 Greenbank House in East Renfrewshire |
East Renfrewshire is one of the 32 unitary council areas into which Scotland has been divided since 1996. It is the council area which lies immediately to the south-west of the City of Glasgow and includes within its boundaries parts of the southern edge of the Glasgow conurbation as well as the remote uplands of Eaglesham Moor. For accommodation in Inverclyde and a full list of features, see our Glasgow & Clyde Valley area pages.
 East Renfrewshire Since 1996 Note About Image Copyright |
Significant settlements in East Renfrewshire include Barrhead, Giffnock, Newton Mearns, Clarkston, Thornliebank, Eaglesham and Neilston. It is the 28th largest Scottish council area in terms of physical size and the 24th largest in terms of population. A Reader's Digest poll conducted in 2007, which looked at all local authority areas in the UK, rated East Renfrewshire as the second best place in the UK in which to bring up a family (after East Dunbartonshire).
East Renfrewshire is bordered on its north by Renfrewshire and the City of Glasgow; on its east by South Lanarkshire; on its south by East Ayrshire; and on its west by North Ayrshire.
From the point of view of local authority coverage, the 1996 reorganisation that discarded Scotland's 12 regions in favour of 32 unitary council areas saw East Dunbartonshire formed from the Eastwood district of the Strathclyde Region, with the addition of Barrhead from the neighbouring Renfrew district. If you take a longer view and compare East Renfrewshire to the traditional counties of Scotland before they were replaced by regions in 1975, it occupies the south-eastern third (roughly) of the traditional county of Renfrewshire.
