| AdminHistory | After two brief leases in Edinburgh, the Development Corporation designed and built its own headquarters in Kirk Lane, Livingston Village.
The project soon ran into difficulties, however. After a tendering process a contractor, Perts of Montrose, was appointed to build an office block of some 30,000 square feet; Perts was also to build the first 270 houses of the New Town at Livingston Station. The work was commissioned by the LDC in the Summer of 1963, with a completion date of spring 1964.
The work was not completed by Autumn 1965, and, in some cases, contained serious defects in materials and workmanship. The delays incurred considerable financial costs and by 1965 it had become obvious that the contractor, Perts, was to go into liquidation. The difficulties and costs encountered prompted the Board of the LDC to ask for the resignation of their Chief Architect, Peter Daniels. Six other staff of the architects department resigned as a direct result, and a further eight resigned citing unrelated reasons.
The process of appointing a firm that was relatively small, which was not based in the area, that would have to cope with a substantial amount of work and capital outlay, and had previously worked with the General Manager of the LDC before (when Brigadier Purches had been General Manager at Glenrothes New Town) drew substantial criticism, not least from Tam Dalyell, MP for West Lothian. There was a variety of legal action regarding the collapse of Perts
The building was never entirely satisfactory, suffering from a number of structural faults. By 1983 it was decided that the offices no longer met health and safety standards. The Corporation moved to new accommodation in Sidlaw House whilst the office block on Kirk Lane was sold to McGregor Developments and leased back to the Corporation for a thirty five year period. The Corporation in turn, leased out the small suites as office space. McGregor holdings disposed of their ownership of the building to another company in 1993. |