SOME of my friends have recently moved into a new home in an area of new builds. "What was it like?” I asked my boyfriend after he had visited their new abode. “Nice, but you wouldn’t like it,” he said: “There was nothing else but houses.”
When talking about where we, if we were to move from our current Glasgow flat once we are able, my partner and I have had hours of discussion on what our ideal scenario would be: affordable, of course. An extra room would be lovely. Maybe even a garden? (a girl can dream). But for me the one essential thing has always been: I want a neighbourhood.
What makes a neighbourhood? Textbook definition is “the area of a town that surrounds someone's home” according to the Cambridge dictionary. Yet, like the definition of “home”, the term neighbourhood is permeated with subjectivity.
National Geographic has described a neighbourhood as “an area where people live and interact with one another” which “tend to have their own identity, or ‘feel’ based on the people who live there and the places nearby.”
How to make areas better neighbourhoods has also been part of conversations in the public sphere. The Scottish Government has been reviewing the potential of creating more 20-minute neighbourhoods in Scotland in which “people can meet the majority of their daily needs within a reasonable distance of their home, by walking, wheeling or cycling.”
For me, I too want to meet my daily needs nearby, but I also want character. I like places to go and browse not far from where I live. I want to enjoy a coffee or a pint and walk home at ease; shop for things close to me. I want familiar faces; to meet and recognise people. I want sense of belonging – and that is what I found.
The neighbourhood I have found myself in currently is in Dennistoun, although more recently in the bordering neighbourhood of Haghill to be precise. It is the place I have lived the longest in my ten years in Scotland. Aside from a three-year stint in the city centre, my home in Glasgow has always been in the East.
For those that follow “best places to live” lists, Dennistoun may be familiar. In 2020 and 2021, it was featured as one such place in lists by TimeOut and The Sunday Times. For those that do not, it is a small area in the Glasgow’s East End – one that has been often referred to as up and coming and seen a vast change in recent years, due to an influx of people moving to the area for its proximity to the city centre and, at one point that’s there no longer, affordable rent and house prices.
Walk along Duke Street, and you’ll see an array of cafes, restaurants, charity shops, trendy bars and more traditional boozers. It is exactly for these businesses and what they give – an array of choice on possible activities, places to meet and spend your time – that the area has been earmarked by the people moving here (and those curating above best places to live lists as a result).
I too love what I have. When I first moved to the district, I – like so many others – was fuelled by a sense of pragmatism. The popular, trendy cocktail bar that will soon celebrate a decade of being there, was only in its infancy. Many of the coffee shops of today were non-existent. At that point, the “place to be” was still the West End. So, while I once only lived here and spent my leisure time elsewhere, I have found myself increasingly sticking to my surroundings.
But in the more recent years there have been transformations of other kinds: the closure of many small businesses. A couple of years ago it was the fishmonger round the corner from my flat. A few months ago, the small tearoom on my street and the small Zero Waste Shop down the hill. Last week, it was my favourite place to get pizza.
The tearoom, which closed “after 50 years serving the east end of Glasgow” back then cited “day to day running costs” for their decision to terminate. For Baked Pizza al Taglio, my already much-mourned favourite pizza place, it was “the ridiculous energy bills, price increases” and the Duke Street building’s structural issues that brought on the closure.
For whatever reason these decisions happen, each time they take something with them. At their simplest, they give what they offer – pizza, a good fry-up and a cup of tea. Yet, it isn’t always for only what they sell that these businesses matter to the communities they serve. There’s so much more to them.
These spaces – particularly as other available public meeting areas are affected by budget cuts and closures, or simply being non-existent in some places in the first place – have offered meeting points for many. The tearoom beside my street was where I regularly met neighbours and locals, old and new faces. Everybody interacted – I laughed every single time I was there.
Ultimately, every time a business closes they take something with them and leave a void. Read through the more than 200 comments under the post with which Baked announced their closure, and you will quickly grasp the sense of loss people feel.
Sure, it is not always all doom and gloom. In Dennistoun at least, the void is often filled with a new venture. The space that once housed the fishmonger round the corner from my flat is now home to a popular bakery – I often have seen the long queues gathering in front of it. Whether such replacement helps aid the sting of loss of the former is subjective but, I guess, new possibility still trumps emptiness.
But not all areas are this lucky. Walk along some of Scotland’s high streets and such quick turnover doesn’t always happen. Moreover, conditions in Scotland, and the UK as a whole, remain precarious, bringing in the question of how many more such closures will follow. Earlier this year, the Federation of Small Businesses warned that hundreds of thousands of small UK firms are at risk as a result of the Energy Bill Relief Scheme ending in March.
Conversations have shifted towards creating better neighbourhoods for people and these are very much needed. But so is looking at how to support other institutions that are the fabric of neighbourhoods, including small businesses.
These businesses, and the services they offer to communities directly and indirectly make areas what they are. They can, at times, help propel them on to the map and bring new activity. Would Dennistoun have featured in best places to live without the work of small businesses? The answer is probably no.
For me, small businesses are the fabric of neighbourhoods – and I would be sad to see more go.
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