Park Place

Park Place was the official name for a row of houses that all fell under the address of 15 (later 31) New Street, Stevenston. Locally though it was known as the “Ham and Egg Close”. In the photos below you can see the remains of the houses in March 1975, and the same view in April 2022.

Built around 1895, the houses were originally owned by John Alexander, a local coal merchant who also owned several of the houses and shops on New Street itself.

Accessed from the lane next to 31 New Street, there’s multiple different stories for the origin of the Ham and Egg name. The most interesting one we’ve seen is that the close had rich residents (the “ham”) on one side and poor residents (the “eggs”) on the other. Old valuation rolls from 1905 to 1940 show it was mostly miners and dynamite factory workers that lived there and no “rich” people as such.

The building in the background was used as a burgh yard by the town council in its later days, and may have been part of the gas works before that. Today Bonnie Lesley Court occupies that site.