The Clyde Valley plan of 1949 described Coatbridge as 'situated over a flooded coalfield' - a phrase that captures the town's geography and its history at once. The flat low-lying ground 60 metres below the Slamannan plateau was perfect for siting blast furnaces and routing the Monkland Canal in, but the coalfield beneath it dictated everything that happened above. The black band ironstone seams of the Coatbridge field stretched from Langloan east beyond the town, and the Monkland Canal (completed 1791) carried coal and iron west into Glasgow for a century and a half. Tenements in Coatbridge were never built as tall as their Glasgow equivalents because the ground was unstable from centuries of mining. Neighbouring Airdrie, sitting on higher ground at the edge of the plateau, did not get the canal because the gradient was wrong - and so it never got the same density of heavy industry.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Coatbridge received a long succession of immigrants from Ulster, particularly from County Donegal, drawn to the furnace and pit work. The Irish presence has been so substantial that the town has been called 'little Ireland.' The Coatbridge accent - flat, with a characteristic stress on the 'a' vowel that turns 'stair' into 'sterr,' 'hair' into 'herr,' 'fair' into 'ferr' and 'chair' into 'cherr' - is attributed to that Ulster Catholic influx, though the distinctiveness has softened as Glasgow has absorbed Coatbridge into its commuter belt. Every March the town holds an annual St Patrick's Day Festival sponsored by the Irish Government and Guinness - the largest Irish celebration in Scotland - running for over a fortnight with lectures, dance and Gaelic football. In the 1880s a small Lithuanian community arrived; in 1905 an Italian wave from Monte Cassino; in the 1940s a Polish tank regiment was stationed in Coatbridge and some stayed.

William Baird's Gartsherrie Works was for decades one of the largest ironworks in Britain - and the last of them in Coatbridge. Its blast furnaces shut in 1967, ending an industry the town had defined and been defined by for more than a century. The 1934 exodus to Corby had been the warning. The 1950s decline of Clydeside shipbuilding had collapsed the demand. The post-war state-sponsored housing programmes built thousands of new council homes through the 1930s, 50s and after, replacing the slums Orwell had photographed; but the iron was gone for good. What remained, in time, became museum. Today the Summerlee Museum of Scottish Industrial Life sits on the foundations of one of those historic blast furnaces - now a Scheduled Monument - and has become one of Scotland's most-visited museums. A reconstructed miners' row, a working tramway and a reconstruction coal mine let visitors walk through what working people did here.

Coatbridge's cultural output is wildly out of proportion to its population. Mark Millar, the comic book writer behind Wanted and Kick-Ass, grew up here; both his comics became Hollywood films. Thomas McAleese (stage name Dean Ford) of The Marmalade had a UK number one in 1969 with 'Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da' and co-wrote 'Reflections of My Life,' the band's biggest worldwide hit. The brothers Greg and Pat Kane are Hue and Cry. Alan Frew left Coatbridge for Canada and fronted Glass Tiger, writing 'My Town' as a tribute to the place he came from - Rod Stewart sang on the recording because of his Scottish ancestry. Ricky Burns held three world boxing titles. Walter Donaldson was World Snooker Champion. Mark Meechan, the YouTuber known as Count Dankula, comes from here too. And Jock Stein, who managed Celtic to the European Cup in 1967 - the first British club ever to win it - played his early football for Coatbridge's Albion Rovers. In 2007 Prospect magazine voted Coatbridge 'the most dismal town in Scotland.' The locals tend to mention that with weary humour, then list their famous sons and daughters anyway.