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348 results for “newhinton”
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@newhinton Danke, über eine Umkehr habe ich auch schon nachgedacht, aber irgendwie möchte ich schon auch eine regelmäßige Rückmeldung, dass die Skripte überhaupt laufen 🙂
Aber vielleicht lässt sich hier auch was mit der Frequenz ändern - wöchentlich sich sicher wähnen wäre auch eine beruhigende Möglichkeit.
Sonst gibt es das Bot-Konzept eigentlich nur auf zusätzlichen Plattformen, wie #mattermost , #rocketchat #matrix etc richtig?Würd's euch denn stören wenn mein HA hier zukünftig postet? 🫠
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@sesivany @newhinton I am pretty happy with #PhotoSync. Give it a try. So far I have tried #photoprism and #Immich as targets.
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in an browser cardgame at @mintapps \o/
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My mother-in-law set up the #Nextcloud app to back up photos from her #Android phone. However, no photos were uploaded. I thought she did something wrong, but in fact it was set up correctly, including all permissions. But nothing was even queued for upload. I couldn't make it work either.
I got a recommendation for #FolderSync, but it's freemium and it felt fishy with all the data consent dialogs. Then I went to #FDroid and discovered #RoundSync and wow, it's a great piece of software, clean, lean and does reliably what I want it to do. The sad fact is that @newhinton, app developer, gets 3€/month for it on Liberapay. We really need to get more money into open source apps.
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Here is an other post of my series about #^WebDAV & CO .
In the last posts we learn who to mount the Hubzilla/streams cloud by WebDAV to our desktop or phone.
Now if we would have the option to auto-sync folders into or from the Hubzilla/streams cloud this would gives us even more abilities and extended usability.
For auto-sync folders form an android phone you can try RoundSync
#^https://github.com/newhinton/Round-Sync/releases
The project builds on rclone and is fork from RXC
#^https://github.com/x0b/rcx
#^https://f-droid.org/packages/io.github.x0b.rcx/
RXC is also a very useful app but it is lacking the auto-sync function.
After you set up the WebDAV remote connection in RoundSync you can add tasks and timer for triggering the different tasks - i love it.
On your desktop and if you are on Linux you can have a look at Celeste
#^https://github.com/hwittenborn/celeste
#^https://flathub.org/apps/com.hunterwittenborn.Celeste
First set up the WebDAV connection and add to the URL also a folder in your cloud if you like
than set up the local folder like:
Celeste works very well - the downside is that we can´t set a time-period for syncing... when Celeste is running sync will start every 2 second...
Auto-sync folders can be very useful for a lot of things, not just for backups.
You may post and tell us about the use cases you come up with.
I use it to save my photo collection of images i find in the web to a HZ photo album. Also edited notes from Joplin can be shared this way automatically.
In the next post i will show an Android audio player which can play your privat music /audio file collection from your WebDAV streaming cloud.
STAY TUNED and keep following
#WebDAV #DAV #Hubzilla #Streams #Howto #Cloud #Sync #auto-sync -
NONE OF Y'ALL LOVE ME! I HAD TO FIND SOMETHING ALL BY MYSELF! 😔 *pouts*
ok, it looks like RoundSync may be the app am looking for. am testing it right now.
https://f-droid.org/packages/de.felixnuesse.extract/
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@SanskritFritz Bzgl. #RoundSync: Hmmm. 😐 https://github.com/newhinton/Round-Sync/issues/258
Eigentlich mega cooles Projekt! Es gibt einen halbwegs gepflegten Fork, aber das lässt für so ein Langzeitprojekt wie Backups, wo ich keine akute Sorge um die Einstellung der Software haben will, doch einen bitteren Beigeschmack.
@schlackenfuchs @Datenpunks -
I have just found out up to date version of #rclone can be used on non-rooted #android devices thanks to the #round-sync app. github.com/newhinton/Round-Syn… cc @IzzyOnDroid -
@Thebratdragon @auguryignored I think Peter F. Hamilton announced a new project that is due this year.
(He also confirmed sequels to the salvation-sequence, im very excited)
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@Thebratdragon @auguryignored I think Peter F. Hamilton announced a new project that is due this year.
(He also confirmed sequels to the salvation-sequence, im very excited)
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@Thebratdragon @auguryignored I think Peter F. Hamilton announced a new project that is due this year.
(He also confirmed sequels to the salvation-sequence, im very excited)
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@Thebratdragon @auguryignored I think Peter F. Hamilton announced a new project that is due this year.
(He also confirmed sequels to the salvation-sequence, im very excited)
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@Thebratdragon @auguryignored I think Peter F. Hamilton announced a new project that is due this year.
(He also confirmed sequels to the salvation-sequence, im very excited)
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The thread about the excavation of parts of Edinburgh’s old cable tramway system from beneath Leith Walk, what the various pieces of ironmongery were and how it all worked
This thread was originally written and published in bits and pieces between 2000 and 2022 as bits of tramway came out of the ground. It has substantially re-written here to create a coherent story.
In a previous post I covered how (and why) Edinburgh came to use cable-hauled trams in the 1880s and why Leith didn’t, and also some basics of how that system worked.
The principal of operation of a cable hauled tramway is quite simple. Between the tram tracks is a slot, in which there runs an endless loop of moving cable. The cable is powered by steam engines in a winding house, from where it runs around the system under the streets on an ingenious (and complex) series of pulley wheels. The tram car is fitted with a pair of grippers which slide into the slot; to move forward it grabs the cable with a gripper and to stop it releases the cable and applies its brakes. To move across junctions, between different cables or to pass subterranean obstructions such as pulley wheels, it can perform an elaborate ceremony whereby it grabs and releases different cables with the front or rear grippers – often with a little bit of gravity assistance.
1882 American diagram of a hypothetical cable tramway system. The winding house with its steam engines, gearing and cable drums is towards the top. The cables exit the winding house in a tunnel under the street and then head off around the system in the slot between the tracks, guided by a large system of pulleys.One of the most common finds has been sections of old tramway rail. A tramway rail differs from a railway rail in that the rail has a flat top with a groove in the middle of it for the flange of the wheel to run in; a railway rail has a domed top and the wheel flange hangs over the side. The rails were relaid when the move was made from cable traction (or in Leith’s case, horse) to electric, so none of the dug up rail sections will be from cable days.
Tram rails on Leith Walk, notice the dark line on the top which is the groove for the wheel flange to run in. © selfThe next most common item that was seen during excavations were the U-shaped cast iron “chairs” that formed the supporting base of the conduit structure in which the cable ran beneath the street surface. To better understand what were are looking at (and for, underground), a cross-section of a cable tramway is helpful, I can’t find one for Edinburgh so one from San Francisco will do as the two were fairly similar. The chairs are coloured yellow, and sat on the concrete base of the conduit.
San Francisco Cable tramway cross-section. The rails are coloured green; the horizontal ties in blue; the top of the conduit structure in orange; the supporting chairs in yellow; the small cable support pulleys in pink; and the cable gripper in red.The Edinburgh system did not use the orange cast slot shown below; it used old rails laid on top of the cast iron chairs to form the slot. Additionally it did not have the small pink cable support pulleys; it used larger, 14inch diameter pulley wheels spaced every 50 feet.
Section of an illustration of a hypothetical cable tramway system, which seems very similar to the system in use in Edinburgh. Note the cable running through the conduit and over the support pulleyThe picture below shows a pile of these iron chairs dug out from beneath Leith Walk, plus sections of old rail that had been used to form the horizontal ties. Notice the chairs are caked in old concrete, as they were set into the conduit when it was being poured.
Cable conduit support chairs, September 2021 © selfCable conduit support chairs, December 2020 © selfNone of the cast iron chairs are complete; all are missing their top sections; cut and cracked off. However it was not the excavation works of 2021 that caused this, it were those of 1921! A a book kindly provided to me by Chris Wright has a photo of Hanover Street, c. 1921, on the cover. In this scene, a crowd watches workmen digging up the old cable conduit system during the switch over to electric traction (which was apparently the first use of pneumatic drills in the city). The caption explains that for ease, the workmen only removed the top section of the conduit chairs when removing them; the lower sections were left concreted into their bases. There are a couple of broken sections of chair in the pile of rubble below the boy with the cricket bat.
Edwin Catford’s Edinburgh, coverThe cables themselves were driven from the four winding houses at each of the tramway depots; Henderson Row, Tollcross, Portobello and Shrubhill (off Leith Walk). We see the Shrubhill winding house interior in the images below. The engines, each with two cylinders and producing 500hp, are in the foreground. They are connected to the cable system by the ropes strung between the pairs of enormous drums. The larger drums, in the back ground, were connected to the 10 foot diameter cable-driving pulleys.
Interior of Shrubhill winding house, seen from the side of the enginesInterior of Shrubhill winding house. The two wheels in the foreground are those that would drive the traction cables.The cables were tensioned on weighted pulleys hung from the wall of the winding house, before exiting the building down a long tunnel from the winding house off Dryden Street at the northern end of the site to Leith Walk. The below photo shows the remains of one of these tunnels being demolished in the 1960s during works outside Shrubhill.
Brick arch of the cable tunnel on the right.These tunnels ran to large brick chambers beneath the road surface and ran off up and down Leith Walk. Each cable required two pulleys; one for it on its outbound journey and one for it returning back to the winding house. Shrubhill drove two cables, so required two sets of these pulleys in chambers below Leith Walk. The diagram below shows the State Street Cable Car power station in Chicago. The winding engines are in yellow and drive 4 sets of cables. The red and blue cables head off right and left out of the power station. The two green cables are for different lines; they travel to the start of those lines “blind” (i.e. not pulling trams), which is why they are running in between the two sets of tracks, rather than between the rails like the red and blue cables. Each cable reaches the end of its line where it turns around and comes back to the power station. Shrubhill was very similar to this but drove only two cables; one for St. Andrew Square and Leith Walk, which also served the branch to Abbeyhill, the other for the Bridges to Newington.
The Street Railway Journal, 1889The illustration below shows a cross section of those cables coming to and from the winding house down the tunnels, running around the pulleys in their chambers and then off around the network. The chambers are brick built, with arched steel plate roofs. This is a conceptual railway, but has two driven cables, rather like Shrubhill. Notice the return pulley is inclined so as to be able to sit underneath the outward pulley.
Cables to and from the winding house and running around the large underground pulleysThe below images show the destruction of the brick walls of one of the Shrubhill pulley chambers under Leith Walk. The dark patches are not tunnels, the one on the left is a recess in the chamber walls and the other seems to be a previous collapse that had been filled in with concrete.
Leith Walk at Shrubhill, November 2020 © selfLeith Walk at Shrubhill, November 2020. Notice the cast iron chair section onwards the middle bottom of the photo © selfThe image below, taken of the same overall excavation hole as those above, shows the huge steel roof section of the chamber – the frame is almost identical to drawings of one for the terminal pulley of one of the Henderson Row cables. There is a supporting structure of steel I-beams that would have sat on the brick walls and foundations, and the metal sheet sections forming the roof on which the road surface lay. The large pulleys that directed the cables in and out of the tunnels to the winding house sat directly below this.
Shrubhill cable chamber roof structure, November 2020 © selfThese chambers, and others around the system (particularly where there were junctions) were manned to make sure the cable was running properly. Children were in the habit of tying a can to a piece of string, then dropping the loose end into the slot in the road, where it would catch the cable and be dragged off up the road creating an amusing racket. If there was any snag or derailment of the cable, they would phone back to the powerhouse, who would disengage the cable until it could be reset or re-spliced, or the offending item untangled from it.
The excavations here also uncovered the structure of the railway tunnel under Leith Walk, where the North British Railway passed beneath. This was incredibly close to the surface (as a result of the tunnel being built after the road surface, and the Town Council refusing to allow the road level to be raised where it passed overhead); the outer skin of the tunnel is about only 30cm or a foot below the surface. Indeed, a special system had to be devised here to support the new tramway as there was not enough space to fit the standard concrete track slab. You will notice a large trough in the tunnel structure here. This, I think, is where the cable for North Bridge to Newington ran, as it was not used for traction purposes here and is described as “running blind” as far as Picardy Place, where it came in to use to go up Leith Street.
Leith Walk railway tunnel, May 2021 © selfThe shallowness of this tunnel totally precludes the urban myths of any tunnels under the road running up Leith Walk towards Elm Row from Shrubhill. Those tunnels are actually a single passageway, just large enough for a man to walk up, that ran under the pavement from Mcdonald Road up to Picardy Place, which was to carry the first electricity cables into the city from the McDonald Road Power Station.
When Edinburgh moved to replace its entire horse-drawn tramway with the cable system across the city, for various reasons Leith declined. Up until the last minute, it had been hoped and assumed that a compromise could be reached and that Leith would join; but it declined to do so. The Shrubhill winding house had a third winding drum for a cable round the Leith rails, but it was never used. Instead, the cable ran from the winding house at Shrubhill, turned left down the hill to the municipal boundary at Pilrig Street, and then ran back up the hill towards Edinburgh again. This meant that passengers had to change onto a Leith tram to proceed any further north (and vice versa). This 24 year inconvenience became known as the Pilrig Muddle. In the below photo, an Edinburgh cable car loads its passengers at the terminus of the line at Pilrig Street. In the background, the electric cars of the Leith system wait for the exchange of passengers heading the other way. exactly where this pit is.
The Pilrig Muddle © Edinburgh City LibrariesThere was another one of these awkward interchanges on the network, at Joppa, which I like to call the Joppa Jumble. Here the cable line from Portobello met Musselburgh’s electric system and again a change had to be made for through travel. But this was at least at the network end, not the middle of a principal route, and traffic here was much lighter
https://www.flickr.com/photos/johnmightycat/5967127413
The terminus of the cable car lines was always on a short, single line siding of track on a slight incline. If the terminus was a downhill incline; the car would disengage from the cable and run by gravity into the siding, where it would pick up the cable running back the other way with its other gripper. The process was reversed for an uphill terminus; it ran into the siding on the cable, and ran out of it by gravity to the return cable. This was required as the cable could not be gripped where the it ran around the huge terminal pulley to change direction. This is shown by the diagram below, where the terminal pulley is in blue, inclined so as to fit below the street surface. The cable (red and white dashed line) is guided to and from it by the orange pulleys.
Terminus of the Edinburgh Northern tramway from Henderson Row.Much excitement erupted at the Pilrig Muddle in August 2021 when unexpectedly (considering this shoul dhave been discovered way back during the first round of tram works), an almost completely intact terminal pulley chamber was uncovered, with not one but two huge pulleys, each totally complete and in remarkable condition. Both were still sitting on their original bearings, just as they had been left almost exactly 100 years before when they were covered up and forgotten about!
Side view of the Pilrig terminal pulley chamber and pulleys © selfOne of the terminal pulleys, approximately 8 feet in diameter. Photo Credit: ACamerunner / @aljaroo1874The Pilrig Muddle pulleys are unusual for two reasons. Firstly, they are mounted vertically, usually they were horizontal. Secondly, they are back to back, which makes little sense for the terminus of the line. I suspect they are vertical as the street is narrower here, so there was less room to fit them in horizontally. And I think there are two back to back in anticipation of the cable being extended down Leith Walk into that burgh (which of course never happened). The red pulley on the right would have returned the Edinburgh red cable back up Leith Walk to Shrubhill. The blue one on the left would have returned the blue Leith Walk cable back down to the Foot of the Walk. If the cable had been extended to Leith, at Pilrig trams coming uphill from Leith would have swapped from the blue to the red cable here as they crossed the civic boundary. Because Leith was never added to the cable system, if I am correct the blue pulley would therefore never have been used.
Side view of the Pilrig terminal pulley chamber and pulleys © selfThe below animation shows how a car would have swapped cables here. A car travels with its front gripper engaging the cable. As it approaches the end of the cable, it is released before the gripper gets dragged into the pulley. To move onto the next cable it can either use its momentum (known as a “fly shunt”), can use gravity if it is running down hill, or it can push itself off the cable onto the next one by using its rear gripper. When the front gripper is over the next cable, it can be re-enaged and the car sets off again. This was a laborious (and potentially hazardous) process, so by design a cable car network keeps junctions and switching between cables to a minimum.
Swapping cables © selfIf you look closely to the left of the archaeologist squatting on the ground peering into the chamber you can see the conduits for electrical wires on the wall along with a box. This is either for electric lighting or the communication telephone.
Electrics in the Pilrig pulley chamber © selfPilrig was not “de-muddled” until 1922 after the amalgamation of the Burgh of Leith and its Tramway into that of the City of Edinburgh. Edinburgh quickly decided to adopt the electric system of Leith and rapidly converted one to the other. The picture below shows the Muddle being converted. A cable car has reached the terminus at Pilrig Street and is about to return back up the hill. You can see the slot between the tracks for the cable. The tracks on the right are being relaid for the electric trams and a new junction to connect down the Leith Corporation tracks on Pilrig Street is being incorporated. The centre poles for the overhead wires are already in place. I suspect the reason that the Pilrig pulley chamber was left in such good condition, with its pulleys still in situ, was the speed with which the switchover was made. There was no time to demolish the chamber, remove its pulleys and infill it. The new tracks were simply built over it and connected together one night to allow for running of the electric trams the next day.
De-muddling the muddle, 1922 at Pilrig Street looking up Leith Walk.When Leith Corporation rebuilt its horse tramway for electric traction in 1904-1905, it constructed a large new depot on Leith Walk. This later became the Leith Depot of Edinburgh Corporation Tramways. Sadly the depot structure was demolished for no good reason about 4 years ago now, but the depot office building remains. During excavations at the rear of this, the brick outlines of inspection pits appeared, where the running gear could have been checked and maintained without having to lift the tram body off of it. The tram rails would have run along the top of these walls, see the lower picture for an example.
Inspection Pits at Leith Depot. These were only ever for electric cars © selfInterior of Leith Depot, pre-1920. © Edinburgh City LibrariesNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
Historic CT ice cream factory slated for redevelopment
More than five years since it stopped churning out…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Food #acpetersenfarms #Bloomfield #brownfieldscleanup #connecticut #CTnews #factory #FoodTopics #hartfordcourant #IceCream #localnews #newparkavenue #Newington #parkroad #playhouseonpark #Renovation #restaurant #restoration #Simsbury #theatre #westhartford #windsor
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2231950/historic-ct-ice-cream-factory-slated-for-redevelopment/ -
Historic CT ice cream factory slated for redevelopment https://www.diningandcooking.com/2231950/historic-ct-ice-cream-factory-slated-for-redevelopment/ #AcPetersenFarms #Bloomfield #BrownfieldsCleanup #connecticut #CTNews #factory #food #FoodTopics #HartfordCourant #IceCream #LocalNews #NewParkAvenue #Newington #ParkRoad #PlayhouseOnPark #Renovation #restaurant #restoration #Simsbury #theatre #WestHartford #windsor
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Horseless Carriages: the thread about the first motor car in Edinburgh and Scotland (and why motoring began with deliberate law breaking)
I’ve been waiting for July 19th to write this. On this exact day – 127 years ago – something momentous happened. Something that would change Edinburgh, and Scotland, forever: The first ever motor car entered the city, on the first ever (legal) cross-county drive in Scotland. Thomas R. Barnwell Elliot of Cliftonpark, Kelso, had been causing a stir in the south of Scotland ever since he imported his 3.5hp Panhard et Levassor Phaeton “horseless carriage” from France in December 1895. It was the first motor car imported into Scotland, the 7th in the UK.
T. R. Barnewall Elliot and his car. At this time the Daimler Syndicate held the British rights for Panhard et LevassorAt this time, the Locomotives Acts, meant any “locomotives” (which included motor cars) on the road were limited to 4mph (country) and 2mph (city), and a man had to walk 20 yards in front. (The red flag requirement of popular lore was actually abolished by the Locomotive Act 1878.) Barnewall Elliot was the son of the Deputy Lieutenant of the County of Roxburghshire, and had been given exemption by the county constabulary from the restrictions of this act within their borders, unless any specific complaints were raised against him.
The “Red Flag” acts didn’t actually mean a red flag was carried infront of motor vehicles.The July 17th trip took him from Kelso, via Edinburgh and Stirling, to the Highland Show at South Inch in Perth. The Provost of Perth had invited him to demonstrate his contraption there and had gained an exemption for this journey from the 14 police jurisdictions he had to pass through.
The car had been imported via the Daimler Syndicate (hence sometimes referred to as such). It had a 2hp engine, weighted 1 ton, had iron tyres, tiller steering, no radiator, ran on petrol (at the rate of 1pint / hour), had a range of 100 miles and could do 12mph on the flat. It could seat 4 persons, but on any sort of a gradient 3 of them would have to get out and walk. Barnewall Elliot took his first drive in it on December 27th 1895 and made local news headlines (and turned many a Roxburghshire head) when he drove the 50 miles from Kelso to Ladykirk in it on 31st January 1896. On February 2nd, he went to Jedburgh, where Inspector Dickson of the Constabulary stopped him. However, after a brief check of the facts and that all was in order, he went on his way again and proceeded along the Jed water.
Edinburgh Evening News illustration of Barnewall Elliot’s Panhard et Levassor Phaeton. Monday 10 February 1896On 19th March though he did something he shouldn’t have: he drove it over both county and country borders and into Northumberland. When he was stopped by the Police in Berwick, he agreed with them that he was “probably breaking the law” and he was charged. This was deliberate on Barnewall Elliot’s part, he was trying to force a test case, and was successful. He admitted to the magistrates that he drove at “up to 14mph“, defending himself with the contention that his motor car was not a locomotive as defined in those acts. The magistrates were sympathetic, but stuck to the letter of the law. Describing Barnewall Elliot as a “most obliging defendant” they found him guilty, buy only with failing to have a man walk 20 yards in front of him and fined him a total of… 6 pence! (plus 19s 7d costs)
These events made Barnewall Elliot something of a household name in Scotland. At this time, the organisers of the Highland Show were keen to have an exhibition of motor cars as it was felt they would be of great transport use to country farmers, and so Barnewall Elliot – a gentleman farmer – was the perfect man for the job. He accepted their invitation and “those who witnessed [his demonstration] were struck by its easiness and steady progress“.
He had bought his car for £250 (c. £27k in 2023). After driving a few thousand miles in it he sold it in October 1896 for £112 in order to buy another. He suffered 55% depreciation on account of the crummy build quality of these early vehicles.
A Panhard et Levassor Phaeton of the type driven by Barnewall ElliotBut although his was the first motor car imported into Scotland, and although he made the first legal road journeys in it, it was not actually the first horseless carriage in Scotland. That honour goes to Glaswegian locomotive engineer George Johnston. ohnston had been engaged by the Glasgow Corporation to build a tramcar that did not require electricity or horses. He came up with an oil-fuelled steam tram. Unfortunately it burned down before it could really prove its worth. Johnston went back to the drawing board.
Illustration of Johnston’s mechanical tramcarHe gave up on the idea of the steam tram and having seen a motor car in operation, decided he could build one of those too, but better. He imported a Panhard chassis and Daimler engine via Leith and combined them with a “dog cart” carriage body in late 1895. Very early in the morning of November 12th that year, Johnston took his machine for a test run through the streets of Glasgow. He knew full well he was breaking the law and even invited a journalist for the Scotsman along for the ride.
The Johnston Dog Cart in 1897, probably not the original model from the 1895 test run, however it did not change much in subsequent years.Not long after midnight, they set out from Springburn, taking Buchanan Street, to cross the city. They went along the Broomielaw to Shawlands “and back by a more circuitous way“. They deliberately tested a range of road surfaces, noting that macadam roads gave the best ride. The 3 occupants noted “the feeling of greatest exhilaration” on the Parliamentary Road when Johnston took them up to the giddy speed 12mph. The Glasgow Polismen on their early morning beats were dumbfounded and didn’t know what to do. The law caught up with Johnston on January 24th 1896, when he was convicted by Judge Mitchell in the Glasgow Police Court and given a token fine of 2s 6d. He would go on to become one of Scotland’s most successful early motor engineers under the Arrol-Johnston name.
1902 Arrol-Johnston Dog Cart car. Note the similarity to that in the previous photo. CC-by-SA 2.0 Graham RobertsonWhile Glasgow and Kelso took an early lead in motoring, the Edinburgh Evening News noted “Edinburgh people… Did not readily take to innovations and preferred to wait until they gained experience from others.” We can be confident that Barnewall Elliot indeed brought the first car to Edinburgh because when the Locomotive Acts were repealed on 14th November 1896, the Evening News reported there were no cars in the city at that point and his had been the only one to pass through up until then. Despite the repeal of the Acts, it was not until 11th December that another car came to Edinburgh, when Glaswegian firm Colosseum Warehouse Co. brought a Daimler with a taxi cab body to the city and gave rides in it. It took until February 1897 for a citizen of Edinburgh to troubled themselves to get a car, when Mr John Drew of Belford Road exhibited an “almost noiseless” electric car of the Neale type that he had built.
Illustration of the Neale electric car from “The Automotor Journal” March 1897It was not long thereafter that the Rossleigh Cycle Company (named for partners Thomas Ross and the Sleigh brothers) went into the chauffeuring business with a number of Daimler Dogcarts acquired for the purpose. Driver Thomas Morrison is seen here in Holyrood Park in 1897.
Thomas Morrison, Holyrood Park, in a Rossleigh Daimler Dogcart 1897.On 22nd September 1899, Sarah Renicks, a domestic servant from Broxburn, was the first reported person to be knocked down by a car, when a vehicle of the Edinburgh Autocar Co. hit her as she stepped off a tram on Princes Street. She sued for £150. In January 1900, the Edinburgh Autocar Co. was again in court, having knocked down Thomas Woolard in Newington. Sheriff Maconochie however found that the car was not being driven in a “furious and reckless manner” and that the pedestrian was at fault for not looking. In April 1900, James Collins of Duncan Street, Newington, was fined £5 (or 20 days imprisonment) for having driven his car in a “reckless and careless manner” on Lothian Road and crashed into a horse and carriage.
On June 16th 1902, the first pedestrian fatality as the result of being knocked down by a motor car took place on Princes Street. Christina Currie, 56, of Cumberland Street was hit by a vehicle being driven by Thomas Morrison as she crossed the street at the foot of the Mound. A policeman on tram points duty witnessed the event, and estimated the accused had driven at 15mph. He said he had tried to stop the vehicle but it had not. Other witnesses put the speed between 12 – 17mph. The defendant stated the victim had stepped out from behind a tramcar. A jury took only half an hour to find Morrison not guilty, however the foreman expressed “their strong disapproval of the too common practice of driving motor cars in crowded thoroughfares at too high speeds and without due regard to the safety of the public“.
Register of deaths entry for Christina Currie. (685/4 659)Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
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Wonder to debut in Newington on Berlin Turnpike with soft opening | News
NEWINGTON — A new food concept is coming to…
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The thread about Sciennes; how you pronounce it, where the name comes from and its important moment in Scottish literary history
This thread was originally written and published in February 2020.
There was some chat the other week about place names that were so unapparent in their pronunciation that they were the shibboleth of the real local. One which kept coming up for Edinburgh was Sciennes. First things first, it is Sciennes; as in Sheens; as in Machine; as in Rise of the Machines. The name comes directly from St. Catherine of Siena, a convent in her honour being established in the locality in 1517. In Scots, Siena was Seynis or Schiennes. From there it’s a short leap to the modern Sciennes, but the pronunciation has remained true to the original local form.
St. Catherine of Siena, by Giovanni Battista TiepoloThe convent occupied a 2 acre site and was surrounded by an enormous wall, some 13 feet high. The land had been fued off the Burgh Muir (common moor land owned by the city) to the Canon of St. Giles in 1513, who founded a chapel and hermitage to St. John before giving it to the Sisters.
The ruins of Sciennes convent, from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant. Probably in use as a barn at this time.Another view of the same ruins, looking north east towards Salisbury Crags in the distance. From the Hutton Drawings, vol. 2, CC-BY-SA 4.0 National Library of ScotlandGiven the location of the convent some 1,000m outside of the city walls (hence the big defensive enclosure) it is consistently missed off of all the older town plans and it’s not until Kirkwood’s plan of 1817 that it makes an appearance. We can see an old rendition of Scienes and the reference to Siena. The designation as a monastery is a mistake.
Kirkwood’s 1817 Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandNotice the 2 arrows in the above map and notice that they correspond to two obvious kinks in the modern street layouts. These mark the turn of the boundary wall of the convent – I have found a good rule of thumbs when looking at old streets in Edinburgh which is that if there is a bend or kink in an otherwise straight road that seems to serve no apparent purpose, there’s a very good chance that it respects the alignment of an even older property boundary. See this thread for instance. Or this one!
Kirkwood’s 1817 Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe presence of the convent also explains why Sciennes Street (marked in green below and now known as just Sciennes) splits off at a very shallow angle from Causewayside (red arrow) . Until the early 19th century one of the two main road south east out of the city – leaving that odd gushet formed by Lord Russell Place; it was the alignment of the original footpath to the convent from St. Giles to the north.
Ainslie’s 1804 Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAfter the quagmire of the Boroughloch began to be drained in the 18th century and the Meadows began to be laid out as a pleasant, formal park, some of the rich of the city built large villas along the southern edge. A roadway formed at the back of the plots to give coach access, meeting the old route to the convent at its eastern extremity.
Ainslie’s own Plan of 1804, showing the villa plots along the south of the Meadows. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAnd at this junction stood a place called Sciennes Hill House. This building isn’t actually on a hill as such, but when entering the city from Causewayside it is at the top of the ascending grade from the south. The Scottish philosopher and historian of the Enlightenment, Professor Adam Ferguson of Raith, lived here at the end of the 18th century. His property was ¾ miles from the city walls at the Bristo Port and so his friends took to jokingly calling it Kamchatka on account of its perceived remoteness.
Adam Ferguson in 1781, by Sir Joshua Reynolds.The National Gallery has the below sketch of the house and notes a soiree which took place there in 1786 that was attended by a young Walter Scott, Robert Burns, Dugald Stewart, Joseph Black, James Hutton and John Home! One can only imagine how inadequate you’d feel, staring into your tea, sitting round a table while that lot had a debate! This was both the first and last time that the young Scott met Burns and it was a formative experience for the former, then just 15 years old.
Sciennes Hill House. CC-by-NC National Galleries ScotlandBy this time Sciennes was a well-established place name and had given its name to that lane along the back of the big villas, as Sciennes Road, to Sciennes Hill House, to Sciennes House Place and Sciennes Hill Place. And what became of the house itself? Well, believe it or not, it’s actually still there, hiding in plain sight, even if you look straight at it. Its clever disguise is that the back of the house is now the street façade, and the house has been subdivided and reconstructed into what looks from the street to be an unremarkable tenement.
But when you look at it again when armed with the facts, suddenly things begin to look incongruous. That rubble finish doesn’t quite look Victorian, that stair door is out of alignment, and the vertical spacing of the windows is well out with its neighbours.
The rear of Sciennes Hill House is now the front.Oh and those plaques are a bit of a give away too…
Plaque on Sciennes Hill House. CC-BY-SA 3.0 Kim TraynorAnd if you can get around the back, this ain’t your usual finish for a tenement back green! It’s quite obviously the (restored) façade of an altogether different and grander Georgian house.
The original (restored) facade of Sciennes Hill House. CC-BY-SA 2.0 Kim TraynorThe rear of the building was restored in 1989 (there are pictures of it here just prior to this) and given the much quite regular appearance above. In the old engraving below it can be clearly seen where the original doorway and portico was, at 1st floor level, by the gap in the horizontal bands of masonry and window spacing.
Sciennes Hill House in 1891, from “The Literary Landmarks of Edinburgh”in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine.St. Catherine of Siena lent her name to one other street in the neighbourhood, that of St. Catherine Place, a street of grand Victorian semi-detached villas on the boundary with The Grange. For some reason though, when Bertrams Ltd. built a large factory in Sciennes, they went for a different spelling and we got the St. Katherine’s Works. Bertrams were ironfounders and engineers, specialising in roller machines for papermaking and printing.
Bertram’s St. Katherine’s Works. Note the malt kiln cupola to the right of the large chimney, from the West Sciennes Distillery. © Edinburgh City LibrariesBertram’s were a very successful company in their time, with a foundry in Gorgie at Westfield and also one in London – another St. Katherine’s Works – to serve the newspaper industry. Sadly the Sciennes works burned down in 1983 at what was a difficult time for the company, with the Scottish print and papermaking industries in terminal decline. The whole company was gone by 1985 and when new housing was built on the site later it was appropriately named Siena Gardens.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/maleny_steve/42942242202
Sciennes of course also gives its name to the local school (I am typing to you from an old teacher’s desk of that establishment, recovered from a skip). I recall the first time I saw the name, written on an Edinburgh schools football league fixtures sheet about 30-odd years ago and yes I too did imagine it was pronounced Scy-ens.
There’s one more “place” in Sciennes that’s been lost to time, which is the romantic sounding Glen Sciennes. Indeed it’s a place that never even existed anywhere but on paper as a faux-Highland brand name for the spirit from a distillery in the district belonging to Thomas Duncanson & Co. It was being advertised in the London papers in 1854 but the firm went bankrupt in 1859, so Glen Sciennes had a life span of only five years. After this the distillery ran through a number of other names; the Newington Distillery, the West Sciennes Distillery; the Edinburgh Distillery before closing in 1925 by which time it was the last malt distillery in the city. The buildings were incorporated into Bertram’s works.
1850s Post Office Directory entry for the Glen Sciennes distillery.I don’t know of any contemporary illustrations of the Sciennes distillery, but a William Channing sketch of 1852 of Sciennes Court – where the Sienna Gardens student flats are these days – shows its chimney in the background.
Sciennes Court, 1852 by William Channing © Edinburgh City LibrariesAlways be on the lookout for unexplained kinks in old streets or buildings that feel a bit out of place; if you dig into them a little bit you might find out more local history than you bargained for!
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The thread about Brydone’s Circular Delivery; trying and failing to break the Royal Mail’s monopoly
Today’s Auction House Artefacts are some intriguing postage stamps (stamps are big money on the auction scene, it seems) that unravels a really interesting local history story of their own. But these aren’t Royal Mail Stamps, they are Circular Delivery Company stamps. The Circular Delivery Companies where short lived attempts to flout the Royal Main’s postal monopoly, between 1865 and 1869. They were the brainchild of one Robert Brydone, a 33 year old Edinburgh printer and publisher. Robert was the son of James Brydone, an established printer and engraver with a good reputation around town. The family premises were on Elder Street, just off St. Andrew Square.
The Brydone family house was at the respectable address of 27 Dundas Street. Robert seems to have been on the move a bit as he goes from 5 Hope Park Terrace in Newington to 25 Gayfield Square between 1865-1866 and then is no longer in town by 1867 (more on that later).
The Brydones published railway timetables amongst other things;
Brydone’s Railway Directory. Railway Map of Scotland. 1858-1862 © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum1865 finds Robert Brydone as the manager of the Edinburgh & Leith Parcel Delivery Co., based at 4 North St. Andrew Street. Now the site of Edinburgh bus station and just around the corner from the family printing works on Elder Street. These parcel delivery companies were nothing new, they did exactly what the name suggested and moved priority parcels around town – and began charging by issuing stamps (which could be printed at the Brydone family works). The Edinburgh & Leith Parcel Delivery Co. had been founded in 1856 by Robert Ferguson, a merchant in the Kirkgate of Leith and ran “light parcel delivery vans” twice a day between the respective burghs to and from 9 different stops.
Two pence stamp for the Edinburgh and Leith Parcel Delivery Co.Robert’s brainwave was to exploit his delivery network to undercut the Royal Mail’s postage monopoly in the city. This was a curious 360° turn of events, as the very first postage network within the City had been set up by a private entrepreneur – “Indian Peter” Williamson – in the 1780s before being bought out by he Royal Mail. Brydone set up the Edinburgh & Leith Circular Delivery Co. to provide prepaid delivery for the booming market in “circulars”, magazines, newspapers etc. The Brydone presses already made the stamps for the parcel company so it was natural they should make the circular stamps too, from designs by George Oliver, engraver and die maker, of Edinburgh. None of these ideas were on their own novel, all Robert did was bring them together, and have the gumption to take on the might of the Royal Mail.
A wide selection of Edinburgh & Leith Circular Delivery Co, featuring stylised coats of arms of each respective burghBrydone was directly targeting the legally protected revenue of the General Post Office here; they weren’t so interested in the parcels business. He also had his stamps perforated and gummed so they could be issued prepaid, a direct infringement of the GPO’s patents. But for whatever reason, the GPO decided to do nothing while the practice was restricted to just Edinburgh and Leith. Brydone issued stamps to the value of 1/4d (farthing), ha’penny, 3/4d and 1d., with the rates being 1/4d for circulars, 1/2d for newspapers and 3/4-1d for books.
Sheet of One Farthing E. & L. Circular Delivery Co. stamps before perforation.The business seems to have boomed initially, with their stamps cancelled by an elegant R. B. & Co. monogram.
Robert Brydone & Co. monogram from the cancellation stampHad Brydone been content to leave it there he might have got away with it, indeed he had taken legal advice from the Lord Advocate who had shared this opinion with him, but he over-reached himself and decided to grow the concept by setting up similar Circular Delivery Companies across the whole country. Aberdeen, Dundee, Glasgow all got companies, as did Liverpool. Each got their own stamps, to a similar design inspired by the civic crest of each city.
Liverpool Circular Delivery Co. stamp, One Farthing, featuring a Liver Bird.Brydone also began to face competition himself – you can’t keep a good idea down and soon found himself up against his neighbour at Dundas Street, the stationer and printer Robert Clark, whose press was directly over the road from Byrdones’ at 15 Elder Street.
Clark & Co. Circular and Parcel Delivery stamps, notice these have no price or perforations.So now Brydone faced competition at home, form the lawyers of the Royal Mail who were not content at all for him to undercut their business across the country, and also from a third direction; Forgery. Philately was the new pass-time for the aspiring Victorian gentleman of leisure and the novel and relatively uncommon Circular stamps found themselves in huge demand (a similar thing happened with the short lived regional coinage of “Provincial Tokens”.)
Forgeries of Brydone’s stamps became common and before long Robert was declared bankrupt in 1866. His father James took on the business, moving it to the family’s Elder Street premises, and issuing new stamps to match; I assume that the removal of the price and perforations was to satisfy the Royal Mail’s lawyers.
Edinburgh and Leith Circular Delivery Co. advert from 1867, when James Brydone was the managerThe Philately website says it is “unlikely” that many (or any) of the offshoot stamps were ever used for delivery, instead they remained valuable collectables. Robert Brydone was not one to be kept down however, and moved to London in 1866. He founded the London Circular Delivery Company to carry on his ideas, merging with the Metropolitan Circular Delivery Company in 1867 to form the London & Metropolitan Circular Delivery Company.
One Halfpenny Stamp for the London Circular Delivery CompanyBrydone’s next move was the National Circular Delivery Company, which would act to connect the provincial Companies and form the basis of a national delivery network to undercut the GPO. While they did not feature the monarch’s likeness, these stamps had a very thinly altered version of the Royal Coat of Arms and were a direct challenge and affront to the Royal Mail.
National Delivery Company Stamp featuring a very official looking coat of armsEnough was enough, and the GPO took the London & Metropolitan CDC to court in August 1867, a case which they quickly and comprehensively won. Within a month, all the other CDCs were closed down too, some having never got further than having their stamps printed.
A selection of provincial stamps for the various local Circular Delivery Companies, one Farthing, 1867The parcel delivery companies carried on, but the GPO got its monopoly on the prepaid collection and delivery of letters and printed materials back. But Brydone’s basic idea was sound and in demand, and in 1870 the Royal Mail bowed to demand and introduced the “red bantam” stamp, a reduced rate stamp for the delivery of circulars and papers.
Red Bantam stamps for “circular delivery”Brydone still wouldn’t give up though, and his various companies were in court again in 1868 and again in 1869 for attempts to restart their practices by getting around the letter but not the spirit of the law (.e.g by not using prepaid stamps). Again they lost and again Brydone tried again. He registered the Circular Delivery Company Limited in 1869 and was taken to court yet again before they had even got off the ground. The GPO made it clear that they would not tolerate any form of competition, and this time it seemed to work. The railways, however saw their opportunity and very carefully got in on the act too. They restricted their practice to newspapers and parcel delivery and by not offering a door-to-door service; you picked up your items from the station. Thre’s a huge page of very beautiful railway delivery stamps on this website.
Caledonian Railway Company pre-paid parcel stamp for Central Station.Perhaps it was the death of James Brydone in 1869 that dried up Robert’s sources of funding. Robert himself died a few years later back in Edinburgh, at 10 Comely Bank, aged only 41, from phthisis (TB of the lungs) with his brother by his side. Obviously not financially ruined, but a widower.
41 Comely Bank, another fine address.He may have died relatively quietly and in obscurity but for a short time, Brydone genuinely shook the establishment. The original local delivery disruptor! His main legacy is one of interesting and collectible stamps which seem to have been heavily forged in their time.
Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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Historic CT ice cream factory slated for redevelopment
More than five years since it stopped churning out…
#dining #cooking #diet #food #Food #acpetersenfarms #Bloomfield #brownfieldscleanup #connecticut #CTnews #factory #FoodTopics #hartfordcourant #IceCream #localnews #newparkavenue #Newington #parkroad #playhouseonpark #Renovation #restaurant #restoration #Simsbury #theatre #westhartford #windsor
https://www.diningandcooking.com/2231950/historic-ct-ice-cream-factory-slated-for-redevelopment/ -
Historic CT ice cream factory slated for redevelopment https://www.diningandcooking.com/2231950/historic-ct-ice-cream-factory-slated-for-redevelopment/ #AcPetersenFarms #Bloomfield #BrownfieldsCleanup #connecticut #CTNews #factory #food #FoodTopics #HartfordCourant #IceCream #LocalNews #NewParkAvenue #Newington #ParkRoad #PlayhouseOnPark #Renovation #restaurant #restoration #Simsbury #theatre #WestHartford #windsor
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Historic CT ice cream factory slated for redevelopment https://www.diningandcooking.com/2231950/historic-ct-ice-cream-factory-slated-for-redevelopment/ #AcPetersenFarms #Bloomfield #BrownfieldsCleanup #connecticut #CTNews #factory #food #FoodTopics #HartfordCourant #IceCream #LocalNews #NewParkAvenue #Newington #ParkRoad #PlayhouseOnPark #Renovation #restaurant #restoration #Simsbury #theatre #WestHartford #windsor
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CT plans to transfer properties of former psychiatric hospital
The state of Connecticut is prepp…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Healthcare #Cedarcrest #Connecticutnews #creepy #crumbling #ctnews #DepartmentofAdministrativeServices #eerie #hartfordcourant #Health #hospital #localnews #NationalHistoricLandmark #NaturalDiversityDataBase #newington #OfficeofPolicyandManagement #patients #Psychiatric #site #stateowned #Wethersfield
https://www.newsbeep.com/us/233985/ -
CT plans to transfer properties of former psychiatric hospital
The state of Connecticut is prepp…
#NewsBeep #News #US #USA #UnitedStates #UnitedStatesOfAmerica #Healthcare #Cedarcrest #Connecticutnews #creepy #crumbling #ctnews #DepartmentofAdministrativeServices #eerie #hartfordcourant #Health #hospital #localnews #NationalHistoricLandmark #NaturalDiversityDataBase #newington #OfficeofPolicyandManagement #patients #Psychiatric #site #stateowned #Wethersfield
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1875 – St. Mary’s Church, Newington, London
Architect: James FowlerConstructed after a limited competition to design a church for 1,100 people for £10,000. The final church could seat up to 1,300. Described in Survey of London, vol. XXV by Ida Darlington (1955) as “from the designs of James Fowler, was consecrated in May 1876. It
https://www.archiseek.com/1875-st-marys-church-newington-london/
#ArchitectureOfLondon #ArchitectureOfSurrey #1875 #churches #JamesFowler #Newington -
1875 – St. Mary’s Church, Newington, London
Architect: James FowlerConstructed after a limited competition to design a church for 1,100 people for £10,000. The final church could seat up to 1,300. Described in Survey of London, vol. XXV by Ida Darlington (1955) as “from the designs of James Fowler, was consecrated in May 1876. It
https://www.archiseek.com/1875-st-marys-church-newington-london/
#ArchitectureOfLondon #ArchitectureOfSurrey #1875 #churches #JamesFowler #Newington -
The thread about the Salisbury Arms and the famous literary association that never was
Here’s an eye-catching headline one one of those sites that passes itself off as local news from today. “First Look at transformed Edinburgh boozer visited by Arthur Conan Doyle“.
Edinburgh Live headline, 25th June 2025. “First Look at transformed Edinburgh boozer visited by Arthur Conan Doyle”.The piece goes on, “Once a favourite watering hole of the iconic Sir Arthur Conan Doyle“. Stop the bus! Arthur Conan Doyle was a regular in the Salisbury Arms? That’s news to me! Now, I’ll readily admit that I don’t know everything about Edinburgh, but something here feels a bit off.
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
The Adventure of the Copper Beeches, Arthur Conan Doyle
But let’s be fair, not everyone spends quite so much time poring over local history as I do, and not everyone will be irked enough by something that troubles them to look more into it. But I’m not everyone and I was sceptical and so in the best spirit of Sherlock Holmes I set out to do a little deduction of my own. To paraphrase the great detective, when it comes to Edinburgh history “it is my business to know what other people do not know!”
Sherlock Holmes statue in Edinburgh, erected opposite the birthplace of Conan Doyle. CC-by-SA 3.0 Kim Traynor via WikimediaThe first indicator that something isn’t quite right is that the website of the Salisbury Arms itself doesn’t trouble to mention its famous literary association. The game is afoot! Delving a bit deeper, a quick tap of the keys in a search engine traces the Conan Doyle claim back to an advertorial piece from the Scotsman in June 2011. In this it is stated – without reference – “Apparently Sherlock Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle used to frequent the hostelry now known as The Salisbury Arms in Dalkeith Road.” That word apparently is key here and from it we should suspect that the author was well aware that their claim was without evidence. Wind the clock forward to January 2017 and we find in the sister publication, Evening News, a repetition and reinforcement of the claim: “The most intriguing connection the Salisbury Arms has is with the fictional private detective Sherlock Holmes” it gushes, before quickly contradicting itself; “Whether Conan Doyle was ever a visitor… is unclear” and then instantly trying to get itself out of jail with “but it is thought he dropped by on a few occasions“. Once again I think our author was very aware that there was nothing to back up the claims they were making. By this point I’m willing to stake a round of drinks on the fact that my initial cynicism is well founded.
“Historic Salisbury Arms to undergo major renovation work”, Evening News, January 14th 2017.I could stop there, but I like to be both firm and fair in my debunking and come to an argument armed with the facts, so I shan’t.
It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.
A Scandal in Bohemia, Arthur Conan Doyle
So let us take a proper look into the history of the Salisbury Arms, after all history is probably why you are reading this in the first place! Along the way I can attempt to keep my reputation intact by offering a well evidenced counter argument, I can demonstrate the sort of readily accessible sources that you a I can turn to for investigating a case such as this and and hopefully we can all learn something more of the history of the place in question and write it down for the benefit of others (particularly writers of local news!). Looking at the building in question itself, it doesn’t need an expert eye make a sure guess that it probably began life as a Georgian villa.
The Salisbury Arms, Edinburgh, 2015. © Paul Farmer, CC-by-SA 2.0 via Geograph.A quick search through the online Book of The Old Edinburgh Club – one of my frequent first ports of call for local history queries – brings us to Volume 24 and pages 152-197, “The Lands of Newington and Their Owners“, by W. Forbes Gray. In this piece we find that a house and plot here was seised (officially registered) to Francis Nalder, merchant, in 1812. Referring to a map of the area around this time – Kirkwood’s Town Plan of Edinburgh of 1817 is a reliable source, freely accessible from the National Library of Scotland – we see Mr. Nalder’s name appears as landowner here too.
Kirkwood’s town plan of Edinburgh, 1817. Showing “Nalder” on the site of the house which is now the Salisbury Arms. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandFrom Forbes Gray’s we learn that this plot was one of just many such others which were feued from the Newington Estate in the early 19th century to create a new suburb. Newington’s lands were an irregular rectangle defined by the Gibbet Loan (now Preston Street) to the north, East and West Mayfield to the south, Dalkeith Road to the east and the turnpike road south to Selkirk and Carlisle (now Minto Street) to the west. There was a large house, Newington House, in the southeastern quarter. This estate was an old one but had been split into six lots by the city back in the 16th century. Over subsequent centuries, five of the plots were acquired and combined by the Lauder of Fountainhall family, from where they passed to John Henderson of Leistoun. Henderson’s grandson bought the sixth and final plot in 1733, reuniting the estate and taking for himself the title Henderson of Newington.
1817 Kirkwood town plan of Edinburgh, highlighting the lands of Newington. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAt this time the Newington House on the above map had not yet been built and there was instead an older mansion located in the northwest corner at the end of what is now West Newington Place. It is shown on the Ordnance Survey 1849 Town Plan as Old Newington House. After Henderson the lands were acquired in 1751 by a saddler, Patrick Crichton. The financial problems of his son Alexander in the 1780s saw loans taken out, secured against the estate, which were defaulted on. One of the major creditors came to an agreement in 1803 whereby Benjamin Bell of Hunthill, surgeon, bought Newington for £5,000 thus settling the debt.
Benjamin Bell by Sir Henry Raeburn (c. 1780-90). From “Raeburn to Redpath” booklet by Bourne Fine Art, Edinburgh, via Wikimedia.Bell, “the first Scottish scientific surgeon” and “father of the Edinburgh school of Surgery” built the new Newington House but died in 1806, before he had a chance to settle in and enjoy it. It so happens that he was the great grandfather of Joseph Bell, the surgeon and lecturer known as the inspiration from which Arthur Conan Doyle formed Sherlock Holmes. So finally we arrive at a kernel of a grain of truth in at least one aspect of our story. Bell’s eldest son, George, sold Newington House to Sir George Steuart of Grandtully in 1807 and Steuart bought up more of the land shortly thereafter to form gardens around the house, but also with a farsighted view that he could feu this land himself, and his own charter indeed allowed him to do so after a period of time had elapsed. In due course, his estate-within-an-estate would later be developed into the planned suburb of the Blacket Estate.
1817 Kirkwood Plan of Edinburgh centred on Newington House, showing land owners as Sir George Stewart (sic) of Grandtully, Bart. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandHaving sold the house, George Bell and his brothers began the process of feuing the rest of their land here into plots for fashionable new suburban villas. To distinguish theirs from Steuart’s holding, they gave his district an on-trend new name which also happened to be a pun on their own: Belleville. On the 1826 feuing plan on the NLS maps site, both names are given:
“Plan of the Lands of Newington and Belleville, 1826”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThis new name for the district stuck for a short while in the newspapers, but old habits can die hard and it soon reverted back to being just plain old Newington. But two houses kept the former name alive; Belleville Lodge on South Blacket Place (now Blacket Avenue) and Belleville at 58 Dalkeith Road – which is that house which would much later become the Salisbury Arms. The first record of that name being used in connection with the house that I can find is on the 1855 valuation roll over on Scotland’s People, with the owner and occupant being listed as William Donaldson, Grocer. By 1865 he has been replaced by Miss Mary Duncan as “William Donaldson’s Representative“. She is still the owner in 1875, but the occupant is one James M. Watters, Captain.
Belleville Lodge. A gate pier carries the name “Belleville Lodge” painted on it and also on a brass plaque, complete with a sign to the right saying “Belleville Lodge. Mansfield Care”.Come 1885 there is once again a new owner and occupier; William Nelson of Salisbury Green. This latter house you can see on the 1817 map above of the Newington Estate is directly to the east of Belleville, it’s the baronial pile opposite which now forms part of the Pollock Halls complex. Confusingly the same valuation rolls show William also owned and occupied Salisbury Green at this time, it’s not clear why he needed both! He was a wealthy publisher of the family firm Thomas Nelson & Sons, whose vast Parkside Works lay just across the way, and who is known for restoring St. Bernard’s Well at Stockbridge and St. Margaret’s Chapel in Edinburgh Castle.
Salisbury Green house, a 3-storey mansion in the Scottish Baronial Revival style.Ownership of Belleville never seemed to stay with one person for long. By 1895 the valuation rolls show it was Robert Inch, a well known and prosperous seed merchant who ran his business from the Timberbush in Leith. He died there in 1912, after which it was bought by its next door neighbour, Mrs Jane Binning Burn Murdoch of Arthur Lodge . Regular listeners might be familiar with the Burn Murdoch name, she was the wife of the artist and explorer WG Burn Murdoch who was so involved in helping Edinburgh Zoo acquire its first polar bears, at the same time as indulging in his passion for trophy hunting them. The house was let out and an advert at this time gives us a description of its accommodation and features:
Newspaper advert for the lease of “Belleville” house. “Entrance hall, cloak room, 3 public rooms, billiard room, 8 bedrooms, 2 dressing rooms, 2 bathrooms, laundry and ample servants’ accommodation” plus stables and garaging. The Scotsman – 19 March 1913Mrs Burn Murdoch’s maiden name was Usher, she was a daughter of Andrew Usher of that distilling dynasty which financed and lends its name to the Usher Hall. Belleville by 1930 was in the hands and occupation of her sister, Elizabeth Usher Cunningham and in turn by 1935 it was Elizabeth’s son, Howard, who was there. Howard Usher Cunningham served with the Royal Irish Regiment during World War 1 at Gallipoli, in the Balkans and in Palestine, being awarded the Military Cross in the last theatre. He was in the fertiliser business with the family firm of J. & J. Cunningham of Leith, which was one of the five constituent companies of the Scottish Agricultural Industries conglomerate which formed in 1928. He was appointed director in 1929, rising to Managing Director in 1947. During World War 2 he was the Ministry of Supply Fertiliser Controller for the country, which earned him a knighthood.
In 1942 the house of Belleville was turned over to the Edinburgh Home for Babies and School of Mothercraft, a charitable maternity home and training establishment for both midwives and young (often single) mothers. This organisation had lost its base on Colinton Road to the Civil Defence for the duration of the war and at first had been evacuated to the countryside, but returned to the city in 1942 once the immediate threat was passed where it could better undertake its work. Usher Cunningham returned to the house briefly after the war but by 1948 it had been taken over by the Relief Society for Poles in London as the Polish House, a Polish community centre for exiles and a headquarters for organisations such as the Polish YMCA and Scottish-Polish Society.
Scotsman article, 29 January 1948, showing a picture of the dining room of 58 Dalkeith Road under the title “Polish Centre in Edinburgh”, with two columns below of description.The Polish House was transient and soon moved on as Poles in Edinburgh either emigrated or integrated, it relocated to Drummond Place where it joined the Polish Press Agency. In 1950 the Edinburgh Corporation looked to acquire the building as a remand school but it was instead opened as the Davidson Clinic, to treat young adults and children with “anxiety illnesses“. The Clinic took its name from the Davidson Church in Eyre Place, where the idea for it had been formed by the minister. It practised what we would now call psychotherapy and had been established in the city in 1941 as a charitable institution. Under its lead doctor, GP Dr Winifred Rushforth, it took a pioneering approach to dealing with nervous and anxiety conditions.
Dr Winifred Rushforth (1885–1983) by Victoria Crowe. © Victoria Crowe. Credit: Museums & Galleries EdinburghThe Davidson Clinic remained a charity and closely associated with the Church of Scotland for its existence. Never part of the NHS it relocated from Belleville in 1968 and was closed in 1973. Key members of this organisation, including Winifred Rushforth, would go on to find the similar Wellspring clinic. Belleville was now acquired again by the Usher family, this time by Thomas Usher & Sons, the brewing branch of the dynasty. Ushers successfully applied for a licence to turn it into a modern roadhouse type pub and restaurant. Despite local objections it opened as such in 1970 as the Commonwealth-games inspired Gold Medal Tavern. The Gold Medal found its way into the Alloa Brewery’s portfolio, who refurbished it in 1986 and renamed the restaurant to Waffles. With a trendy open plan dining area and kitchen, it offered “pizzas, pasta, hamburgers, steaks and chicken“. No mention was made of waffles, but traditional pub food could be had in the lounge bar.
Newspaper advert “We’ve pulled a fast one” on the refurbishment of the Gold Medal tavern. Edinburgh Evening News – 15 May 1986Roll forward the clock to 1994 and the pub was acquired by the Firkin brand of Allied Domecq who renamed it The Physician & Firkin, despite it having no obvious connection to medicine. When that chain folded in 2001 it was passed to Bass who branded it as one of their yellow-liveried, sticky-floored It’s a Scream student discount pubs with the new name of The Crags. Come 2011, the pub was re-branded and repositioned once again, becoming the more upmarket Salisbury Arms.
This has all been a very long winded way to say that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle died in 1930 and there was not a pub on the site of the Salisbury Arms until 1970! The original claim is demonstrable nonsense – he definitely never drank in, never mind frequented, this establishment. Furthermore, the association of the Bell family with the house ended in 1807 when it was sold to its first owner, some 30 years before the birth of Joseph Bell. So the chance that he or Conan Doyle have any further connection with it is slim to nil.
So why is any of this important? Am I just showing off about being right about something? Shouldn’t I be magnanimous and attribute this to an innocent journalistic error? Well, you’re probably reading this page because you have an interest in Edinburgh and local history, so I will try and explain why I think that it matters and why you too should be bothered.
Arthur Conan Doyle in 1914, photograph by Walter Benington. Via WikimediaThe first problem is that despite the best efforts of their owning companies to try and destroy all trust in them over the last 20 or so years, faith is still put by many in local newspapers as they trade on past reputations and a lack of alternatives. They and their websites are still held as being reliable places to find things out and they still command a wide local reach; people will read what they write and there’s a good chance they will accept it. Why shouldn’t they? The Evening News even has a strapline at the top of every page which says “News you can trust since 1873“, it invites you to believe it. So when it publishes historical facts without substantiation, they will inevitably become accepted as facts. The irony is not lost on me that a lot of what you will read on this very website has been arrived at by trawling through previous generations of these very local newspapers. I too have to trust that what was being printed in the pages of the Evening News or the Scotsman at the time was an accurate and factual record.
But this shouldn’t be a problem I hear you say, people have the sum of the world’s knowledge at their fingertips these days and can just check a search engine to verify a fact. So let’s do just that and perform a quick experiment by doing what many people do these days to adjudicate a point: let’s ask Google “which pub did Arthur Conan Doyle drink in?”.
Oh, so it was The Salisbury Arms. Mea culpa, if it’s on Google it must be true, right? But give the result a second glance, that’s not actually a search result. That’s an answer automatically generated by Google’s AI Overview and presented above and before the actual search results. It’s what some might call machine generated slop, an approximation of what looks like a plausible answer arrived at by a statistical analysis of a very large data set. It is the year 2025 and the problem of the Evening News presenting theory as fact is no longer confined to the reach of its own readership. Local news websites are now constantly crawled and trawled as the training material for the Large Language Models that are commonly referred to as AI. Local news is the factual foodstuff, chewed, digested, reconstituted and regurgitated by the LLM. And as the old saying goes, if you put garbage in you’ll get garbage out.
Give the above result a third glance and you see a little vague link symbol at the end of the word soup of that first paragraph. Click that link and it will suggest to you the source from which it came to its conclusions. So I did this and what should we see but two “references”, the oldest of which is only a day old and is the very same article which got me started! The second is a copy-and-paste effort of the first, barely hours old on the internet at this time.
And here is the big problem I’ve been trying to get at. We’ve just got a complete worked example of Google inventing itself a new fact about an important figure in Edinburgh local history, and people will believe it, because it is Google and that is were a huge number of people turn to for information, and because it is substantiated by links to local news websites, which many people still put trust in. That fact is now out of the bag and once it’s out, it is very hard to put it back in. Check in on the above search in a few months, weeks, or even days and you will undoubtedly see the fact has replicated itself across multiple other sources like a virus. And those sources will now in turn be consumed once again by Large Language Models, which will spit out the same result in future with ever more confidence. We’re all going to have to get used to accepting a lot less of what is presented to us fact and doing a lot more of our own verification if we want to find out the actual answer…
Ouroboros, the serpent consuming its own tail, a symbol for eternal cyclic renewalIf you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.
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