Coatbridge

Trams, mines and a family day out

The tram at Summerlee runs the length of the site and back, the first working tramway in Scotland for more than a quarter of a century after Glasgow's closed in 1962. It carries you across twenty-two acres of the old Summerlee Iron Works, past a reconstructed underground mine you can go down into, a row of workers' cottages furnished decade by decade from the 1880s to the 1980s, and a hand-riveted replica of the Vulcan, the iron-hulled barge first launched on the Monkland Canal in 1819. Entry is free. Around 180,000 people come each year. There is a vintage sweet shop in the Miners' Row, a café and a play area.

That is the anchor of a family day here, and it pairs with the Time Capsule a short way off — swimming and adventure pools, an ice rink, sauna and steam rooms. For open air, Drumpellier Country Park covers five hundred acres of heath, woodland and two natural lochs, one of them a Site of Special Scientific Interest with swans, mallard and migratory waterbirds. A lochside mile circles Lochend Loch, flat and firm enough for bikes; a parkrun has met here since 2019, and there is a municipal golf course alongside. The Showcase Leisure Park adds a fourteen-screen cinema, ten-pin bowling and restaurants.

The Coatbridge confection

For something to take home, Lees of Scotland has made confectionery in the town since 1931. The Macaroon bar — a slab of coconut-coated fondant — was reputedly the result of an accident, a chocolate fondant that failed and got covered in coconut instead. That and the Snowball are still the flagships. Lees sells eighty per cent of its output in Scotland, on the reasoning that the rest of the United Kingdom is less familiar with tablet or macaroon.

Six stations and motorway links

Getting here is easy. Coatbridge has been called the Crewe of the North, with six railway stations across four lines, and it sits against the M8 and M73. Glasgow is eight and a half miles west, twenty minutes or so by road or a direct train; McGill's runs most of the local buses.

How the Iron Burgh rose and fell

The greenery is comparatively recent. This was the Iron Burgh, remade by the 1828 hot-blast furnace that cut fuel use by two-thirds and drew the population up by roughly six hundred per cent in forty years. The Baird family turned six farmer's sons into millionaires; their Gartsherrie works was the largest in Scotland by 1869, employing 3,200 men, its slag heap said to be as big as the Great Pyramid. The last blast furnace closed in 1967. So much labour came from Ireland, much of it from County Donegal, that the town was known as little Ireland; its St Patrick's Day Festival is the largest Irish celebration in Scotland. In 1886 the world's first automatic telephone exchange was switched on here.

From immense garden to lochside green

The 1799 parish account, written before any of it, described the place as having "the appearance of an immense garden." The orchards are gone, but the lochs and the parkland have come back around them.