Theme Week Scotland – Cumbernauld

27 December 2014 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General Reading Time:  5 minutes

Red Deer Innkeepers Lodge © geograph.org.uk - Johnny Durnan/cc-by-sa-2.0

Red Deer Innkeepers Lodge © geograph.org.uk – Johnny Durnan/cc-by-sa-2.0

Cumbernauld is a Scottish new town in North Lanarkshire. It was created in 1956 as a population overspill for Glasgow City. It is the eighth most populous settlement in Scotland and the largest in North Lanarkshire. The name comes from the Scots Gaelic comar nan allt, meaning “meeting of the streams” as, geographically, from its high point in the Scottish Central Belt burns (streams) flow west to the River Clyde and east to the River Forth. A two-time winner of the Carbuncle Award; the town has since received the award of ‘Best Town’ at the Scottish Design Awards 2012.   read more…

Glasgow, the largest city in Scotland

14 November 2011 | Author/Destination: | Rubric: General, European Union, UNESCO World Heritage Reading Time:  12 minutes

Mitchell Library © Andeggs

Mitchell Library © Andeggs

Glasgow is the largest city in Scotland and third most populous in the United Kingdom. The city is situated on the River Clyde in the country’s west central lowlands. A person from Glasgow is known as a Glaswegian. Glasgow grew from the medieval Bishopric of Glasgow and the later establishment of the University of Glasgow in the 15th century, which subsequently became a major centre of the Scottish Enlightenment in the 18th century. From the 18th century the city also grew as one of Britain’s main hubs of transatlantic trade with British North America and the British West Indies. With the Industrial Revolution, the city and surrounding region shifted to become one of the world’s pre-eminent centres of Heavy Engineering, most notably in the Shipbuilding and Marine engineering industry, which produced many innovative and famous vessels. Glasgow was known as the “Second City of the British Empire” for much of the Victorian era and Edwardian period. Today it is one of Europe’s top twenty financial centres and is home to many of Scotland’s leading businesses. Glasgow is also ranked as the 57th most liveable city in the world. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries Glasgow grew to a population of over one million, and was the fourth-largest city in Europe, after London, Paris and Berlin. In the 1960s, comprehensive urban renewal projects resulting in large-scale relocation of people to new towns and peripheral suburbs, followed by successive boundary changes, have reduced the current population of the City of Glasgow council area to 580,690, with 1,199,629 people living in the Greater Glasgow urban area. The entire region surrounding the conurbation covers approximately 2.3 million people, 41% of Scotland’s population.   read more…

Return to TopReturn to Top