So, Who is St Andrews Really For?

Ask me what makes St Andrews feel like St Andrews, and I definitely wouldn’t say the golf course. I’d say sitting in The Rule while playing cards with friends, getting an extremely overpriced toastie from Cheesy Toast Shack, or having the loveliest strawberry danish from Fisher & Donaldson as a treat for actually completing my assigned readings. These are the places that have made St Andrews feel like home to me. But lately, I’ve started to notice a new picture of the town emerging in the background, and I wonder who it is being created for.

The character of St Andrews is noticeably changing. If you like golf, tweed, or expensive candles and soap, this is excellent news for you. For everyone else, it is perhaps a little harder to see where we fit in.

It is understandable that businesses are going to go where the money is, and I don’t think there’s anything particularly sinister about that. What has started to bother me is how many of these changes seem to be pointing in the same direction. 

The former New Picture House is now T-Squared Social, where golf simulators, dining, and entertainment sit alongside semi-flattering portraits of Justin Timberlake and Tiger Woods, reminding us all that JT is a true businessman now and not just the guy who sang ‘SexyBack.’ The cinema, granted, is still there, but it feels exceedingly different. There is something charming about a small town with a famous golf course, but there is something different about a town where that fame itself becomes part of what is being sold.

Once you start noticing it, the shift is difficult to ignore. A tweed shop appears where a vape shop used to be, despite there already being two other tweed shops in town that I never see anyone in. Amber, a restaurant where I can never seem to find a seat, replaces BrewDog. Increasingly, new businesses seem to offer a refined version of the quaintness that made St Andrews appealing in the first place. There is something almost ironic about it: with thousands of students and residents living here, the town seems to need another place to buy an awful tweed jacket more than affordable places to eat or shop.

What interests me most is how these changes are helping curate a specific image of St Andrews. A town’s identity is shaped by the places that fill it, and the more St Andrews fills itself with golf-themed stores and places to buy regular items at luxury prices, the line between everyday St Andrews and the image it sells becomes harder to distinguish.

Nevertheless, the St Andrews I have grown attached to is not particularly polished. To me, it is where I can spend far too much money in a bookshop or watch my best friend emerge from a charity shop wearing something I had just told her I wanted to buy. These are fairly unremarkable parts of the town, but they are what make it feel lived in. I don’t think they will disappear, but if enough of them are replaced, at what point does the version of St Andrews we are selling become more recognisable than the one we actually live in?

That is why I keep coming back to the question of who this version of the town is actually for. Not because tourists and golfers do not belong here — they obviously do — but because I would like St Andrews to remain somewhere that feels like a home to the people who live here, rather than just a remarkably convincing idea of one.

Illustration by Anna Dickson