Purdie Street in Burnbank.
Like many areas around Hamilton Purdie Street was a typical Victorian tenement street. It was thriving and most of these tenements in the late 1800s would have been occupied by Coal Miners.
When the Coal masters started to sink their pits, places like Burnbank (which at the time was a quiet little village on the outskirts of Hamilton) started to massively grow and houses were quickly built to cope with the amount of people moving to the area for work.
One family that lived in Purdie Street in 1916 were the Kidlay Family. It was reported in the Hamilton Advertiser on Saturday the 15th of July 1916 that Matthew Kilday, pony driver, residing with his parents at 4 Purdie Street Burnbank, met with an accident while at work in the Kiltongue seam of No 3 Pit, Earnock Colliery.
He received a severe kick from a pony in the lower part of the stomach which rendered him unconscious for several hours. After being attended to on the surface by Dr Brownlie he was removed home. A brother of Kilday’s was killed in Bent Pit two years ago. [Hamilton Advertiser 15 July 1916]
The tenements were demolished in the mid 60s partly due subsidence from the underground coal mines and also to make way for the new Burnbank shopping centre.
Below is a picture of Purdie Street and a more recent photo of how it looks now! The street is now a car park and entrance to the shops. Maybe one day we will see Purdie Street a thriving street with houses.
my mum, Margaret Rodden and her 5 sisters and two brothers were born and brought up at 19 Purdie Street . My mum was born in 1915. They later moved to Abbotsford Road Whitehill.