For many years Robroyston was mostly farming land, and best known as the location where William Wallace was betrayed and handed over to English soldiers in 1305.
It later was home to Robroyston hospital but after it shut in the 1970s, housing developments started to appear on the land – slowly at first, with Glendale in the 1980s, and then rapidly from the late 1990s onward.
In 2009 the city council identified Robroyston and nearby Millerston as a community growth area, complete with a masterplan to bump up housing and infrastructure accompanying this.
About 1,600 homes were listed, although the city council now estimate the final number will end up at about 2,000, due to extra homes outside the masterplan also being built on land there.
Several residents contacted Scotland’s Your Voice to express frustration over the housing expansion not being accompanied by anything else.
Betrayal on the scale of what happened to Wallace would be an exaggeration, but there is evident disappointment among people living there over what they see as broken promises from housing developers who have built there.
“This area is bursting at the seams, but none of the benefits from so many people moving in has resulted in anything going back into the actual community,” says Eamonn McCloskey, who has lived there for several years.
“They sold houses on the basis of schools, shops and amenities coming in. Essentially we have the opposite problem to nimbyism in that we are desperate for anything in our backyard.”
