Would you like to become a member of Helensburgh Community Council? Elections are being held this year. For more information, get in touch with Sarah Davies, Helensburgh Community Council secretary, for further information, an informal chat and application forms. Applications close on 21st March.

Meeting at the Crossroads: The intersection of local communities with Faslane and Coulport nuclear submarine bases.

Would you like to take part in a PhD research project?

Over the next 24 months, Kenneth Grant Glenaan, a PhD student at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, will be studying the relationship between the local communities and the nuclear submarine bases at Faslane and Coulport as part of an ethnographic film PhD study.

He is particularly interested in families who have several generations of contact with the bases, both civilian and military. Families and individuals who have migrated to the area for work are most welcome too!

If you have a family history or are directly or indirectly involved, Kenneth would love to hear from you. Social history, employment, culture, family, and memory are of particular interest.

The study is officially registered, funded and monitored through Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh. Confidentiality is guaranteed, and all personal information will be treated in accordance with the terms of the UK Data Protection Act 2018 and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Kenneth cannot pay you for taking part in the study, but any expenses incurred will be covered – along with lots of tea and coffee!

If you are interested, please contact Kenneth and he’ll get back to you asap:

Email: 22009106@qmu.ac.uk Or on 07968001162

In 2017, Helensburgh Community Council created a sub-committee, Vision for Helensburgh, to understand what the people of Helensburgh wanted their town to be like in the future. Since then, we’ve all experienced a significant shift in behaviours brought on by the pandemic.

The Vision for Helensburgh work is intended to be part of our response to any planning process with Argyll and Bute Council as part of any planning application for the waterfront development. However, given that the pandemic changed a lot of behaviours, we wanted to get an insight into what the community wanted to ensure that any response was as robust as possible.

Through a website, we invited people to answer one question:

What would you like to see built in the empty Helensburgh waterfront space?

There were four options:

• Large retail development (M&S, Aldi, etc)
• Local retail development
• Community facilities
• Additional leisure development

People could then suggest other uses for the space or leave a comment.

We had 1,025 responses to the question. Here are the results:

Looking more into the comments that people left, two themes arose.

1. Any development on the waterfront site should focus firmly on the young people of Helensburgh and how we can make the town a better place for them.
   
2. While a large retail site on the waterfront isn’t desirable, people are looking for a cheaper retail option that could be placed elsewhere in the town.