Community stalwarts have two new streets named in their honour

FIFE councillors have broken convention to honour the lives of two well-known people by naming new streets after them.

Members of the North East Fife area committee agreed to overlook the normal protocol for street naming and numbering by approving the names John Dott Avenue and Iain Peter Place for two new streets being created on land west of Kilmany Road in Wormit.

Normally, the local authority’s policy does not allow streets to be named after living people or people who have been dead for fewer than five years.

However, councillors decided to make an exception for Mr Dott and Mr Peter, both of whom served their local community well before their deaths in the last couple of years.

Mr Dott was a longstanding member and chairman of Newport, Wormit and Forgan Community Council, and served as a north-east Fife district councillor between 1989 and 1993.

He was the local pharmacist and also the group Scout leader for many years, and warm tributes were paid to him when he died in 2019.

His daughter Anne said her father – a longstanding Conservative – “cared deeply” for north Fife and was vehemently against any plans to see the area “swallowed up” by Dundee, or forgotten about by Fife Council based in Glenrothes.

A spokesman for Newport, Wormit and Forgan Community Council said they backed moves to name a street after him, describing him as a “lovely man”, “well-liked and respected throughout the community”.

Mr Peter, meanwhile, was a highly-respected businessman who was born and brought up across the road from the development on Kilmany Road.

He started his first joinery business in Wormit and it grew and thrived for 30 years eventually becoming one of the area’s major employers.

Mr Peter died at the age of 53 in 2018 after battling liver cancer.

John Dott, left, and Iain Peter served their community.