About Motherwell

Feb 19 2008 By Judith Tonner

Motherwell is one of Scotland’s biggest towns and is home to Scotland’s biggest theme park, a Premier League football team and an exciting redevelopment project on the largest brownfield site in Europe.

The town remains synonymous with steelmaking as the Ravenscraig plant, one of the world’s biggest, made it the steel production capital of Scotland until the plant was closed in 1992 with the famous cooling towers being spectacularly demolished four years later.

Now a multi-million-pound regeneration project is underway on the site — construction began in 2007 on a new Motherwell College campus and the first residential developments, and the vast site will eventually house a new shopping centre and state-of-the-art sports facility.

Motherwell currently has a population of more than 30,000, making it one of the bigger towns in Scotland, and its attractions include a local heritage centre and much-loved Strathclyde Park, which contains a theme park, Roman excavations and Olympic-standard watersports facilities at its impressive man-made loch.

The park will host the triathlon when the 2014 Commonwealth Games are hosted in Glasgow, adding further to its sporting pedigree — Motherwell FC have won all of Scotland’s domestic honours and flown the claret and amber flag in European competition. Their last trophy was the 1991 Scottish Cup, earned after a thrilling extra-time victory at Hampden, and the current team currently flying high in the SPL under Mark McGhee.

The town is part of the Motherwell and Wishaw constituency, represented in the Scottish Parliament by former First Minister Jack McConnell at Westminster by Frank Roy MP, while famous residents include legendary footballer Ian St John, former Scotland captain Gary McAllister, actress and comedienne Elaine C Smith, poet Liz Lochhead and Olympic and Commonwealth medal-winning runner Yvonne Murray.