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“When you drive from Edinburgh or Glasgow, and you hit that Dunblane roundabout and you’re driving north, it’s a different world,” he says, wistfully. “This is quality of life. The scenery changes, the colours change, you relax in your car, and you just feel like a different person.”
We’re sitting inside the Auchterarder Golf Club, around one and a half miles down the road from the Gleneagles Hotel. A proper man of the town, the Perth and Kinross councillor is congenial. He gestures across the clubhouse lounge at the trophy cabinet and mentions he was the club Captain in 2007 and 2008. He’s also heavily involved in the church, he built the second floor of the clubhouse (his “legacy”), he once coached the youth football team. Now he runs a cleaning product business out of Bellshill. He greets staff and patrons inside the modest clubhouse with ease. “I don’t have time to be a councillor, I really don’t,” he says. “But I was cajoled into it because people know me.”
The Conservative politician moved to town in 1992 when the population was around 3,500. It has since more than doubled and continues to draw more and more residents at pace. But it’s more than just the scenery that makes this rural enclave feel like a different world. Auchterarder is nestled into a landscape drenched in wealth. Residents live in the shadow of Gleneagles’ Millionaires’ Row.
In December, the town’s Queen’s Crescent was crowned Scotland’s most expensive street, knocking Edinburgh’s Ann Street from the top spot. Average prices for Georgian properties that line the leafy Stockbridge promenade now lag around £1.12 million behind the new £3 million mansions in Gleneagles Village, according to the latest Bank of Scotland data.
The nouveau riche road has been around ten years in the making. The crescent sits awkwardly on land that was once part of Gleneagles. It was sold off in 2013 by then-owner Diageo to help generate the £18 million needed to host the 2014 Ryder Cup. The Queen’s Crescent lots were valued at around £1 million a pop and sold for a total of around £14.9 million. A two years’ free golf membership for two at Gleneagles and a free two-year membership for four to the hotel’s health spa were thrown in to sweeten the deal. Shortly after the competition, Diageo sold Gleneagles Hotel Limited to a London-based investment group led by Ennismore for a rumoured £150 million.
Financiers, property developers and businessmen snapped up the plots, which ranged from between half an acre to three-quarters of an acre, and began to build. Millionaire residents are rumoured to include taxi tycoon Stevie Malcolm, T in the Park founder Scott Menneer and Strathclyde Homes boss John O’Neill.
Before meeting Councillor Allan I meander around the maze of Gleneagles and through the open gates of Queen’s Crescent. It’s like wandering down a dollhouse aisle in Hamleys. An incongruous mishmash of built-to-spec mansions. Eerily quiet, just yards from the fairways of the world-renowned Queen’s Course, the crescent feels uninhabited.
The mansions have names instead of numbers: Glenaig, Glen Devon View, Tantallon Lodge, Tigh Mór, Glen Oran Gallery House. Lawns are perfectly manicured; Range Rovers sit neatly in nearly every driveway. Rumours abound about the properties. One is said to have a vehicle elevator that leads to an underground garage teeming with classic cars. Stevie Malcolm allegedly commissioned a three-storey fish tank in his residence.
One modern-looking monstrosity has two white balloon dog sculptures on the patio, a la Jeff Koons. Another of the properties was a top prize in the Omaze Million Pound House Draw in 2023 – it featured a golf simulator, cinema room, hot tub, guest annexe and leisure suite. The winner (known as Jon from Berkshire), sold the seven-bedroom abode for more than £4 million last May.
To people in Auchterarder, the gated community of Queen’s Crescent and nearby, nearly as expensive Caledonian Crescent, are often referred to simply as “up there”. There is the millionaire, billionaire world of Gleneagles, and then there is the town.
But though the residents might feel removed from the luxury less than three miles away, such closeness to affluence has given Auchterarder a boost that similar places could only dream of. Its high street is a flourishing clutch of independent shops, cafes and restaurants without a vacant unit in sight. Hotel guests trickle down to spend. At the same time, it shares in the struggles of a rapidly growing community at the mercy of council cuts, developers and straining infrastructure.
Known colloquially as The Lang Toun, it was built around the old A9 which now forms the high street. Stretching from one end of town to the other, it was flanked by hotels, banks, antique shops and petrol stations to serve the transient motorists. Beyond that, it was just farmland.
These days, it’s one of the hottest commuter towns in the country with its close links to Perth, Dundee, Aberdeen, Glasgow, Edinburgh and elsewhere across the central belt. No one seems outwardly bitter about the evolution of Auchterarder, but the well-worn fear that houses are being thrown up faster than amenities can keep pace is clear. It’s not immune to the cracks appearing in rural towns across Scotland.
Inside the bright blue shopfront of the Townhead Pet ’n’ Pony, owner Ally Kay explains it’s grown exponentially and changed dramatically since his family sold their farm (now housing) nearly a decade ago. He paints the picture of a proud town, where volunteers work throughout the week to pick litter and maintain the plants.
The High Street is buoyant, thanks to the Gleneagles’ Effect. The population is expanding, but at the same time, amenities are disappearing. The last bank closed quietly over the pandemic. The council voted to turn the public toilets into a banking hub despite pushback from the community.
Now, Perth and Kinross council has put the library on the chopping block. Culture Perth and Kinross, an arm’s length organisation of the local authority, has decided that they need to close five peripheral libraries amid budget constraints. The potential loss of the public library is devastating. As with many communities, the space acts as a well-used hub by people across all generations. The idea of it being replaced with a book-carrying van is more than disappointing. Another suggestion is to reduce the library’s hours, perhaps get volunteers to run it.
Mr Kay is an active member of the Auchterarder Community Council. The night before we speak, he was at the January meeting which unusually went on for several hours. “People are concerned that we’re getting new houses but not the facilities to back it up,” he says. “We’re losing facilities rather than gaining facilities.”
“We’ve got the super-rich – great,” he adds. “We’ve also got those struggling to stay afloat, people in different areas. And it’s a shame to see the huge divide.”
The library is only one of many council services impacted by a tight wallet. I ask Councillor Allan what he thinks. He suggests the council has to look at its priorities. There’s the library, yes. The town bus is also in need of a cash boost. Same with additional support needs in the school. He takes a thoughtful pause. “Sponsorship. One of the things that we don’t do enough of is look for sponsorship. And we’ve got such affluence at the end of our town. We need to start looking at and encouraging some of these people to help out in a different way.”
“We need to engage more with those people, which I haven’t done and I certainly know prior to now, my colleagues haven’t done prior to now,” he adds. “If there’s an issue of funding the Auchterarder Library for £73,000 and if we find for some strange reason we can’t do it through the council, we might have to do it through different means. If that means me knocking on a few doors to say, can you help? I’ll do that.”
Inside the Auchterarder Golf Club, a group of men cluster around a large round wooden table in front of the bar, nursing afternoon pints. Councillor Allan gestures over to them.
“These guys will sit for an hour with a beer, and they’ll have a blether. They’ll never once mention what goes on ‘up there’. It’s not on the agenda. It’s a different world, but it’s in our world. And it’s accepted. People just accept it for what it is and where it is. If you see somebody down in the block, they’ll say hello. It doesn’t make them alien that they’re affluent and they’ve got a big fancy house up there. They’re not aliens, they’re just part of the community. I’m not here to criticise them because they just don’t deserve it.”
He describes this club as a leveller, frequented by “people from Queen’s Crescent all the way down to Sydney Crescent”, a street off Townhead populated by council houses. “It caters for everybody. And when they walk in that door, they’re all equal. That’s the type of place we are. Auchterarder is a fabulous place,” he says. He suggests this kind of egalitarian environment is the best representation of a meeting of the two worlds.
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He offers to drive me around and show me what Auchterarder is all about. There’s the new playpark, with ziplines and slides and a good few children running about besides the frigid temperatures. There’s the new “cutting edge” 160-metre cycle pump track at Primrose Park, due for completion later this year. The booming high street is dotted with independent shops.
As we near the bottom of the Lang Toun, the stone cottages give way to the new housing being snapped up by the commuter community. One of the housebuilders has gone bust and a few of the lots have been left in a pile of rubble. Sainsbury’s has submitted an application to build a new supermarket at the bottom of the high street to serve the new residents. The Co-op at the top of the road has been vocal in its objection, however, claiming a new Sainsbury’s would “significantly harm” the health of the town centre.
The crime rates here are pretty low, though dog fouling is rife. But shop owners have started training their CCTV cameras on hotspots and reporting delinquent dog owners to the local authority. The teenagers get bored and cause trouble, but there’s hope the new cycle track will keep them busy.
The symbiotic relationship between the posh end of town and the rest of Auchterarder can’t be denied. It’s quietly benefited from having a wealthy top hat on, the prestige has trickled down, making Auchterarder an incredibly proud town. But can it cope under the weight of its own burgeoning success as a skyrocketing hot spot for commuters? The Perth and Kinross town is flourishing, thanks to Queen’s Crescent towering over it from Gleneagles. But like many rapidly expanding rural towns, Auchterarder is beginning to buckle under the pressure.
Marissa MacWhirter is the editor of The Glasgow Wrap newsletter. Each morning, Marissa curates the top local news stories from around Glasgow, delivering them to your inbox at 7am daily so you can stay up to date on the best reporting without ads, clickbait or annoying digital clutter. Oh, and it’s free. She can be found on X @marissaamayy1
