Danbray was an ugly little town about fifteen miles from Glasgow, it had long past its sell-by date. At one time it was a shipbuilding town, like many others dotted around the Clyde basin, but it had been a good fifteen years since the last shipping yard closed. Now this was a hollow town slowly lapsing into economic failure. Unemployment was high and the half dozen housing schemes, which formed a ring around Danbray, were growing exponentially in size and population.

What work there was tended to be in the CG Whisky Distillery, exuding an ongoing stench of decaying hops into the contaminated atmosphere each and every day, making Danbray smell just like it looked – rotten! The only other mass employers were some five miles East, outside Levenvale, another hideous ghetto, where 3 small factories dominated the Industrial Zone – Kolorfoto, which processed people’s holiday snaps, Polaclick, the Instant film company and Westklox, producing cheap timepieces for down market retail outlets. The entire number of employees in these combined companies was maybe three to five thousand, depending on the season, to serve a surrounding employee catchment area of some sixty thousand adults. It was little surprise that crime and violence were a way of life for a substantial amount of the population.

Like any of the fading towns it had its share of respectable, middle class neighbourhoods, little safety zones that were far enough removed from the unpleasant areas so as to provide the illusion that this was a nice place to live. It wasn’t. It didn’t take too long for new arrivals to realise that they were now in a place where nothing and no one was truly safe. The ghetto housing schemes leaked their pupae offspring into the community like a virus, always spreading and contaminating everything it touched. That’s not to say there weren’t many, kind, respectable and civilised people who lived in these ghettos, but it would be fair to suggest that they were in the minority.

There was little, if anything, that made Danbray beautiful. It was yet another ‘blink and it’s gone past’ town that sprang from some miserable settlement that accidentally formed sometime back in the long forgotten history of Scotland. A geographical location that capitalised on its resources and assets to manufacture enough work to sustain a population that eventually grew to the point where there were more bodies than available employment… but by then it was too late – this town had set its roots down and was here to stay.
Town planners and speculative industries had sustained and supported Danbray through the times when Britain had ‘never had it so good’… except that by the time the phrase was coined, the rot was already endemic throughout the downward spiralling economy – it just took a while for everyone to realise it.

Danbray was just yet another decaying West of Scotland town sliding into the same economic recession as the rest of seventies Britain… this one was just accelerating a little faster than most!