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Gerry Stuart
Pithead is not an actual place in Glasgow. Having read the book I’m convinced it’s set in a place called Cardowan which is on the north east outskirts of Glasgow. I live nearby and the general description of the area in the book plus the fact the mine there closed down in the early 80’s leads me to this conclusion. Perhaps Douglas could confirm this (should he wish to do so!)
Jamie
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Scott
I went to school in Cardowan (St. Joseph’s) during the late 70’s, early 80’s. I can guarantee everything in this bleak but wonderful book points to Pithead being Cardowan. Everything from the drive through Millerston and Stepps with neat bungalows to the right turn at a petrol station (no longer there) to the description of a small Catholic Church, no pubs but the miners club, the few streets surrounded by peat bogs marks Pithead as Cardowan 100%. I couldn’t read it without visualizing the streets and areas I knew well and with a few minor alterations everything fits. Intentional or not, even some of the surnames mentioned in the book (Donnelly etc.) were local extended families. The area is much changed with a lot of new house built on the extensive peat bogs and cleared Pit (which closed in 1983). Like much of the post industrial UK communities, a decent, tight, close knit mining populace was destroyed for several generations. It’s only now getting back to what it was, and could and should be. Despite the depiction of life in this book, I wouldn’t swap my growing up there.
John Boyle
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Paul Whitehead
I believe there was a real place called Pithead in what is now Cardowan. The whole area has been redeveloped since the closure of the mine, but the portrait in this book is typical of many a mining community in Scotland or northern England during the 1980s de-industrialization. A lot of dangerous industrial land was left abandoned for years, usually fenced off but it didn't take long for fences to come down or for holes to open up in them. Where I lived in Lancashire, it was the same. As kids, we were able to clamber into some of the disused mineshafts around one disused colliery.
Jean Grantham
(The) Pithead was indeed the ground above the pit, where the pit baths were and where the miners cleaned up (which they did do) before heading home after a long, tiring shift of hard work underground. Most were cleared and built over; they were certainly not left unsafe as is implied in this book; there is a lot of poetic license going on in the book.
Laura
I believe its not an official name of a city, but its a place where the miners worked. The coal mines that they called Pits. I tried looking the name up, but only found Pit bath house. That's where the miners bathe after working their shift in the pits, coal mines.
Mindy Utay
I looked for it and came up with nothing, so I think not
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