What Scotland looked like in the 1960s

Scotland in the 1960s was a country pulling in two directions at once. Old industries were crumbling, whole communities were being torn down and rebuilt, and a new political spirit was rising from the uncertainty. It was a decade of shipyard closures, high unemployment, and a deep sense that the country’s best days were slipping away — yet it was also a time of striking ambition, creative energy, and dramatic transformation. These photographs capture both sides of that story.

Edinburgh in 1960 was a city of contrasts. Its grand Georgian streets and ancient castle sat alongside a growing modern economy, and events like the Edinburgh Festival drew visitors from across the world. Princes Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, buzzed with traffic and people throughout the year.

Away from the cities, Scotland’s landscapes were as dramatic as ever. The Isle of Skye, with its jagged Cuillin mountains rising over small settlements like Sligachan, attracted tourists and provided a striking backdrop to quiet rural life. The village of Uig, perched at the head of a sheltered bay on Skye’s Trotternish peninsula, served as the ferry departure point for the Outer Hebrides.

Scotland’s traditions remained very much alive on the streets throughout the decade. Bagpipers performed at gatherings and festivals, their music a constant thread connecting modern Scotland to its past. Highland Games events like the caber toss at the Braemar Gathering drew crowds and even royalty — Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Princess Anne, and Princess Alexandra of Kent all attended the 1961 gathering.

No area better captured the turbulence of 1960s Scotland than the Gorbals in Glasgow. The tenements there had been among the worst slums in Britain. Overcrowded, crumbling, and without adequate sanitation, they had been the subject of demolition campaigns for years before bulldozers finally moved in during the late 1950s. By 1960, the clearances were well underway. Residents collected firewood from the rubble of half-demolished buildings. Coalmen still did their rounds by horse-drawn cart on streets where modern tower blocks were already rising nearby.

The redevelopment of the Gorbals was one of the most ambitious urban renewal projects in British history. Old tenements came down while prefabricated concrete tower blocks went up in their place. Residents who had spent their entire lives in the close-knit tenement streets found themselves relocated to high-rise flats. Eleven-year-old Willie Thomason, who had moved to a new house, still returned to his old streets to watch the demolition crews at work.

Glasgow’s troubles went beyond housing. On 28 March 1960, a fire broke out at a whisky bond on Cheapside Street in the city centre. An explosion blew out the walls of the warehouse, burying three fire appliances under tons of rubble and burning whisky barrels. Nineteen men died — fourteen firefighters and five members of the Glasgow Salvage Corps. The Cheapside Street fire remains Britain’s worst peacetime fire services disaster.

Greenock, on the Clyde, showed what was happening to Scotland’s industrial heartland in sharper focus than almost anywhere else. The shipbuilding town was a place of hard physical work and tight community bonds. Workers poured out of the shipyard gates at the end of each shift — men who built ships that sailed all over the world, working in conditions that had changed little in generations.

The political mood in Scotland shifted dramatically during the decade. The Scottish National Party was, at the start of the 1960s, a tiny organisation. Its own leaders joked that the entire senior membership could be wiped out if they were all on a small plane when it crashed. That changed fast. After the Covenant Association — which had campaigned for a Scottish parliament — collapsed at the end of the 1950s, the SNP moved to fill the gap. In the 1962 West Lothian by-election, SNP activist William Wolfe, who later became party chairman, came second. It was treated as a major breakthrough. SNP members in West Lothian threw themselves into building a local base, and it showed.

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the broader new left added fuel to Scotland’s political transformation. When the UK government chose Scotland as the base for its Polaris nuclear submarines, a wave of younger, idealistic activists joined the debate north of the border. When the Labour Party under Hugh Gaitskell abandoned its commitment to unilateral nuclear disarmament, many of those activists turned to the SNP instead, giving the party an injection of energy it badly needed.

One of the decade’s most watched engineering projects was the construction of the Forth Road Bridge. Workers anchored suspension cables from massive concrete tunnels driven deep into the earth on either side of the Firth of Forth. The two halves of the bridge crept toward each other across the water throughout 1963, meeting early in 1964. The bridge opened that same year, replacing a ferry service that had become completely inadequate for the volume of traffic demanding to cross.

Scotland’s art schools and music scene produced remarkable talent throughout the 1960s. The McKinleys, a pop duo made up of sisters Sheila and Jeanette McKinley, were among the Scottish acts making noise in the decade. Elsewhere, the Glasgow art school scene was generating painters and designers who would go on to shape British culture for decades.

Fair Isle, one of the most remote inhabited islands in Britain, sat far out in the North Sea between Orkney and Shetland. In 1964, it was home to a small community of crofters and fishermen, and curious incomers like the Bancrofts — a couple who had left London and Whitstable behind to try a new life there. The island’s isolation was total; its landscape, spare and windswept.

Inverness, the capital of the Highlands, presented a quieter picture. The River Ness ran through the town under solid stone bridges, and life moved at a pace very different from Glasgow or Edinburgh. The city was a gateway to the northern Highlands and the far northwest coast, where places like Lochinver in the Assynt district of Sutherland remained fishing villages largely untouched by the changes sweeping urban Scotland.

The Cairngorms in the eastern Highlands drew skiers and winter sports enthusiasts. By the early 1960s, skiing in Scotland was an established and growing pursuit, with families and clubs heading to the mountain range each January. The landscape there — vast, open plateaus ringed by high peaks — was unlike anything else in Britain.

Scotland’s railway network was still a vital artery of movement in the early 1960s. Gresley A4 locomotives — the same class as the record-breaking Mallard — were transferred to Scotland from 1963 onward, working express services between Glasgow and Aberdeen. At Gleneagles, the station platform served the grand hotel of the same name, attracting wealthy visitors from across the world. The Flying Scotsman made its centenary run from London to Edinburgh in 1962, a reminder of how central the railways were to Scottish life.

The islands off Scotland’s western coast maintained rhythms of life shaped by fishing, farming, and the sea. On Barra in the Outer Hebrides, boats tied up at Eoligarry Jetty on the North Bay, women walked the island roads, and children pressed their faces against shop windows at Castlebay. These were small, self-contained communities where the concerns of Glasgow politics felt very far away.

Coal mining remained a major employer in parts of Scotland. Bilston Glen Colliery in Midlothian was sunk between 1952 and 1961, becoming one of the most productive pits in the country. Thousands of men worked underground there throughout the decade, their livelihoods tied directly to the demand for coal. The pit would become headline news again decades later during the 1984–85 miners’ strike, before closing in 1988.