A warm welcome in Scotland's most notorious neighbourhood

In 2022, something similar had happened here on a grander scale, sparking comparisons with Fort Apache the Bronx and The Purge, the ultimate middle-class nightmare depicting organised societal breakdown. Then, some shops and cars had been damaged and set alight and a local school attacked. The police and firefighters were met with a barrage of missiles. Some streets were annexed by masked youths before the police regained control before the end of the 10pm news bulletins.

The media had reported these events in the manner of war dispatches and civic Scotland did what it normally does when there’s a crisis to be manipulated: it started banning things. Last year they restricted the sale of fireworks to young people, which, like minimum alcohol pricing and drugs consumption rooms is like imposing a smoking ban beside an active volcano.

My Kirkton tour guide today is Jim Spence, Dundee’s unofficial cultural attaché. Mr Spence is a lawyer, academic, broadcaster and journalist whose columns in the Dundee Courier are worth the admission price alone. He and his family were born and raised on these streets and though he left at 18 it’s clear he retains fond and vivid memories of this neighbourhood. 

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As we tour the streets, he provides an audio map describing this place in the 1970s and 1980s. In the middle of a residential square there’s a small, grassy hill. “There used to be a Coop there, in fact there were two on this estate,” he says. “My mate was a message boy for one of them.” He points to a street beyond Beauly Avenue. “That’s where my aunt Bessie and the Murrays used to live.”

Beauly Crescent is where lot of the bother occurred, and down there at Balgowan Avenue which forms the main artery of this community, there was also some trouble. Yet, these are decent streets with a solid and well-maintained housing stock. Here and there are the familiar signs of oncoming decrepitude.

There’s nothing here signifying lawlessness and social breakdown. Nothing screams deprivation apart from those occasional inside-out dwellings where soft furnishings and electrical goods lie rusting in long grass indicating something sad and lonely and untreated inside.

Jim points to another scrap of empty land. “There were greenhouses there when I was young. I delivered papers around here. There were even some four-bedroom houses at the end of that road.” We turn another corner and he points directly at one house. “My cousin lived in there with my granny.”

Now were on Dunmore Street. “This is my street. These were all tenements. My wife lived in the fourth block there.” He’s eager not to convey a rose-tinted impression of an estate which then – as now – had its social challenges and tribal intensity. He recalls an incident featuring Derek Johnstone, the former Rangers and Scotland striker who lived near here.

Kevin McKenna with Jim Spence, who grew up in Kirkton (Image: Stewart Attwood Photography)

“I was with my girlfriend (now his wife) when big Derek Johnstone appeared. He had come up from Glasgow to see his girlfriend (he even remembers her name). Suddenly, a bloke called Fergie from the Mid, who were sworn enemies of the Fintry boys, Derek’s patch, came running down with a big pole and put it through the back of his car.

He talks about another bloke from further along the street who make millions in property. And then a house belonging to another who was murdered. The lad who lived next door went off to Oxford. In a place like this – like many others of its type in Scotland’s cities – fine margins determine who flourishes and who dies. Jim points out that we’ve now passed seven houses belonging to men who are now all dead “either through drugs or other wrong turnings in their lives”.

“So, what causes the bother in Kirkton,” I ask him. “Social media can act as an accelerant,” he says. “And Kirkton is also peculiar. It’s a really tight-knit community. There are lots of people here who have lived in this scheme all their days. And there is a great sense of pride in being from Kirkton. People are fiercely protective of it and draw a large part of their identity from it.”

We come to a row of shops, most of which have been boarded up. He points to one of them. “That was a newsagent when I was a boy.”

He talks about one of his school mates from primary who broke into the post office beside it and did in the safe. “He’s lived in the scheme all his days. He’s a highly-intelligent lad, but he’s never done a hand’s turn in his life.”

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The Kirkton Asda and the gargantuan Tesco across the Kingsway have replaced all those little shops, now boarded-up that greet you sadly round corners of Kirkton. They were places that helped maintain a measure of social cohesion in hard times; they and the pubs that once stood here have all gone and with them, a sense of local identity. In these place, they knew you and had known your parents. They provided a sense of belonging to something. There was respect here and your family’s name had resonance.

But in Tesco and Asda no-one knows your name and all that matters is your money. Local suppliers are priced down to a barely subsistent level. There are no identifying features and nothing flows back into the community. They look and feel exactly like 100 other places across Britain. When these retail space ships landed here a decade or so ago they literally sucked the local producers dry and emptied the little trade routes that wound in and out of these street.  

Echoes of this dehumanisation are evident in Graeme Alexander’s haunting and brilliant documentary, Street Gangs on the BBC’s Scotland channel. Mr Alexander is a former gang member who re-visits his old patch and talks to the present-day young teams still seeking something meaningful in lives that have been marginalised and excluded.

He doesn’t know why gangs fight each other beyond a need to be “postcode warriors: you’re from there; I’m from here”. He describes them as providing a sense of belonging and acting as “surrogate families” and adds “behind the balaclavas and masks these are just ordinary kids looking for a way out and a better life”. He says that many of their activities are the predictable consequences of being “neglected, left out of society, excluded on many, many levels”.

The neglect of communities such as these scream out from the annual statistics of generational government failure in the entirety of the devolved era: 250,000 children in poverty; annual record highs in addiction deaths; the critical dearth of social and affordable housing; rising numbers of rough sleepers in Glasgow city centre.

Jim Spence (Image: Stewart Attwood Photography)

In response, the Scottish Government bans fireworks and Buckfast and gaslights these places by seeking to impose Named Persons targeting their children. Social progress to them is measured in pronouns and state-funded drug dens rather than actual rehab beds. They think the people who live in these places are scum and treat them as such.

Yet, in Kirkton as in so many other working-class neighbourhoods which have been excluded from Holyrood’s artisan progressiveness, people emerge to make something of themselves armed with nothing more than their native ingenuity and a will to graft. 

On Beauly Avenue I meet Kathleen and May on their way to Asda. They’re delighted to be asked for a comment. “We’ve lived in Kirkton all our lives,” says Kathleen. “People look after each other here. Neighbours around here actively seek you out to make sure you’re doing okay.” May remembers what it was like here in the 1960s. “It’s not any worse than it was back then,” she says. “The trouble the other night got blown out of all proportion. There are good people here, why else would I and many others never feel like leaving?”

At the end of our trip round Kirkton, Jim mentions once more how social media and the publicity attending the troubles leads to notoriety. And how, in the absence of any recognition from anywhere else, notoriety equals adulation. When no-one’s offering anything else, that can be quite seductive too.

Near the entrance to the Kirkton Estate is the community centre. It’s shut on the day when most people are around. It’s emblematic of the relationship these places have with civic Scotland.