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Many of us who have visited Glasgow will call in at the Willow Tea Rooms in Buchanan Street for a cup of tea and one of their delicious homemade scones, but tea rooms have not always been there for us to enjoy. In the 1880’s an alternative was needed for the “men only” pubs in many of the larger cities throughout the country. Tea had always been considered a luxury and drunk only by the rich but “tea rooms” started opening offering a relaxed and sociable area for ordinary h

A bright airy room, a series of mini play-zones and an open plan table arrangement where you can sit with your coffee or lunch and watch your preschoolers play – welcome to Tot's Spot, a unique play cafe for West Lothian. Tot's Spot is the creation of Danielle and Simone, and was a concept they had wanted to put into action for a long time. When the former library building in East Calder became available it proved to be the ideal premises, and Tot's Spot has been open a year

A nineteen year old lad writes home to his mother from the trenches in World War 1 France: “I have seen all the life I want to see.” A bundle of letters 100 years old, written in pencil on scraps of paper, are a poignant testimony to one young man's experience of war and his longing for home – home that he never saw again. His family in East Calder kindly let me read them and share some of the contents here. Tom Pullar enrolled in the Scots Guards in his native North Berwick

''Here the pulse of life beat strong at one time, here large bands of young men were wont to assemble of a summer's evening to take part in the old fashioned game of handball, and here troops of young maidens, who made the air ring with their cheerful laughter and song, could be seen going and coming from the village well carrying their wooden stoups’’. This extract from the West Lothian Courier written in 1921 describes the Camps, East Calder, during its heyday in the 1880s.