Can Tweedbank Masterplan Two outperform its predecessor?

SPECIAL REPORT by DOUG COLLIE

For the second time in half a century blueprints are being pored over prior to the investment of millions of pounds on infrastructure, house building and extra commercial premises at Tweedbank, the 'new' community regarded as the trigger for prosperity and economic growth in the Central Borders since the 1960s.

This renewed attempt to beef up the role of the village situated between Melrose and Galashiels will hopefully proceed more smoothly and achieve more tangible results than the initial Tweedbank project.

It was mired in legal wrangles and public inquiries for five years before being mothballed several times not long after its launch in 1973. At one stage in its chequered history it remained shelved and in limbo for twelve years before being resuscitated.

The bold if risky scheme drawn up to reverse decades of population and employment decline in the Central Borders was scheduled for completion by 1976, delivering a thousand new homes plus a range of industrial premises in what was supposed to be a rapid fire initiative.

But lack of demand and national economic crises meant it took not four but 37 years to 'complete' the job. Even then Tweedbank's population only just exceeded 2,000 rather than the 4,500 originally envisaged by Government and local authority planners.

Renewed activity on fallow areas of the site in 1992 included proposals for a 24-bed dementia unit, a business park and a major hotel development. None of those facilities have been delivered 27 years later and all of them feature in Tweedbank Masterplan Two. Perhaps they will get past the drawing board this time around.

The visionaries who first came up with the idea of developing the new village reckoned without the redoubtable owner of Lowood Farm, septuagenarian Constance Hamilton and her equally formidable husband Ian.

Their court battles to prevent their beloved farm from falling into developers' hands frustrated officialdom but gained the admiration and respect of many members of the Borders public who would rather have seen £15 million of public money - the price tag would eventually spiral to £30 million - spent in the existing towns, some of them struggling for economic survival as traditional manufacturing industries withered away.

Mrs Hamilton told a public inquiry into the proposed compulsory purchase of Lowood in March 1969 that if she had believed Tweedbank was a necessity she would have been only too pleased to negotiate the sale of the land. But she maintained unemployment was not a great problem and the scheme would not benefit the whole of the Border area. She was to be proved right.

However, the Hamiltons could not stop the juggernaut that was the Scottish Office, and the couple were eventually forced to throw in the towel in 1972. The Court of Session judgements went against them after they racked up massive legal fees and paid for the services of a QC.

At long last the bulldozers were free to move onto Lowood's coveted acres and the birth of Tweedbank was marked by a tree-planting ceremony on March 19th 1973. Constance Hamilton was invited to attend but was unable to join in the celebrations due to a "prior engagement".

Instead she told The Scotsman newspaper: "I feel just as strongly as I ever did about this mad scheme. I fear it will become a very large white elephant and taxpayers and ratepayers in the Borders will regret they did not do more to stop it. The whole thing is just crazy".

And in October 1976 she appeared to have been proved correct when the public housing programme was brought to a halt by the Government agency known as the Scottish Special Housing Association [SSHA], later replaced by Scottish Homes. Only 234 of the planned 800 homes for rent had been completed.

The demand from incoming workers, including the expected "Glasgow over-spill"  was so low that in order to let the completed houses the SSHA accepted applications from local people, among them families living in flats barely a mile away in Galashiels.

But even in 1980, with housebuilding again at a complete standstill the planners remained hopeful Tweedbank would grow into a community with 4,500 residents. However, little or nothing happened over the next twelve years.

Scottish local government reorganisation in 1975 meant Tweedbank became the responsibility of the newly formed Borders Regional Council. The arrival of four accompanying district authorities in the Borders soon resulted in representatives from Hawick, Kelso and Jedburgh and from Berwickshire claiming the 'all eggs in one basket' approach that was Tweedbank was failing the region and choking off public investment elsewhere.

As early as 1977, only four years into the project, Roxburgh district councillors were calling for the entire concept to be abandoned completely. Hawick elected member Bill Douglas declared: "Tweedbank so far has not proved attractive to industrialists. It is time we had a change of emphasis to the towns and encouraged development there".

'TWEEDBANK DREAM IS SMASHED' screamed a headline in The Scotsman from February 1987. It followed the decision by the SSHA to sell off its entire undeveloped land holding of 17 hectares at Tweedbank with only 300 of the 800 houses for rent completed, and 30% of those sold to sitting tenants.

Secretary of State for Scotland Malcolm Rifkind told local MP David Steel: "Following decisions on the policy review of the SSHA, the economic expansion programme has now been discontinued. Accordingly, there is no scope for further development by the Association at Tweedbank and the surplus land is, I understand, being disposed of". A spokesman for SSHA concluded: "The demand for much of the Tweedbank scheme failed to materialise".

So the UK Government, which had poured millions into Tweedbank, no longer thought further public investment in housing at the site was justified or worth while. How much of that public investment already committed to the site had been wasted?

In a scathing comment on the SSHA's decision to pull out, David Steel said: "There is an element of dubious morality in buying land by compulsory purchase with public money and then selling it off privately. Your [Mr Rifkind's] action may not be, in Harold Macmillan's phrase disposing of the family silver, but it strikes me, as it will I believe the public, as akin to selling part of the family's garden for the sake of a quick profit". Constance Hamilton would no doubt have agreed.

The Scottish Office performed a bit of a reverse ferret in 1989, announcing that Scottish Homes wanted to see 400 more houses built at Tweedbank by housing associations, housing trusts and private developers.But the largesse from Treasury coffers largely dried up.

It would take until 2010 before an announcement could be made claiming that Tweedbank was 'complete' albeit with only 860 households, well short of the original target.

Presumably the bulky Tweedbank file in the archives at Scottish Borders Council catalogues the many ups and downs experienced by the original Masterplan. The multi-million pound public investment had only a limited impact on Borders prosperity and left communities on the periphery out in the cold. So why concentrate resources in the same way at the same location again?

It remains to be seen whether much the same strategy achieves greater positive outcomes the second time around. But at least those promoting Tweedbank Mark Two won't have Constance Hamilton to deal with.