Convalescent Coast

Rest, Revival and Resilience: Exploring and Activating Dunoon’s Victorian Heritage

Dunoon’s Victorian heritage is set to inspire a new community project, thanks to National Lottery players. POP Shop Enterprises CIC has received a grant of £101,819 from The National Lottery Heritage Fund for Convalescent Coast, an 18-month community heritage project exploring Dunoon’s Victorian story as a place of health, temperance and soft drinks production.

Running from June 2026 to October 2027, the project is delivered in partnership with Dunoon Community Development Trust, with support from CHARTS, Scotland’s Rural College (SRUC) and the University of Strathclyde. It responds directly to findings from the Dunoon and Kirn Local Place Plan, which identified valuable but fragmented heritage provision, underutilised archives and a lack of interpretation across the town as key challenges to inclusive regeneration.

In the Victorian era, Dunoon was transformed from a small coastal settlement into one of the Clyde’s great resort towns — a place where Glaswegians came to rest, recover and holiday ‘doon the watter’. Convalescent Coast will research and share stories now at risk of being lost: Beatrice Clugston’s West of Scotland Convalescent Seaside Homes, which brought thousands of working-class Glaswegians to the coast for convalescent care; the town’s temperance establishments; and George Stirling’s soft drinks factory, a rare survival of Victorian high street manufacturing which operated behind an Argyll Street chemist from 1891 until the 1970s.

Local people will be at the heart of the project. Residents and volunteers will be involved in archive research, events and activities, and multiple local heritage organisations will be provided with new opportunities to share ideas and collaborate.  Working with SRUC and inspired by the project’s research, the project will co-create three new low-sugar soft drink flavours — connecting the Victorian story of ‘health-giving’ aerated waters to today’s public health challenges. Young Gaelic learners and locally based residents from Dunoon will help create bilingual interpretation, and the project will culminate in a two-day public exhibition and temperance bar in Dunoon in 2027.

The project will also create paid opportunities locally, including a new part-time Project Coordinator role, Living Wage remuneration for community steering group members, and two student internships with the University of Strathclyde.

Dr Manda Forster, Co-Director of POP Shop Enterprises CIC, said: “Part of Dunoon’s Victorian story — of rest and recovery, temperance and small-scale enterprise — is hiding in plain sight on our high street and across the town, and parts of it are at real risk of disappearing. Thanks to National Lottery players, we can now work with local people to research these stories, share them through walks, maps and films, and even bottle them, creating new low-sugar drinks flavours inspired by the people of this place. This project is about using our heritage story to start new conversations about health, community and the future of our town.”

Find out more about the Project co-ordinator role go here>

Find out how to be involved.

Contact hello@popshop.scot, drop by the POP shop on Hillfoot Street or attend one of our events>