ABSTRACT
In 1936 a visit to Motherwell decided Edwin Muir to write his Scottish Journey. The sprawling, silent steel-manufacturing town seemed to him to exemplify, in its total subordination of community to material development, the fatal impact of industrialisation on Scotland. With the slump it had ceased both to work and to exist as a community. It, and the hundreds of industrial settlements like it in the Scottish central belt, were simply accumulations of buildings and people, whose only reason for existence was their contribution to the organisation of capitalism. Capitalism, wielded by Scots against Scots, not the depredations of the English, was the spectre that had to be exorcised before any valid community could be re-established.
