THE photographs in this week's trip down West Fife's Memory Lane feature Abbeyview housing estate.

The urgent need to provide housing in the aftermath of the Second World War resulted in Dunfermline Town Council creating a new post of town planning officer which went to a woman called Annie Turnbull (on the princely salary of £750 per year) in 1948.

On her advice, in the following year, the decision was taken to purchase 240 acres of land at Aberdour Road in order to build the largest housing estate in Dunfermline.

Our first photograph is an aerial one from around 1965 showing the layout of the estate and the roads all radiating outwards from the shops situated in the centre. Although the housing scheme looked good on paper, little consideration had been given to the contours of the area, which resulted in shops and community facilities being built on the top of the hill with steeply-terraced streets running down into the steep valleys on either side.

The next photograph shows the main shopping provision, the Co-operative store, situated in the centre of the estate. Although not as grand today as it was when it was first built, the building still remains standing. The houses in Abbeyview provided a degree of luxury in a period when people had been used to housing with outside shared toilets, no baths, hot water or central heating and they proved popular and very sought-after.

The streets were named after Scottish lochs, rivers and places. The next image is of Bute Crescent, named after the Isle of Bute. This street was originally named Arran Crescent but was later changed due to the name being confused with Allan Crescent, one of the streets at the top of the estate.

In 1961, the only three high-rise blocks of flats in Dunfermline were built at Broomhead Drive, and towards the end of that decade, council housing expanded further with the building of 500 houses on the area between Garvock Hill and Woodmill Road and a further development of 87 houses between the Abbeyview scheme and Aberdour Road.

Our final image is of the junction of Wedderburn Street and Blacklaw Road in 1952 with many of the houses in that area still under construction.

More photographs like these can also be seen at facebook.com/olddunfermline, as well as in Dunfermline Carnegie Library and Galleries, where 'Old Dunfermline' DVDs will be on sale in the shop when it reopens to the public.