Argyll and Bute Council have launched their bid to have Oban granted city status and it seems that local opinion is divided over this. I must admit that initially I was unsure about whether this would be desirable or not.

I think back to the Oban of my childhood and my teens, a bustling, busy, fun filled town. I have summer evening memories of pipe bands marching down George Street while farmers struggled to recapture escaped beasts heading for the mart, and tourists thronged, engaged in the sights and the sounds and smells of a busy rural seaport, replete with  ferries and fishing boats and fishermen landing catches and mending nets. The old station lent a Victorian grandeur to the vista and provided a sheltered meeting place.

The replacement is an anodyne brick built station that would be more comfortably at home in Cumbernauld and nearby, lending added local colour and culture, is a branch of “Tesco’s by the sea” that has pretty much extinguished every small business in the town. The granite high school that once stood proud and foursquare and harboured real academic achievement within its stout walls has been replaced not once but twice by inferior buildings that might win prizes as examples of the architectural school of ‘brutal modernism’ but which don’t seem appropriate for Oban. I expect to see at least one more of these ill designed behemoths before my time comes.   

And everyone back then,  in the not so long ago days of the old station and the old high school, knew each other and met and chatted in shops and at dances and ceilidhs that reached out into the rural hinterlands. And folk from the islands and those same rural places met each other on their Saturday shopping visits or when they came to Oban for a spree.

I think also of Inverness, when I worked and mis-spent a part of my youth there helping to build the A9 when it too was still a town. Like Oban it was a fun filled place where everyone knew each other, whether they met in the street or in the Gellions or the Market bar. It is still pleasant to wander along the banks of the river Ness, but sadly I cannot see that achieving city status and all the concomitant growth has been good for the people of Inverness. No longer is it a place where everyone knows each other. Instead it is a perpetual building site of endless growth where necessary infrastructure never keeps pace with increasing demands and where community life has been replaced by stay at home loneliness transfixed to the goggle box.  

The signs are already there that Oban is heading in the same direction. The population growth that Oban has already seen is not due to economic dynamism but the result of the population having been stripped from our rural places. Those same folk that once visited Oban for shopping and supplies now live there permanently. At the same time the principles of town and country planning that suggest that we build communities and not just houses are blithely ignored and the investment in supporting infrastructure is plainly lacking. The development pressure of endless growth engulfs all in its path and environmental and community assets like Ganavan are prey to and fodder for the bulldozer, both literally and metaphorically.

This is the same urge for development and expansion that is thoughtlessly trashing our planet with its endless focus on quantity and not quality. This is the same mindless obsession with growth and greed that is blind to the fact that what we all love about Oban and places like it is the quality of life it affords and not merely the creation of even greater profit opportunity for the ever hungry big retail beasts that stalk our country and suck it dry of economic value.  

Bringing city status to Oban will not bring a special pot of money. If it brings investment it may very well bring the wrong sort of investment and if it brings any jobs at all it may very well bring the wrong sort of underpaid, insecure, gig economy jobs.

Achieving city status may be the dream child of some ambitious council officer anxious to burnish his credentials on his climb up the promotion ladder but study after study show that the residents of Scotland’s towns enjoy a better quality of life, are happier and live longer than their city counterparts.

Oban is a very special town and one that we all still love. What is needed is a better and more thoughtful traffic management plan,  an investment in infrastructure and community facilities and a consolidation of its present position before any further expansion is planned. We need to think local, nurture our special places, our people and our small businesses and relish the fact that Oban is such a special town, not turn it into a carbon copy of every other undistinguished conurbation.