Barracks View, Whitburn

Image: © Ian Dodds Taken: 18 Aug 2023

This road is fairly new, but exactly how new it is hard to say as, it being entirely social housing, there have never been any sales logged. The properties have recently changed housing association hands: from West Lothian Housing Partnership to Wheatley Homes East Limited. There is an official (i.e.statutory) Social Housing Register website in Scotland that gives all sorts of interesting information about 'social landlords', which housing associations are legally called - how much rent they collect, how quickly they do repairs, how long it takes them to re-let a property, and so on. However, it becomes increasingly meaningless the more properties the housing association owns, as there is no way to zoom into specific geographical areas on the site. WLHP, for instance, could re-let a property in under a week on average and had rental charges around 10% higher than the national average across their 700 or so properties. Wheatley, however, take around a fortnight to re-let and have rentals that are almost 40% higher than the national average across their 5000+ properties. Nothing has really changed here though, as the rent for a two double-bedroom flat has only gone up from £100 to £105 between 2021 and this year, after the change of owners. The interesting street name was probably chosen because in the Second World War there were barracks built in the grounds of what is now Polkemmet Country Park, about a mile away to the NorthWest. There is almost no information about this online, and nothing present on any maps, from WW2 and before. The country park website simply states that some soldiers were stationed there during the war and a website called TracesOfWar shows an image from this site - Image] - that shows low brick remains of a former barracks, said to have been occupied by Polish soldiers.

Images are licensed for reuse under creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0