shop is open and I’ve managed to get a chocolate brownie.” These are essential items in a Stockbridge resident’s shopping basket.

Maggie Lennon, director of the Bridges Programme charity and now resident of Glasgow, recalls her years living in Stockbridge fondly. “There was always something thrilling yet comforting walking down those steep hills from the new town to Stockbridge,” she says. It’s where, she says, the regimented streets and thoroughfares of the New Town succumbed to the anarchy of the twisted and meandering lanes of the village. “I always considered Stockbridge to be hip.

“And I loved the restaurants, bistros, wholefoods and wine bars. Maison Hector was famous for the wall of running water cascading down the wall in the gents’ loo. This was a design feature. We even had a cricket ground to which the Lord Taverners turned up once a year for a charity match and a ball. If you got tickets for this you knew you had made something of yourself.”

BACK IN GREENOCK they choose not to be resentful at such apparent inequality in the space of an hour’s drive in an affluent country. Councillor McEleny points to the town’s own handsome places. Just a few hundred metres separate the benighted town centre from the redeveloped waterfront seafront and the splendid Beacon Arts Centre. A tennis club, a private school and a fancy hotel sit just a few streets away from the corner that houses five betting shops. “From a planning perspective,” says Councillor McEleny, “you have to ask how we allowed a system that allowed the town centre to be hollowed out and then filled with franchises and chains and the practice of permitting the bookies to take up all the empty shop spaces.”

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Yet, he refuses to dwell on the glories of Greenock’s shipbuilding past and the well-paid jobs that made this place thrum with productivity and economic health. Instead he points to missed opportunities at a local level and a chronic lack of imagination and aversion to risk at a national level.

“When the shipyards began to close and the jobs began to disappear there was little thought given to what should happen next,” he said. “Unfortunately, Greenock encountered a perfect storm of circumstances all converging at the same time. Councils and governments were desperate for jobs and, in their panic, they invited the multinational supermarkets in with open arms.

“The local producers all disappeared to be replaced by low-paid jobs contributing [less] to the long-term health of the local economy. Choices made nationally have also had an effect. There’s no thinking outside the box.

“Cities have the tools to meet economic challenges. They will always attract finance and have a lucrative retail and night-time economy. The power of the public sector should have been better used in areas like this. Scotland’s new Social Security hubs in Glasgow and Dundee are providing 750 jobs. Most of these are relatively high-paying, skilled jobs and would have made much more of a difference in Greenock than in Glasgow city centre. He salutes the Greenock Telegraph, the much-loved local newspaper which has been chronicling and supporting the town for 163 years. “Like many other local papers, they could have moved to the outskirts, but they’re still here in the heart of the town centre. It’s a very powerful symbol of solidarity and much appreciated around here.”

“Neither Santander or Scottish Power are going to build large facilities here but our public sector has the ability to do this. Cities must accept that if we want thriving towns which feed the cities then we’ve got to start doing things differently or these communities and ones like Bute and the Western Isles are just going to keep depopulating.”

For those of us who live in and around cities it’s easy to forget that smaller and more far-flung places all need the same level of services: the bins still need to be picked up; education and policing still has to be provided. But with fewer people you’ve got less taxation to pay for it. The economic model is broken but it could be fixed with a little imagination.

“Any time a developer wants to build new houses there’s supposed to be a mix to promote social cohesion. But the developers get round this by offering little parcels of land cheaply for social housing so that they don’t spoil their fancy developments with it. This creates social division.”

Coronavirus has now rendered the recent multi-deprivation statistics obsolete. Inverclyde now has the highest death rate in the country due to the disease according to the latest National Records of Scotland statistics. The region has had 120 deaths per 100,000 people, a figure nearly three times that of the death rate in the least deprived areas. In neighbouring East Renfrewshire it’s 50 per 100,000 and in East Dunbartonshire it’s currently 43.

This pandemic, like all the others before it, preys on the poor. We like to think of Scotland as a progressive country, inclusive of all. Yet, in the numbers that gather around life and death nothing really changes for the people who live out of sight and beyond the limits of our imagination and compassion.