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December 8, 2018 by Alexander Meldrum
Scotlands Citys & Towns
Motherwell
Motherwell (Scots: Mitherwall, Scottish Gaelic: Tobar na Màthar is a large town and former burgh in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, south east of Glasgow.
It ha...Scotlands Citys & Towns
Motherwell
Motherwell (Scots: Mitherwall, Scottish Gaelic: Tobar na Màthar is a large town and former burgh in North Lanarkshire, Scotland, south east of Glasgow.
It has a population of around 32,120. Historically in the parish of Dalziel and part of Lanarkshire, Motherwell is the headquarters for North Lanarkshire Council.
Geographically the River Clyde separates Motherwell from Hamilton to the west whereas the South Calder Water separates Motherwell from Carfin to the north-east and New Stevenston and Bellshill towards the north.
Motherwell is also geographically close to Wishaw to the south-east.
History
A Roman road through central Scotland ran along Motherwell’s side of the River Clyde, crossing the South Calder Water near Bothwellhaugh.
At this crossing a fort and bath house were erected, but the Roman presence in Scotland did not last much later than this.
Motherwell's name reportedly comes from a well, the Lady Well, formerly dedicated to the Virgin Mary.
The site of this well is now marked by a plaque on Ladywell Road. The name "Moderwelt" appears on a map of Lanarkshire made by Timothy Pont some time between 1583 and 1611 and printed in the Netherlands in around 1652.
Blaeu's map based on Pont's original "Glasgow and the county of Lanark" map c.1596 depicting Moderwelt east of Hamelton, south of Clydsid and north of Dalzel Castle.
By the start of the 19th century Motherwell was a small hamlet, a farming community of some 600 people living adjacently to the 16th century laird’s manor, Jerviston house.
The hamlet remained reasonably small, reaching 1,700 people by 1841, and centred on the crossroads between the main road following the Clyde, and the road connecting Edinburgh with Hamilton and the west. Motherwell's fortunes changed dramatically in the second half of the 19th century. With the coming of the railway in 1848, came industry and money.
By 1881 David Colville had opened both an iron and steel works; Motherwell had a new piped water supply; had been granted burgh status and had its population swelled to 13,800 people. By the end of the 19th century Motherwell Town Hall and Dalziel High School had been built, the local football club had been founded, and its stadium, Fir Park, had been constructed. At the start of the 20th century Motherwell stood a large and growing industrial centre, a town of 37,000 people and a wide variety of heavy industries such as munitions, trams and bridge components. By the 1930s most of Scotland’s steel production was in Motherwell, and owned by the Colville family. In 1959 the Colville family were persuaded by the government to begin work of a vast new steel works, which would become Ravenscraig. Within a few years, Ravenscraig was producing more than a million tonnes of steel per year. Following nationalisation of the steel industry, production at the plant was raised, with the Motherwell blast furnaces producing 3 million tonnes each year. By the middle of the 1970s, Motherwell’s steel industry employed more than 13,000 people. The 1980s brought a catastrophic collapse in the industry of Motherwell. The steel strike of 1980 lost British Steel Corporation important contracts and markets,
followed by the closure of important local customers such as the Linwood car factory and Bathgate truck factory, Ravenscraig employed only 3,200 people by the end of the 1980s. Ravenscraig closed on 24 June 1992, and was demolished in July 1996, bringing 400 years of Scottish iron production to an end. Today the Dalzell Plate Mill is all that remains of Motherwell’s industrial heritage, rolling steel from Middlesbrough into steel plates of various sizes.
By the start of the 21st century Motherwell had begun to transform itself with the service industry thriving, the large scale unemployment of the previous twenty years had been largely remedied.
Go to Wikipedia for full History
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