The Story of Stepps
The First Commuters
The Garnkirk & Glasgow was Glasgow's first public railway, and the station at Stepps (or "Cumbemauld Road") was its first intermediate station, so in theory Stepps might well have become the city's first commuter suburb. However, the station-orientated community was slow to develop.  Even when during the 1850s the nearby example of Lenzie demonstrated the possibilities for businessmen to "live in the country and travel to work in the city each day", the potential remained unrealised. By the mid 1870s Stepps consisted merely of a terrace of stone-built workers' houses on the south side of the main road at Steppshill, opposite the farm; another workers' terrace (known as the "Wee Houses") sitting back from the road, just west of where Edward Place now stands; and a very limited scattering of single dwellings elsewhere (mostly behind the "Wee Houses" and around the railway station). Some of the workers' houses were owned by the stationmaster, Robert Bankier (perhaps as factor for the Caledonian Railway), and the majority were occupied by railway workers. Of significance was "Mark Brae" on the corner of the main road and what is now Whitehill Avenue, regarded by many as the first in the sequence of commuter houses. Having been built in 1855, however, it preceded the others by some considerable time. During the 1870s it was occupied by James Ferguson, a property agent.
Real "commuter building" began during the late 1870s, around a focal point at the junction of Cumbernauld Road and Lenzie Road. Well-appointed dwellings sprang up in Cumbernauld Road, Lenzie Road, West Avenue and Cardowan Drive.  These new houses were occupied by a range of Glasgow businessmen and entrepreneurs, working in a variety of businesses and manufacturing industries. Typical, perhaps, was Josiah Begg, who came with his family to live in a new house at "Fir Knowe", West Avenue, about 1881. Begg modestly described himself as a "Clerk" or "Cashier", but he was in fact the owner of a turning mill at Bridgeton, supplying puns and bobbins to Ayrshire lace mills. Also typical was A.B.Macdonald, a drapery warehouseman with premises at Bell Street, near Glasgow Cross, who came out with his family to "Glencoe", Lenzie Road, during the late 1880s. Among others, William Barnett, of "Homely Cottage", was a brush manufacturer with business premises in Bath Street, Glasgow; George Sandeman, of "Woodburn Cottage", was described at different times as an "oil & grease merchant" and an "iron merchant". His firm, Sandeman, Black & Co., of French Street, Dalmarnock, dealt in all these commodities, and others besides. By 1897 there were about ten new houses in Cumbernauld Road (including five at Steppshill), sixteen in Lenzie Road, five in West Avenue and five in Cardowan Drive; also four at Mount Harriet and three at Whitehill. Around this period, a gazetteer entry for Stepps noted that "A number of excellent villas and cottages, with large gardens attached, line the road here leading from Glasgow to Cumbernauld".
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