HOOD HAUNTS - AND LOOKS TO THE FUTURE
Industry is a different story, though. For generations Paisley was the thread capital of the world, thanks to the pioneering work of J&J Clark and J&P Coats. The two merged into J&P Coats, and at the industry’s peak it employed more than 11,000 people, a figure that had been drastically reduced long before the last Coats mill shut down in 1993.
That the town’s industrial decline still exists cannot be gainsaid. Perhaps this is what local MP Mhairi Black meant when she said earlier this year that the 2021 bid was “partly a cry for help”. It could, she added, also be transforming, and she was hugely enthusiastic.
On Jean’s walk around her old stamping ground she points, with evident pride, to things that have been added since her day – the community hub, the Tannahill Centre, opened in 1995, and the new St Fergus Primary School, which replaced the one she attended.
“Three or four months ago,” she adds, “St Ninian’s Church hosted an event for Syrian families in Paisley.
“It was standing room only, and it was a sunny day.
“That sense of a community looking after its own is still here.”
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