The lost village of Ardeer. Rows of miners' cottages laid out in a rectangle around a huge reservoir; Ardeer Square, as it was called. It was a village in its own right, created in the mid-19th century to provide a workforce for an iron works and coal mines, and totally isolated from nearby Saltcoats and Stevenston. Today, there is absolutely nothing left of it.
Like many miners' rows, Ardeer Square was thrown up with little thought to longevity. The houses didn't even have a slate roof, and had no roof gutter to catch rain water; the result was a mud-bath in and around the houses.
By the 1920s the houses were more than a little tatty around the edges. They had not lasted - and were not expected to last - and were now slums where men and women did their best in impossible conditions, and in housing that did not even have running water.
When the coal mines closed in the 1920s, so too did the iron works they supplied, and the owners of the iron mine, the coal pits and the village went into liquidation. Ardeer iron works was demolished in the 1930s. The village was demolished in the next decade,
Did Nobel's explosives factory, later to become ICI - the first dynamite factory in the UK and the largest explosives factory in the world which occupied most of the Ardeer Peninsula - have an impact on the demise of Ardeer village and all the surrounding industries? I think the answer is probably yes. It couldn't have been fun living beside such a large explosives works that witnessed any number of accidental explosions that resulted in deaths and injuries among the workforce.
But the real reason Ardeer village was demolished was probably down to the economic slump that hit the UK between the two World Wars. There was great activity and industrial manufacturing during the Great War, and when it ended there followed an industrial slump that eventually saw many coal mines and other businesses go bust.
Ardeer village was a casualty of this economic slump, but also a casualty of the men who owned many coal mines in Scotland and who didn't really care enough for the welfare of their workers to provide them with proper housing.
This video is dedicated to the men, women and children who lived in Ardeer Square, and whose back-breaking life and work ultimately allowed us all to exist.