Drumchapel back in time: The history of The Drum in 8 old pictures

Drumchapel has been a part of Glasgow for over 70 years now, but not too many Glaswegians know the district boasts a history that goes far beyond that.

The Drum is one of the main overspill towns built post-war by the Glasgow Corporation, a progenitor to Glasgow City Council, in which new districts of Glasgow were created to provide social housing to the burgeoning population of Glasgow after the war and to get the working class out of delipidated tenement structures in areas like the Gorbals.

Along with Easterhouse, Castlemilk, and Greater Pollok, Drumchapel was one of the Big Four social housing schemes built on the boundaries of Glasgow - coinciding with later new towns like East Kilbride and Cumbernauld.

Glasgow took over the land from the historic county of Dunbartonshire in 1938, but it wasn’t until after the Second World War in the 1950s when overspill areas were needed to house 10s of thousands of Glaswegians. Originally Drumchapel was meant to house 34,000 people.

It was built just north of the modern Drumchapel Railway Station, south of which can be found what is now known as Old Drumchapel, which in the modern day is made up of large private suburban villas.

Before the construction of Drumchapel as we know it today, Old Drumchapel was part of the New Kilpatrick parish, before the construction of The Old Church in 1901 - which became its own church parish in 1923.

A number of famous Glaswegian celebrities hail from Drumchapel, including many famous national and international footballers. Between the ages of fourteen and twenty, Billy Connolly was brought up on a now-demolished council estate on Kinfauns Drive in the Drumchapel district of Glasgow - while James McAvoy was born and raised in Drumchapel, attending St Thomas Aquinas Secondary School.