Shaun Bythell owner of The Book Shop in Wigtown, Scotland. Wigtown has had official 'book town' status since 1998. (Photo by Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)
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Twenty-one years ago, Wigtown, a small settlement on the southwest coast of Scotland, decided to try a new way to regenerate the ailing community. Tucked away on the edge of the Machars peninsula, the town of just over one thousand people became the second place to become what is known as a national “Book Town” – a place dedicated to, and sustained by, people’s love of the written word.
“It’s had an enormous impact,” says Joyce Cochrane, who runs one of more than a dozen bookshops in the town with her husband, Ian. “I grew up six miles down the road, and I can remember Wigtown as it was when I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies. A lovely wee town but when the Seventies and Eighties came, so did the decline.
“Before you would only come into Wigtown for an ice cream. Small family businesses were closing, and nobody was there to take over because my generation – I was born in the early Sixties – either moved away or had bigger ambitions. You couldn’t sell a property. Before we became a book town, you couldn’t even give it away; nobody wanted to live here. Houses were boarded up. It was like a ghost town, really.”
The reason for the town’s slow death would be familiar to many: the Beeching Report of the mid-Sixties which prompted the closure of over half of Britain’s railway stations and more than 30% of its tracks. Before its closure on 14 June 1965, southwest Scotland’s main rail route, the 73-mile arterial line between Dumfries and Stranraer, had serviced some of the country’s most remote communities and employers. The Wigtownshire railway – a branch line that connected at Newton Stewart in the north and ran to Whithorn in the south – served the east coast of the Machars peninsula and was, with the area’s poor quality roads, Wigtown’s primary connection to the outside world.
In the decades after the closure, two important local employers – Bladnoch distillery (which has re-opened and closed several times, and is recently up and running again) and the Co-operative Creamery – succumbed to the same fate. By the 1990s the town had one of the highest unemployment rates in Scotland, was a shadow of its former self and was blighted by derelict homes and shopfronts.
Joyce remembers vividly when things began to change. “I was a librarian around Edinburgh when my Dad had been watching the developments in the town and called to say that a bookshop had opened and, I’m embarrassed, but I burst out laughing.”
The idea for turning small, isolated communities into “book towns” began in 1961 when Richard Booth opened Hay-on-Wye’s first second-hand bookshop in an old firehouse. His was the first of many to set up in the small Welsh town, and by the 1970s it had earned the moniker “The Book Town”. The Hay Festival followed in 1988 and in the following 30 years has gone on to become one of the world’s premier festivals of reading. A truly remarkable achievement.
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SubscribeThe South West of Scotland and Wigtown is such a beautiful part of the world and it is heartening to hear of the community regeneration that people have created and it is a welcoming and interesting place to visit. The local accounts in the article point to an organic growth which will hopefully be sustainable while the warm welcome and the nice atmosphere not to mention the outstanding beauty of the area ought to have lasting appeal. To my eye Galloway is a well keep secret : once visited people will keep coming back and I am sure impressions are good – transport whilst not always straightforward and no doubt in need of improvement will always be worth it when you get there and particularly as people will be holidaying at home more : places like Wigtown just exude appeal and character and culture . roll on 2020 & beyond.
best wishes Donaghadee Co Down.