February 2026 | Holyrood Magazine

When Diageo announced in 2009 that it was to close the Johnnie Walker bottling plant in the Ayrshire town of Kilmarnock, it was just another blow to a local economy that had been repeatedly hit by deindustrialisation on, if you’ll pardon the pun, an industrial scale.

Once known as the light-industry capital of Scotland, from the late 1960s onwards it suffered a series of devastating blows. First, there was the closure of the surrounding coal mines, followed by the loss of a whole host of manufacturing jobs in its world-renowned carpet industry, in its engineering sector and its shoe manufacturers.

Having once been famous as the town that wove the red carpet for the late Queen Elizabeth’s wedding day in 1947, it was fast becoming infamous as an economic blackspot.

When the Massey Ferguson tractor factory which once produced in excess of 4,000 vehicles a year closed in 1980 with the loss of 1,800 jobs after production moved to France, the then local MP Willie McKelvey said in a speech in the House of Commons that the “cost in misery and humiliation” was “incalculable”.

This was closely followed by the closure of two shoemaking factories where about 1,200 workers were employed, supplying 200 branches of Saxone across the UK advertising its products as being “made of honest British leather by British workers at Kilmarnock” and went on to claim that these Kilmarnock- made shoes would last three times longer than any other brand. Notwithstanding that boast of longevity, the factory shut in the mid-1980s and was later demolished.

Read full article – Holyrood Magazine