Livingston Hookups: Livingston Women Want to Meet

Scotland's third-largest town has room for someone new

Livingston was designated in 1962, the fourth new town Scotland built after the war, and it was planned around a handful of older villages and the River Almond, which runs right through the middle. About 57,000 people live here now, making it the largest town in West Lothian, with Edinburgh fifteen miles to the east and Glasgow thirty to the west.

Before the new town, this was oil-shale country, and the bings left by the mining still stand on the landscape round about. High-tech and pharmaceutical factories arrived with the new town, and Livingston became a hub of what people called Silicon Glen. The big names thinned out from the late 1990s, but the industrial estates are still there on the edge of town.

The centre was planned too, on the southern edge of the Almond Valley, with a ring road to the east, retail parks across the south-west and a great many offices. Howden Park sits just to the north, beside an eighteenth-century house that now holds an arts centre, which gives you an easy daytime meeting place that isn't a shopping trip.

From Craigshill to Murieston, with Bathgate and Edinburgh close

Livingston is a town of districts, among them these, and a first meeting can happen well away from whichever one you call home:

• Craigshill
• Howden
• Ladywell
• Knightsridge
• Deans
• Dedridge
• Murieston
• Almondvale
• Eliburn
• Kirkton
• Adambrae

Bathgate is under five miles away and Linlithgow six, with Bo'ness under nine. For a bigger night out, Edinburgh is about thirteen miles off. The locations page lists every other town we cover, and whichever you choose, tell a friend where you're meeting and keep your own way home.