Falkirk is changing.

Last year we started suffering through the fiasco of the Town Hall being closed. The closure took away the town’s only decent theatre. There had been plans presented to the council to start work on a replacement, but those plans were voted down by Labour and the Conservatives in what appeared to party political games, rather than an attempt to do the right thing for the residents of the town.

An investigation into the condition of the Town Hall was carried out and it was found to be in an even worse state than people had known – so it had to be closed and pulled down. A new plan has been brough forward to build a new Town Hall – with theatre – in the Callendar Square shopping centre, but who knows how long that will take?

Anyway, this picture is not of the Town Hall, but of the old Falkirk College. Falkirk is now one campus of the Forth Valley college, but here the owners took a more sensible approach. Probably because they were bound by commercial considerations rather than party political ones. They built a beautiful new campus and got that into operation before closing the old building.

It is amazing to see what is left as a building starts to be destroyed. Every wall that divided an area into rooms had a special role, at once providing space and privacy. Every empty window frame once kept out the wind, every pipe or cable that brought warmth or light…

Even though I never stepped inside the building, it is slightly humbling to see it brought down like this.