AN AREA of natural beauty to the east of Glasgow and into North Lanarkshire will become Scotland’s largest urban wildlife site, with 4,300 new homes created on a wetland park in the next 10 years.
The Glasgow Clyde Valley Green Network Partnership has been passed to the second stage of the Heritage Lottery Funding bid process and hopes to secure £4.5 million towards the £6.8m required to prepare the Seven Lochs Wetland Park for development.
Straddling the Glasgow/North Lanarkshire boundary at Gartloch Gartcosh, the new housing will be created with walkways, cycle paths and natural play areas, and in a manner that protects resident wildlife.
The site covers an area roughly equal to 20,000 football pitches.
The project is one a series championed by the partnership that will transform Glasgow and its housing landscape, especially to the east side of the city, bringing communities closer to green sites and nature.
Exactly 200 years since Robert Owen’s vision of New Lanark as a mill town that would provide decent housing and a desirable environment for its workforce, those values are being applied to Glasgow and the surrounding area by the partnership.
Vincent Goodstadt, the partnership's former structure plan manager, cited Owen’s desire to give the workforce of New Lanark "more than a bare existence" to have them "sheltered by plantations".
He said: “Social justice drives me more than anything else. If you look at Glasgow on a map, you can see most of the parks are to the west.
"Just as many people live in the east, but many of them have lived in relative squalor. We are beginning to change that, and we need to keep driving it forward.”
The partnership held an event at Strathclyde University’s Executive Suite last week to mark its first 10 years. In the past decade, it has encouraged a change of culture on housing development.
Mr Goodstadt, now an independent advisor supporting organisations trying to raise the quality of life in communities through better design and more creative planning, displayed a photograph he had taken in 1996.
It showed seven children, who should have been at school, playing on a derelict site in Glasgow’s East End, with Celtic Park just visible in the background.
The derelict site, 18 years later, formed part of the development constructed to host the Commonwealth Games.
He added: “In the 1970s, Strathclyde Park was a derelict colliery site, but people now take it for granted, and probably think it has always been there. By improving the environment for our citizens, we encourage better health and longer lives.”
Max Hislop, the partnership’s programme manager, said the HLF funding, if secured, would be crucial to establishing a ‘new, green infrastructure agenda’ that would continue the improvement and transformation of the Glasgow Clyde Valley.
It emerged last year that more than 1,000 new homes would also be created at Maidenhill, close to Newton Mearns, with the same principles at the core of the development.
The partnership aims to bring urban life to green spaces with the aim of integrating the two and enhancing both the landscape and quality of life of communities.
At Maidenhill, 25 per cent of housing will have to be affordable, with developers asked to integrate these flats and smaller homes with the larger ones throughout the site, to create a genuine social mix.
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