Southpark Village
Encyclopedia
Southpark Village is an estate
Housing estate
A housing estate is a group of buildings built together as a single development. The exact form may vary from country to country. Accordingly, a housing estate is usually built by a single contractor, with only a few styles of house or building design, so they tend to be uniform in appearance...

 of private
Privacy
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...

 houses built during the mid 1990s, It is an example of how larger cities in the UK
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 are starting to push into the city's boundaries. Most homes in the area are occupied by private owners who are within working class or lower/medium-middle class income brackets. Like much of Glasgow since the mid-20th Century, the area is ethnically diverse. The area falls under the council tax bracket of Glasgow City Council.

The area has many communal landscaped areas that are maintained through financial contributions by the residents of the estate.

History

The entire area was once owned by Lord Darnley
Lord Darnley
Lord Darnley is a title associated with a Scottish Lordship of Parliament first created in 1356 and tracing a descent to the Dukedom of Richmond in England. Outside the Peerage of Scotland, another Earldom of Darnley was created in the Peerage of Ireland in 1729.The first baron was Sir John...

, who ran linen
Linen
Linen is a textile made from the fibers of the flax plant, Linum usitatissimum. Linen is labor-intensive to manufacture, but when it is made into garments, it is valued for its exceptional coolness and freshness in hot weather....

 works in the area. The remains of a large house can be found a few miles south of the village, and this appears to have belonged to Lord Darnley himself.

In later years the surrounding area was successfully and extensively mined for coal
Coal
Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...

; During the late stages of the life of the mine, a catastrophic explosion occurred killing many local miners. A monument to those lost in the disaster currently sits on Nitshill Road, just North West of Southpark Village.

The consequences of this disaster and the subsequent abandonment of the mine have been felt as recently as the late 90s when a mine
Mining
Mining is the extraction of valuable minerals or other geological materials from the earth, from an ore body, vein or seam. The term also includes the removal of soil. Materials recovered by mining include base metals, precious metals, iron, uranium, coal, diamonds, limestone, oil shale, rock...

 shaft collapsed in an area near the estate, leading to a massive land fill operation which successfully prevented the land around the shaft from collapsing any further.

Surrounding areas

In recent years modern housing similar to those found in Southpark was built in the neighbouring area of Darnley
Darnley
Darnley is an area in south-west Glasgow, Scotland located on the A727 just west of Arden. During the second half of the 20th Century Darnley has experienced total transformation from being a modest semi-rural community to becoming a significant part of Glasgow's response to a post-war housing...

, and to a great extent has improved upon the living standards and associated social problems of the older housing schemes previously located there (almost all of which have been demolished).
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