Development
Two large tracts of the northern side of the High Street were demolished in the 1960s and replaced by flats and public buildings in a modernist style. Although these buildings were no doubt welcomed at the time as being a vast improvement on what must have been cramped and dilapidated traditional accommodation, they were poorly conceived and constructed and have required extensive maintenance and renovation over the years. Many locals lament the brutal effect these buildings have had on the character and appearance of the town's main thoroughfare, and indeed such a dramatic remodelling of buildings forming such a central part of the town would be unthinkable nowadays.
Today the town is especially popular with middle classes and commuters, not only because of its excellent transport links with Edinburgh, Glasgow and Stirling, but also because of the perceived quality of its schooling. Its size grew considerably during the 1990s with the completion of several housing developments on the east side of the town. Though there is little scope for the town to grow further (as it is now bounded by green belt to the south and east, the M9 to the north, the river Avon and county boundary to the West and with the east side of the town having limited access to the M9) a planning application by Wallace Land for its proposals for a residential and retail development at Burghmuir was submitted in early February 2012 . The town also now suffers from parking problems with the local schools running to full capacity due to the massive increase in population over the last ten years.
Linlithgow is also home to a major computing centre owned by Oracle. Former industries include the St. Magdalene's distillery, the Nobel explosives works, paper mills and many tanneries.
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Famous quotes containing the word development:
“The young women, what can they not learn, what can they not achieve, with Columbia University annex thrown open to them? In this great outlook for women’s broader intellectual development I see the great sunburst of the future.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“This was the Eastham famous of late years for its camp- meetings, held in a grove near by, to which thousands flock from all parts of the Bay. We conjectured that the reason for the perhaps unusual, if not unhealthful development of the religious sentiment here, was the fact that a large portion of the population are women whose husbands and sons are either abroad on the sea, or else drowned, and there is nobody but they and the ministers left behind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)