Conspiracies, closed doors and conflict: where’s Castlemilk’s supermarket?

Maureen Cope is a short woman with a big laugh, bright eyes and unfinished business. She supposedly retired last year, after 35 years at Ardenglen, one of the big four housing associations in the post-war peripheral housing estate of Castlemilk. But the 78 year-old has a final bone to pick in the area where she’s spent most of her life and career as a community activist and organiser. Closed mouths, you see, don’t get fed. And Castlemilk, home to over 14,000 people, needs feeding. 

Since 2016, it’s been a food desert. There’s no supermarket. Off licences with groaning vape display cabinets, sure. A B&M with brightly packaged processed offerings? You betcha. Your basic supermarket, with fresh fruit, vegetables and so on? Nowhere to be seen — the closest requires a six mile round trip to Toryglen, with a punishing climb on the return leg for pedestrians. But nobody’s walking that with bags of shopping.

I’m meeting Cope at the Birgidale Complex, a multi-purpose community centre halfway up a sloping road, with views across the city. Pay-as-you-go washing machines rotate away outside. Folks of all ages pour in and out of the building. Some are here for a roll and cup of tea on their work break, others for fitness or martial art classes. Cope, chirpy in her sparkly roll-neck jumper, is here to organise. “The volunteering up here is absolutely first class,” she tells me proudly. “The Birgidale is mainly run by volunteers. We want a better living for everybody.” 

Cope rolls deep; no sooner have we sat down in a quiet room to chat than three of her crew — William Coleman, Iris Robertson and Marilyn Davis — wander in and pull up seats on all sides. These are the OG campaigners that have been fighting for nearly a decade to get Castlemilk a supermarket. Their quest has taken them into boardrooms with a Scottish tycoon, while he tries to broker deals with Europe’s largest retailer. Meanwhile, a parallel local community organisation is taking their case all the way to the United Nations. Tension has ensued between the two groups.  

Still, the question remains: when will Castlemilk be fed? 

A flit and a miss 

Maureen Cope was a postwar baby, but only just. She was born in 1946, six years before the Glasgow Corporation began building Castlemilk to accommodate 34,000 people from inner-city slums, then some of the worst in Europe; what would become known as the ‘big flit’. Many new residents, coming from areas like the Gorbals, were delighted with what they found: indoor bathrooms, kitchens and gardens; the estate surrounded by the hills of the nearby Cathkin Braes. 

Glasgow Corporation’s grand plan was for the ‘big four’ peripheral estates — Castlemilk, Pollok, Drumchapel and Easterhouse — to become self-sustaining villages on the outskirts of the city proper. In the Corporation's 1941 plans, Castlemilk was set to be the largest of these municipal housing schemes, its 8,300 houses covering two and a half square miles. Upon construction, a harsher reality soon set in. Without basic amenities like shops, a community centre or a reliable bus service, Castlemilk — along with the other three estates — was left by the Corporation to wither on the vine.

When then-Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher visited Glasgow in April 1975, she spent a grand total of two hours in Castlemilk, 15 minutes of which were at the Braes shopping centre. The PM was followed out by a group of SNP supporters, who waved banners and shouted “Thatcher go home”. And while the iron lady might have been happy to see the area slide into further decline, the people of Castlemilk had other ideas. Thanks to their campaigning efforts, the shopping arcade, community centre and swimming pool had all been belatedly built by the end of the 70s. Next, they set their sights on housing.

“We put wir heart and soul into this, to make it a better life,” Cope says with her chest. “Castlemilk was derelict, it was disgusting, there was damp oan the walls. It was totally unacceptable what we lived in, and we fought hard to get what’s here nowadays.” Cope played an integral part in the housing association movement, and was awarded an MBE for her efforts in 1999. This year, Ardenglen celebrates its 35th birthday. Cope was chair for two decades, and on the board until August 2024. In her retirement statement, she clearly signalled her next battle, saying: “There is a dire need for a supermarket in the area. It must be the largest community in the country without easy access to a supermarket.”

While the Braes shopping centre had been atrophying for years, it was when Castlemilk’s small Co-op supermarket closed with a whimper in 2016 that the area’s food desert became an official state of affairs, once again. Next to the shuttered-up shops in the Braes I meet Lee, a 37 year-old with six kids. She moved to Castlemilk a decade ago, just before the Co-op finally departed. 

“There’s bugger all up here, there’s absolutely nothing. It is sad, and it’s very depressing, especially for people who've lived up here their whole lives, and they’re watching the place just deteriorate,” says Lee, a wheelchair user. Three of her children have severe anaphylactic allergies, and she struggles to buy fresh food to cook for them at a price she can afford. Acquiring baby food and nappies necessitates a trip to the Toryglen Asda. Sometimes she can’t get on the bus with both a pram and her wheelchair, so has to take a taxi, costing £10–£12 each way. It’s either that or order online and pay a service and delivery charge. 

With Lee is a woman in her late seventies, Elizabeth. She remembers a time when the shopping centre had everything: several butchers (she once worked in one of them), as well as a supermarket, and many other shops besides. Today, it’s a different story.

“It adds to your depression, it’s horrible,” Elizabeth says, dejectedly. “This place used to be jumping. It’s a terrible life we’re aw living the noo. We’ve been promised and promised, and then we were built up only to be let down time and time again. There’s nothing, it’s just just hopeless, so it is.” 

Cope refuses to accept the situation as hopeless. After the Co-op’s closure, she had a challenge on her hands: to convince a supermarket chain to set up shop in Castlemilk. The first step, she thought, was identifying just who exactly needed lobbying. She put her detective hat on, establishing the Castlemilk Community and Business Association in 2016. Originally, the goal was to find out who owned the shopping centre. Glasgow City Council, Cope explains, had sold it on to a private developer years before, “and it had been in a state of decline since”. It took the group 18 months to establish the Braes was owned by a consortium linked to an offshore company. 

“Then all of a sudden, it went into administration because we were poking around,” says Cope mischievously. An unexpected opportunity emerged. If the group could find a sympathetic buyer for the shopping centre, they reasoned, perhaps they could get them to agree to establishing a supermarket as soon as possible. 

Enter nightclub magnate Stefan King. The owner of Scotland’s largest hospitality company, the Scotsman Group (then G1 Group), bought the Braes in 2020. Locals, then as now, were sceptical of the move. Local campaigner Cathy Milligan told the Rutherglen Reformer that she had “serious doubts” about G1’s “willingness to deliver the kind of progressive and sustainable investment that the people of Castlemilk need and deserve”. G1, for their part, promised to invest and “fully address the various retail requirements for the residents of Castlemilk”. 

Instead, the Scotsman Group addressed rents. In 2022, social care provider Sense Scotland, one of the centre’s oldest tenants, was told by their new landlord that rates would increase from £10,000 to £15,000 a year. They’d been in the Braes for over 25 years, but were forced to leave due to the “untenable” hike. And rather than a supermarket, the Scotsman Group opened a second outlet of their One-o-One convenience stores in the centre, which joined the B&M, an Iceland and a 24hr McDonald’s Drive Thru outside. The Braes’ forty year-old pub, the Oasis, latterly the New Oasis, was reopened as the rebranded Bonnie Brae. Its owner? Iona Pub Partnership, a subsidiary of the Scotsman Group. On the fresh food provision side, the Braes is down to one butcher, and a greengrocer called Holistic Health Hub that sells a small selection of fruit and veg. Milligan and a group of local women now run Food Solidarity Soup’erheroes out of the shopping centre twice a week. But most of the arcade’s main enclosed thoroughfare lies derelict. 

Cope and community councillor Christine Devine (also MBE) are the only two people allowed to engage directly with King and the Scotsman Group on the issue of Castlemilk's elusive supermarket. Their meetings are commercially confidential, Cope explains. “He says I’m gonnae gie him a heart attack, he says his hair’s falling oot,” she says of her tête-à-têtes with King. “I’m ontae him regular right enough. I send him emails, like: ‘Arite Stef — ye any word for me?’” 

No word has been forthcoming. Yet Cope believes the Scotsman Group is not to blame. “Ultimately,” she argues, “it’s the businesses’ decision whether or not they want to open a supermarket here.” 

In 2022, a breakthrough seemed afoot. Council leader Susan Aitken told residents to expect an announcement of a “household name” supermarket landing in the area. With Scottish Government funding, the council also put together a £3.35m package to develop the precinct and attract business. 

That ‘household name’ supermarket, Cope tells me, was Lidl. Discussions with the Scotsman Group were “advanced”. King even delivered the plans to Cope’s house, which she then displayed in every public place she could think of. Lidl, according to Cope, “got everyhing they wanted” including the demolition of buildings needed to make way for the supermarket and build a carpark. Castlemilk was about to get its long awaited food oasis. 

Then, with Castlemilk’s hopes built up, Cope received news that Lidl were pulling out at the eleventh hour. The German economy was tanking and parent company Schwarz Group didn't want to take the plunge. She was devastated. “We’ve not had any new plans since then,” she says resignedly.

Although they did not respond to several requests for an interview, I’m told that the Scotsman Group remains committed to the original plans to build a 20,000 square foot supermarket. So far, only £463,360 of the £3.35m in funding has been spent: £256,059 on demolition works and the rest on professional fees and surveys. The council have agreed another year-long extension for the Scotsman Group to make use of the remainder of the money, but it can only be spent if they find a supermarket brand to take up the site. 

Finding a willing retailer has not been as simple as Cope, or King, envisaged. The proposed site at the back of the Braes is encircled by a one way road system which is unsuitable for a large supermarket, even with the buildings that have been demolished to make way for it. Tesco and Asda are uninterested, given they already have stores in Dalmarnock and Toryglen respectively. Yet Cope can’t understand why Lidl or Aldi don’t want to come to the area. She cites the 14,000 plus population here, as well as neighbouring areas Carmunnock, Simshill, Croftfoot and parts of South Lanarkshire too.

“I’ve just got to keep going with this and hopefully we can solve it,” she says. “I’m demented and Stefan King is demented. I think he thought it’d be simple to get [one of the supermarkets] to come here, but he came to the conclusion he needed to do the build and they would do the franchise”. 

I hear various unprintable conspiratorial theories about why the supermarket hasn’t yet been built. Several locals tell me plans have been deliberately stymied, using terms like “secretive” and making claims about cynical profiteering and off shore companies, but failing to provide any evidence. In the absence of concrete information, Castlemilk’s suspicions fester.  

Cope dismisses them. “People in Castlemilk actually get to the stage where they've got a lot of apathy,” she says. “It’s the powers that be that actually don't listen.”

Cope is clearly worried about the potential ramifications that criticism of King might have on future plans. “We have to be very careful. At the end of the day, Stefan King and the Scotsman Group have every right to sell that site if they want to — nobody can stop them doing that, and we’d end up in a worse place than where we started,” she says. “I’ve got to work with this man, and he’s very pleasant. I know he has a reputation — that has nothing to do with me; I have to deal with him on the basis that we want a supermarket at the end of this.” 

That ‘reputation’ Cope is referring to is a striking one. King’s career has been “marred by bad publicity” according to The Herald, and his businesses criticised variously for unfair dismissal of staff, putting women and children at risk of predatory behaviour, discrimination, and neglecting to pay national minimum wage to 2,895 employees. King himself is quite the character; one of his most notorious episodes was in 1999, when he defended his venues against accusations of racist door policies by saying an affair with black popstar Sinitta proved he was not prejudiced. The case was later thrown out by the Sheriff Court.

Today, Cope describes King as a “very private man”. Perhaps learning from the Sinitta episode, he doesn’t speak to the press, preferring his multi-million pound acquisitions to do the talking. 

‘I said to Maureen, we irnae working against you’ 

Cope’s campaign is not the only show in town. There is also the Castlemilk Housing and Human Rights Lived Experience Board, a body formed by the four housing associations, including Cope’s former stomping ground: Ardenglen. I contact Ardenglen’s community investment manager, Fiona McGovern, and a meeting is arranged. 

Before I can speak to the Lived Experience Board, they throw a curveball: presenting their case for access to affordable food to the United Nations. The board argues that Castlemilk’s lack of a supermarket is impinging on their human rights — and the UN has a duty to help them sort it out. 

The story makes a splash. The BBC and That’s TV send journalists and camera crews. Outside Iceland, where I’ve been quietly interviewing residents, a media circus descends. I’m frustrated at being scooped, but elated to see the issue finally getting significant traction for the first time in years. 

A week after all the media attention, I go to meet the board reps, led by chair Anna Stuart. She’s had a raspy voice since complications from cancer in her epiglottis. “Some mornings I wake up and I don't have any voice — my family love that, I could talk for Scotland,” she says with a smile. All the media appearances haven’t helped her throat, but she can’t turn down an opportunity to highlight their plight. 

Aged 84, Stuart remembers coming to roll easter eggs down the hills of Cathkin Braes before Castlemilk was even built, over seven decades ago. Later, after moving here from Bridgeton, she became involved in the housing co-op movement. She started meeting the council in 1981, and registered Castlemilk East Housing Co-operative (later rebranded as Casiltoun HA) in 1984. Like many Castlemilk women I encounter over the course of reporting, she has an MBE for community service. 

“It was mostly women that sat on the housing association boards at the beginning, because we manage wur homes, we budget everything — so we knew what we were talking about.” Castlemilk remains a matriarchal society, I point out during the board meeting later, which gets a laugh. “There are a few men,” replies board member Liz McKenzie. 

“Section 11 human rights,” Stuart says, referencing the UN article they argued their case under. “That’s about affordable, fresh food, and you’re thinking adults, elderly people, children growing up, if they don't get access to this, that’s it. Their lives are ruined.” She had to get her submission to the UN, presented over video link, down to two minutes sharp — or she’d be cut off. “I have to say, that’s difficult for Anna,” McKenzie says cattily, with a chuckle.  

I sense the decision to raise their case with the UN has created some tension with Cope and the official campaign. Two weeks ago, the community council meeting became “heated” with “everyone chipping in with their idea about there not being a supermarket and how to go about it”, says Stuart. 

When I press for more, Stuart explains minutes weren’t recorded, but does recount one interaction. “I said to Maureen: ‘We irnae working against you. We’re supporting you. We can say what we like, we're only answerable to our tenants. That's who's asking us to get this sorted out.’” Whereas Maureen, she goes on to argue, is “working wi the owner, her hands are tied”.  

Her voice grows fierce. “I'm not going to mention his name, I don't want to get done for slander.” 

Stuart has become increasingly frustrated about the confidential nature of Cope and Christine Devine’s meetings with Stefan King, which she says leaves the rest of the community in the dark. “All the attention we’ve had between the television and the newspapers — you hink they would have got someone to respond to us, but they’ve never said a word [...] You’re hitting your head off a brick wall, d’you know what I mean?”

The board says enough is enough. “It’s 70 years ago when Castlemilk was built, and at that time it was just a concrete jungle,” McKenzie says. “They placed people in houses and left it as a food desert. We’re back to that again. It’s enough talking. We need action.” 

Fine words butter no parsnips

A week later, I’m at the Castlemilk Community Centre on a bright Wednesday morning. Around 20 people are sitting around tables in a room at the back of the centre, waiting for the Castlemilk Food Pantry to open. Most arrive 45 minutes to an hour early to get their ticket and ensure a place towards the front of the queue. Twice a week, the pantry “provides a dignified approach to food insecurity” through a membership scheme. For £2.50, members get approximately £15 worth of food: milk, bread, fruit, one freezer item, one fridge item and two shelf items.

Fiona McGovern interrupts the chatter to make an announcement: the food pantry is closing temporarily after today, moving to an as-of-yet undisclosed new location, reopening 7 April. “If you’re in an emergency, give me a phone,” she tells the crowd. “I know it’s not the best news, but in the long run this will be better for us.” McGovern hands an info letter to an old guy who heads out for a cigarette. She then walks over to a woman in a hijab, smiles and waves at her baby, and ensures she and her family have understood. 

“By the time the supermarket’s built we’ll all be ashes,” says Thomas, a 60 year-old man. He’s weary, but good-humoured. He’s on the community council, and has spoken to King before. “He says he’s doing his best, but he doesn’t seem to be doing much,” he says with a grin. “Don’t get me wrang, he’s an open guy and shares his plans, but nobody here sees any progress.”  

At the back of the room, a woman in a pink jacket, glasses and gold earrings is quietly waiting for her number to be called. Her name’s Margaret, she’s been living in Castlemilk for 50 years. A woman at the front calls out numbers one to five. Margaret checks her ticket. “20 — I’ve got nae chance,” she says with a laugh. “We’re not expecting the world, a proper supermarket would be nice. I don’t believe in moaning — I believe in doing things. I turned 79 in January, I’m not done yet.” 

Margaret is using the pantry because she’s given most of her savings to her grandson, whose work van was destroyed last year, leaving him destitute and out of work. “There’s no point me having the money and not using it — if I have something I’ll give it to somebody else. Castlemilk is a really good place. People do look out for each other.” The housing associations, she adds, have been “immensely important” in fostering a sense of community. “We have to stand up to be counted. We can't go on like this. People will die of starvation. This is not a third world country, but if we keep going the way we are, it will be and we need to make our voices heard.” I ask if she really thinks people will die. “I do — I really do see it in my community.” 

Jam tomorrow 

It’s almost a fortnight since the Lived Experience Board presented their case to the UN. The story has since died down, and the media’s focus has moved on. The Scotsman Group is yet to provide a comment to the press, and as far as anyone’s aware, the people of Castlemilk remain no closer to getting a supermarket. 

The dust settled, I ring Cope to ask if she thinks the recent news will make any difference. “I hope so — any publicity is good for us, it keeps it in everybody’s mind what’s going on. We’ve had this before — the BBC has been out before. But it’s stumbling blocks, you think you’re there, then you’re not. I honestly don’t know what [the Lived Experience Board] or the Scottish Government can do.” 

At the moment, she’s focussed on setting up a meeting between the new Labour MP for Glasgow South, Gordon McKee (who mentioned the campaign in his maiden speech), and the Scotsman Group. I ask about the confidential nature of her meetings with King. “He trusts myself and Christine Devine,” Cope explains. Besides, she says, “public meetings are a nightmare”. 

But communication is now one-way. They’ve come to an agreement that King won’t be in touch with Cope “until he has something positive to tell me”. Until then she — along with the rest of Castlemilk — will have to bide their time. But while steady perseverance has carried them through the last nine years, the community’s dogged determination to find a solution seems to have breached a wall, just as it did for Cope and Stuart back in the early housing association days. Castlemilk is no longer willing to sit patiently and wait. Their food sovereignty beckons.