Well, this is it, where it all began, well for me at least. I was a wee Woodside quine in the early 1980’s.
Folk have been living on and working on this land since the 15th Century, but Woodside formed officially in 1834, joining Aberdeen City in 1891.
The folks in Woodside are hard grafters and have a strong sense of community. 1881 saw nearly 6000 folks living here. My mum worked at the Crombie Mills Yarn Store Office from 1974 to 1980.
Woodside has a proud industrial heritage, going back to the 16th and 17th century spanning cotton spinning, calico printing as well as iron-founding, a copper mill and paper mills, to name a few.
The hours were long, the work physical and exhausting and the wages? Well not worth the paper they were written on. Poverty was rife and Woodsiders were not to reap the benefits of their work.
Education has always been important to Woodsiders, with several mill-run schools, merging into the now closed Borough Hall, before moving to Woodside School in 1990. They have produced many bright lights, including Sir John Anderson, who gifted the Woodside Library. The land still bears the rusted, crumbling scars of it’s past and nature has started to claim it as it’s own.
Back in 1818, a group of folks got together and formed Woodside Congregational Church, the first of many churches in the area. They Built on the Great Northern Road and called it home until 1993, when it too became a casualty of progress. But they continue to meet every Sunday and run youth groups.
That’s where I fit in again.
I moved back into Woodside in 2006 and started helping with the Church and in 2020, became their minister for a period.
You can almost see the tiredness of Woodside seeping from the grey granite streets, lined with shopfronts and house windows. But new growth is bringing new life back to the area. New builds are popping up, bringing new opportunities. Hopefully this time, Woodsiders will benefit from these investments for decades to come.
So that is a whistle-stop tour of my Woodside, you’ve seen a bit of the history and a bit of the present and I hope you can glimpse the future that Woodside can have.
Hopefully the future will be better for the next generation.
This is my Woodside… What’s yours?
Author: Nicola Watson
