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“The Station Nobody Wanted”: the thread about Leith Central

Has there ever been a more remarkable railway terminus than Leith Central?

Sandy Mullay, The Station Nobody Wanted, Blastpipe No. 73, Scottish Railway Preservation Society, 1986.

If you stand in the car park of the Tesco supermarket at the foot of Easter Road, you could be forgiven for thinking the mighty walls you are confronted with are the remnant of some long-gone defensive rampart. And you’d be half right; they are a monument to a bitter and protracted corporate conflict waged in 19th century Scotland, a fortification thrown up by one combatant to deliberately keep another out of its territory. For these are the remains of Leith Central Station, about which everything was remarkable: its size, its cost, its short operational life, and the fact it was built by a company that never wanted it.

Leith Central owes its origins to the interminable struggle between Scotland’s two predominant Victorian railways: Edinburgh’s North British and Glasgow’s Caledonian. Wherever the two met, they fought: each built lines to block, circumvent or duplicate the other’s. The eventual result in Edinburgh and Leith was a confused spaghetti of railways that didn’t necessarily serve the travelling public well.

As the final decade of the nineteenth century approached, the North British had the upper hand in the east of the country. The completion of the Forth Bridge approached and the hostilities had somewhat fizzled out for the time being. They might have been forgiven for thinking their position in the city was unassailable; the Caley’s mainline had never got further east than its Edinburgh terminus of Princes Street Station and their route to Leith was by way of a circuitous backtrack of a branch. The NB was content with this situation but the Caley had other ideas and was hatching a plan to upset this status quo. They would build a fourth line to Leith and would do so in the most bold and direct manner: tunnelling east beneath Princes Street to a new underground station at Waterloo Place. From there they would continue staight through the Calton Hill and over London Road before turning towards the heart of Leith. And they wouldn’t stop there, they would press on to connect with their existing line at Newhaven, thus completing a circular suburban line around the north of Edinburgh. This would be a counterbalance to the NB’s suburban circle around the south of the city. The threat to the incumbent did not end there, crucially this scheme would give the aggressor a direct route to Leith docks from the east, wherein lay access to the black diamonds of the Midlothian coal traffic.

Leith Town Council was desperate for better transport links to the burgh and enthusiastically threw its support behind the plans. But the full weight of the Edinburgh establishment was dead set against them: they would defile Princes Street and the disruption would far outweigh any benefits. The city thus sought to scupper the scheme. This was a point not lost on the North British, to whom the Caley’s plan was a direct declaration of war in its own front yard. That railway didn’t really want to build another line to Leith, but came to realise one could be used as a means to ruin the Caley’s eastern aspirations once and for all. More importantly, it could be used as political leverage to get them what they truly desired and desperately needed. The completion of the Forth Bridge had shown the capacity and facilities of Waverley, what should have been their premier station, to be totally inadequate. Transport chaos was reigning there and a complete rebuild and expansion was urgently required.

What would become the Leith Central scheme was not therefore a stand-alone proposal. It was actually just one part of a wider bill, passed as the Waverley Station Extension Act 1891 on August 5th that year. With this the NB got what it wanted; Leith Central was the price it had to pay the Corporations of Edinburgh and Leith for their support. From the very beginning  it was thus an unusual railway, built not because there was any real need for it, or because it would make its operator any money, or because the company even wanted it. It was purely to be built to spite the competition.

The Act gave powers to acquire twelve acres of land in Leith for a new station – a whole block between Leith Walk and Easter Road, bounded by Duke Street to the north. A third of this was to be made available as compensation to the Caley; Leith Town Council remained naively hopeful that the two sworn enemies might come to terms and open a joint station. This area was already well developed and a significant amount of property would have to be acquired and demolished. This included the Central Hall, a billiards emporium that had begun life as a Methodist Chapel, and the Central Bar just around the corner. The railway agreed to provide the proprietor of the latter, John Doig, with a replacement establishment. To this day that remains called the Central Bar and Doig’s name is still to be found within the stained glass panels displayed in its windows.

If Leith thought it would get its new railway any time soon then it was badly mistaken. The NB was focussed on the Waverley redevelopment and so deliberately dragged their heels. Progress was glacial, especially by Victorian standards. They took five years to authorise the start of work, which did not begin until February 1896. It took eighteen more months to complete the plans and submit them for approval of Leith’s councillors. Despite the latter’s chagrin at the pace they were most pleased with what they saw. Their only amendments were to request a prominent public clock on the corner with Duke Street and the raising of the height of the approach bridge over Easter Road by two feet. The railway readily agreed to the first but counter-proposed on the second that the Burgh should instead lower the street level by fifteen inches. This was accepted and to maintain the existing thresholds the pavement was stepped down to the carriageway, something that has long caught out drinkers stumbling out of the Persevere bar.

The appointed engineers were Cunningham, Blyth and Westland of George Street, who had recently completed the new North Bridge and doubled the approach tunnels to Waverley. In September 1898 the Railway Times reported that demolition works had concluded and initial construction begun on the station’s frontage onto Leith Walk (200 feet long) and Duke Street (220 feet). This was the only part of the project completed in any sort of haste: by the summer of 1899 its commercial premises were being let and bringing in valuable rental income. Work did not commence on the actual branch line from Waverley until 1901, a decade after the Act of Parliament. The pace remained positively lethargic and it took two further years to complete that mile of track.

As Leith Central began slowly to rise from the ground though, it was clear for all to see that the scale of it was staggering. It was 830 feet long from end-to-end. Its footprint was 15,900 square metres (about 4 acres), making it almost a quarter the size of Waverley. It was just a smidgen smaller than the Caley’s Princes Street terminus (16,500 square metres) and totally dwarfed Haymarket (8,400 square metres), the NB’s second station in the city.

The concourse and platforms were raised up to first floor level to allow the approach tracks to cross over Easter Road. Offices and waiting rooms were at this level and there was 4,500 square feet of vault space beneath. In sharp contrast to the notoriously low and claustrophobic Waverley, the whole lot was topped off with a lofty glass roof it engineered by none other than Sir William Arrol and Co. who had built the Forth Bridge. Rising above the four storey tenements adjacent, author Alasdair Wham described it as a “huge glass cavern over sixty feet high… which broadened from 100 feet at the Easter Road end to more than double that width”. A Scotsman columnist would later write “when a gale is blowing off the [Forth], the whole roof rattles and groans“. Despite the vast scale though there were only four platforms, although each was 790 feet long. The interior was electrically lit and so was the clock – the latter at the request of Leith Town Council who agreed to pay the meter.

Above the frontage on Duke Street were two further storeys containing flats for railway servants. The rear windows of these looked down upon the concourse and there was a private stairway down to platform level. One of the more notable occupants would be a clerk called George Mathers who in 1935 he was elected as MP for Linlithgowshire. He boasted to the newspapers that his commute to London was unique: he could get from his “own back door” to London Kings Cross without ever stepping out from a station and “getting his feet wet“.

The station was advantageously located at the Foot O’ the Walk with its principal public entrance was on the corner below its clock. Around the corner there was a ramp up to a vehicle entrance on the corner of Crown Place and from Easter Road there was a further entrance giving access through a subway beneath the tracks. (the extreme length of the station however gave a rather long hike to reach trains from this direction.)

To control the complex arrangement of approach tracks and carriage sidings, there was an 81-lever signal box located at track level at the eastern end. This also controlled access to a turntable on the opposite side of Easter Road, used for turning locomotives around at the end of their journey.

As 1903 dawned, Leith Town Council was frustrated that it was still not open. They wrote to the railway in April to enquire when that might change; the reply came that Major Pringle of the Board of Trade would begin his approval inspection on May 30th. This passed off without difficulty and opening was finally set for July 1st. The North British was now confronted with a final bill as monumental as the building: £500,000 (c. £57 million in 2026). This was a huge sum for the time, to put it into context it was a third of what the entire reconstruction of Waverley had set them back. The company had a long-standing reputation for this sort of spendthriftness, much to the frustration of its shareholders.

Yet the North British was also notoriously penny-pinching, and they took this to extremes in the utterly minimal effort they put into the opening of Leith Central. There was little in the way of advance advertising; a stationmaster had not yet been appointed; only a single ticket window was staffed and the refreshment rooms remained shuttered. No ceremony was arranged, and the Town Councils of Edinburgh and Leith weren’t even invited. On the appointed Wednesday morning, the 5:55AM to Waverley simply departed the station as the new timetable stated it would and that was that. The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch likened the little engine that pulled the first train out of the huge station to a “Skye Terrier pup in its four storey kennel“.

Such was the railway’s disinterest that they didn’t even bothered to open the entrances! Instead a single, poorly-signed and half-hidden door served as the only way in or out. This caused problems to members of the public who were trying to find their way in. The Rev. Thomas Crerar of North Leith United Free Church soon wrote to the company to complain that he had been unable to find it and instead “accidentally” found himself in the Central Bar. To begin with the only service offered was a shuttle service to Waverley. This took just 6 minutes from Leith (uphill) and 5 minutes on the return (downhill). These trains were nicknamed Penny Jerks on account of the short, sharp journey, but their frequency – just twice an hour – was poor. The Saturday service was lighter yet, but on the opening week a one-off excursion was run to Portobello and Musselburgh. Come the Sabbath however and the gates remained firmly locked to the travelling public, a precedent that was maintained for the entirety of its working life.

Despite their best efforts to discourage patronage the NB soon found they had a hit on their hands. Almost 16,000 tickets were sold in the first four days. The reason proved obvious – the competing tramway to Edinburgh remained horse-drawn for half the route before a change on to Edinburgh’s cable system; the infamous Pilrig Muddle. Slowly the railway began to respond to the success of their massive investment. Within a month they opened the main entrance beneath the clock, followed shortly thereafter by that on Easter Road. In September a permanent station master was appointed: Alexander Somerville from Abbeyhill. The same month the list of destinations was expanded by making Central the start and end point of the half-hourly “circle” services that ran around the Suburban & Southside Junction line (aka the South Sub). This was an operational benefit to the railway as previously trains had to be held at Waverley for 15 minutes, time instead used for the additional revenue-making run to Leith. Abbeyhill thus became the only intermediate direct stop between Central and Waverley, although space had been left between the tracks for another at Hawkhill. Finally, in December a second ticket window was opened.

The revised circle service proved a success too, having hitherto been rather unpopular. As a result the prices were lowered a new “Zone Ticket System” for regular commuters was introduced. It also allowed the old South Leith Station to finally be closed, its handful of services to and from Midlothian being relocated to Central. Further expansion of the destination list was limited to extending a few Glasgow and Dundee services through from Waverley. Thus for most of its life, Leith Central essentially remained an outsize terminus for weekday local commuters, punctuated by occasional busy spells for holiday, excursion and football specials.

Much of the initial bump of success was at the company’s own expense however: the North British found patronage at their North Leith station on Commercial Street suffered a 20% drop. The truth was that Leith only had so many passengers to offer and while the new station provided the quickest route to Edinburgh they were happy to use it. But the NB seemed content with this arrangement; they had seen off the challenge from the Caley and now they could sit back and profit from the lack of direct competition with minimal further effort.

On May 23rd 1915, Leith Central had the grim honour of receiving the first of over 120 local victims who had lost their lives in the Quintinshill Railway Disaster the previous day. These were the remains of the men of A & D Companies, 1/7th Royal Scots, a unit formed largely of volunteers from Leith. Most had departed the same station just a month earlier for Stenhousemuir, where they would complete their basic training before being ordered to the front at Gallipoli. On their return they were taken the short distance to a makeshift morgue in the Battalion’s drill hall on Dalmeny Street. This catastrophe caused an estimated 227 deaths and 246 injuries: the worst rail disaster in British history. The shattered remnants of the regiment would return through Leith Central once more after the war’s end to a heroes welcome.

When peace returned, the NB’s still maintained its competitive advantage on the Leith to Edinburgh traffic, but not for long. In 1922 the Pilrig Muddle was finally resolved after 28 years when Leith was integrated into Edinburgh’s new electric tramway. This caught the railway not just caught napping, but fast asleep: the “cars” served far more destinations, more frequently, were much faster for cross-town journeys and were cheaper.

The effect on Central’s traffic was immediate; it crashed. With its principal source of revenue largely poached, it was now patently obvious to any remaining doubters what Leith Central really was:

A massive White Elephant

W. A. C. Smith, writing about Leith Central in “Edinburgh’s Last Days of Steam”, 2003

The NB has been accused of taking its eye off the ball, however perhaps this can be excused. It was a time of great upheaval in the industry and it was facing a far more existential threat than trams. In 1923 the Government took the drastic action known in as “The Grouping“, which rationalised over one hundred companies into just four in an effort to make them profitable. The NB found itself merged into the new London and North Eastern Railway (LNER). This vast new organisation had much more pressing matters to worry about as than a provincial commuter station (even a very big one). They would therefore refrain from efforts to try and stimulate new sources of traffic on or modernise the Central branch and it remained steam worked until the end.

With not much to do around the place, one of the station master’s principal duties appears to have been holding the keys for the large numbers of flats and shops for let within the station. The railway tried to find uses for the excess of unused space around the place. A number of rooms were given over for training of their volunteer ambulance teams and competitions between the different stations were frequently held here. They also used it for the annual auction of the unclaimed lost property from across their network. The Evening News reported on a real Ali’s cave of bargains up for grabs. Lots ranged from expected items such as watches, golf clubs, tennis rackets, umbrellas, musical instruments, suitcases, spectacles, prams, bicycles and jewellery to the more unusual: deck chairs, a trouser press, a sewing machine, a wheelbarrow, false teeth, a basket of pot lids, a bell tent, sails for a yacht and even a collapsible boat!

For most of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, Central lived the life of a quiet, if vast, backwater. That changed in 1937 when it had its most eventful and unusual year. On June 23rd there was a “melee” outside when a party of Fascists – intent on making a public speech – was met, surrounded and attacked by the Leith Mob. Police who had been waiting for the trouble in the station took some time to restore order. On August 6th a workman, George Fraser of 53 Dumbiedykes Road, was killed when he fell through the station roof onto the platform below. He landed on his colleague Robert Beveridge, also of Dumbiedykes Road, who was seriously injured as a result.

On 29th October there was a serious early-morning fire, which spread from a waiting room and took nine hours to extinguish. Firefighters had to contend with the panes of glass in the roof above shattering in the heat and raining down shards upon them. When the smoke cleared it was found that the timber facings and decking of two of the platforms had been destroyed for a length of 112 yards. Five coaches and three horse vans were also burnt out. Little in the way of permanent damage was done though and services were back up and running the next day at 9AM. The same cannot be said for the resident pigeon population however, most of whom were asphyxiated by the smoke. A further fire in the roof on 30th November was more minor and was brought under control by a single fire engine, causing just £100 of damage.

The station had a relatively quiet war, with services cut back and the Easter Road entrance closed for reasons of economy. The long platforms meant it was regularly used for troop and hospital trains. The sales of lost property were particularly competitive during wartime as eager buyers sought to get items that were no longer readily available, particularly clothing.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/47179713432

When peace returned the 1946/47 timetable issued by the LNER would be their penultimate. It shows the Jerks were week days only, with a small number of services working morning, mid-day and evening commuter patterns. There were twelve services per day from Leith. Three in the morning (the first at 5:41); five around mid-day including and four for the evening – the last departing at 18:10. There was a single through-train to Glasgow each day. From Edinburgh there were ten trips in the opposite direction; four for the morning (the first at 7:21), four for the mid-day and two in the evening, the last at 18:55. There were seven departures from Leith a day on the Suburban “outer circle” line, and ten in the opposite direction. As with the Jerks, these were concentrated in morning, mid-day and the early evening. The last train left Central each week day at 18:11, the last arrived at 19:00. On Saturdays the service was lighter yet and on Sunday there remained no service at all.

The following year, the second major change of ownership came and on 1st January 1948 the railways were nationalised. The first timetables issued by the new British Railways basically maintained the LNER’s scant service pattern at the station. An unusual visitor arrived in 1948 when an exhibition of new and unusual rolling stock was put on for the public. The star draw was the Silver Princess, a modern American showcase design built by the Budd company and with a striking exterior finish of polished, corrugated stainless steel.

Nationalisation ushered in a new era for the railways but for Leith Central it meant rationalisation. It was an obvious early candidate for cost cutting and in March 1952 the Scottish Region announced that all services would be withdrawn from April 7th that year: less than fifty years after they began. An alternative but lengthier route from Edinburgh to Leith would be maintained on the former Caledonian line from Princes Street Station to North Leith (which at this time was confusingly renamed Leith North!) Parcels traffic was re-routed to Waverley station and delivered onwards to Leith from there. The Scostman reported “there was a melancholy air of impending dissolution in the Central. A train was being prepared to go out on its journey through the suburbs. There is only one full-scale train a day from the Central – the 12:45 to Glasgow.” In a somewhat appropriate symmetry to the occasion of its opening, there were no ceremonials at closing. Just four years later, the last of the city’s trams would also be withdrawn: they had killed off Leith Central decades before and in turn were killed off by a deliberate policy of “busification”.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/49512520986/in/photolist-2irfBuW-2j3H7or-2npqwSM-XVEzW3-2kBmVuA-2orYhB6-2jkWLwJ-2aygLjN-2g4gbQM-SPyAj3-2nCsqbD-2dfiX7F-FwivHN-2jtQsbn-2jw5G61-2nu2SFg-2b4tbsC-2aXH8NC-2kBKrxP-2meizEe-ahQGYA-2iYw7be-2quoJrq-2ipAoMz-2paa5NZ-2kDaDxT-2dpLx5y-2n2zfV2-2mUEF4F-2iUACkS-2o2HJpX-2k8kAxP-G6z1jy-GatKs7-PiB7sG-2gwqdWb-2nhKRBh-2kUDVE1-2fcYeZR-2hjD4kK-QTDKkb-7KdeUY-2jURgV5-2h7TCiT-2jeutfC-2hAwefp-e3wHHc-Q9MAQr-2qyhwf1-ZFF1re

Curiously, despite the removal of all its services, the station actually remained in use and the Outer Circle suburban trains continued to start and finish their journeys there: but the carriages were empty and you couldn’t get on or off! For a few years the place was used for such marshalling of services as well as the storage and cleaning of coaching stock. A new purpose came in 1955 when work began to convert it to a dedicated maintenance facility (code 64H) for the new generation of diesel rail cars. These were taking over Edinburgh’s remaining suburban rail routes and also those to Glasgow. The depot also served as a training school for these new vehicles. It’s somewhat ironic that these were exactly the sort of modern, efficient units that really could have benefited the station when it was in operation.

The new era would prove to be even shorter than the first. Edinburgh’s suburban rail network was cut back to almost nothing over the coming decade, the last services running in 1968, and in 1972 the Glasgow multiple units were replaced by locomotive stock. Much of Leith Central Depot’s work therefore evaporated before it ever really got going and it closed in 1972, its few remaining duties relocated to Millerhill and Haymarket.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/49362392322/

A final passenger service had been worked on October 16th 1971, a special put on for enthusiasts, but in April the next year once again Central was closed without ceremony and found itself abandoned. The access bridge over Easter Road was removed within the year, definitely precluding any further railway usage.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/54917798746/

The railways could be a dangerous place to work and there were a number of fatalities at Leith Central and along its branch during its operational life.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/16881499619/

Plans did not take long to materialise for the next phase of Leith Central’s life. In March 1973 the Scotsman reported that Bovis Properties (Scotland) Ltd proposed to clear the site and redevelop it in an £8 million scheme for shops, offices and a 500 space car park. This ultimately came to nothing and in 1974 BR told the same paper they were “re-exploring the possibilities“. “Re-exploration” took four years and it was not until 1978 that Edinburgh District Council announced they were in negotiations to acquire the site and turn it into “Britain’s biggest indoor sports stadium“. This ambitious £6 million proposal would cater for twenty-seven different pursuits and would have included a central multi-purpose main arena with athletics track and further arenas for general sports, carpet bowls and squash. There would be two practice halls, a training gym and even a “projectile range“. The Council purchased the site for £440,000 in 1979 and spent a further £160,000 on planning.

The scheme was proposed by a Conservative controlled council, but in an odd reversal for the usual precedent of British politics it found itself cancelled by pressure from Labour ranks. This happened in April 1982 on account of ballooning costs and a lack of funds. The station had now been abandoned for a decade and was succumbing to the vandals as the authorities tried to work out a future for it.

With their sports centre scheme dead in the water, in 1983 the District decided to dispose of the problem site on the private housing market. There was an initial flurry of interest but only a single, derisory offer was forthcoming, one that less than half what the authority had paid for it. 1980s Leith was severely economically depressed and was already awash with brownfield residential development opportunities. The District reluctantly approved the sale to Barratt Developments but this was blocked in 1984 by an incoming Labour administration.

Once again it was back to the drawing board for Leith Central, which now entered the final and most notorious chapter of its life. Its vast interior was reduced to the haunt of alcoholics and drug addicts and would be immortalised in Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting. The title comes from the chapter “Trainspotting at Leith Central Station“, a sardonic joke on the fact there had been no trains to spot there in twenty years. While the station plays a symbolic part in the story, representative of “a disintegrating and ignored community“. In the prequel, Skagboys, the character Spud will misidentify the former Caley railway bridge crossing Leith Walk as “the auld line ootay Leith Central Station“.

The Labour District Council proposed a new scheme in 1986 that included a 30,000 square foot supermarket to help fund a new leisure centre. This proposal was immediately delayed however when Lothian Regional Council counter-proposed a new Leith Academy secondary school nearby that included community sports and recreation facilities, including a pool. Updated plans were made public the following year for a £12m scheme for a 35,000 square foot supermarket and a leisure pool (“the finest in Scotland“). All but the listed station buildings along Leith Walk and Duke Street, and northern retaining wall, would be demolished. With very limited public funding available, a private sector partner was brought in to finance and build the scheme: Walker Construction (Scotland) Ltd of Livingston.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/52809440@N03/37552337810

Work was due to begin in October 1988 but an eleventh-hour spanner was thrown in the works when the Council was told that their intended leaseback financing for the pool was not viable. A revised financial package was approved in December; they would instead borrow £3m to build the shell of the pool themselves and Walkers would finance the interior fit-out and plant, which would be leased back. The Scottish Development Agency (SDA) contributed £1.4 million to clear and level the site, with the Supermarket being financed entirely privately.

The Trainspotting years came to an end in January 1989 when Dalton Demolition moved in and got to work. In March two passers-by were hospitalised and three cars were written-off when a 63 foot section of the station wall collapsed onto Duke Street. The contractors salvaged the station’s dressed stone and offered it for sale. Some pieces were acquired by the Scottish-Italian artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi who had been born next door in Crown Place. He incorporated them into the planting around his Manuscript of Monte Cassino sculpture outside St Mary’s Cathedral on Picardy Place. These stones were later relocated to London Road Gardens when the roads and public realm here were changed during the redevelopment of the St James Centre area. The statues were returned but the stones still languish forgotten and out of context there, with a nearby plaque commemorating the former Picardy Place roundabout!

In March 1990 Scotmid Co-operative were announced as the operators of the new supermarket and opened their doors on July 31st 1991. The leisure pool, by now Christened Leith Waterworld, was somewhat delayed and did not open until May 1992. In August that year, the final part of the station redevelopment began when the gap in the tenements on Easter Road, where the railway tracks had once burst through at first floor level, was filled with a new 5-storey block of flats. If you look closely at the façade of this block you will notice large pieces of sandstone inserted in it – these come from the station.

Much like its railway predecessor, Leith Waterworld was a grand facility that had taken a long time and a lot of money to build. It too was initially highly popular with the public but was also was unlikely to have ever been profitable. It operated at a deficit from day one and by 2004 was losing £1,500 a day. In was an all too familiar tale, its operators cut back opening hours to reduce losses, but this made it ever-harder for it to pay its way. Like the station before it, the leisure pool proved to have a similarly short service life. It closed after just 20 years in 2012 despite a spirited campaign to keep it open (and re-open it as a community-owned facility afterwards). It was bitter compensation to future generations that its closure was used to finance the refurbishment of the diving facilities at the Royal Commonwealth Pool ahead of the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

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“The Station Nobody Wanted”: the thread about Leith Central

Has there ever been a more remarkable railway terminus than Leith Central?

Sandy Mullay, The Station Nobody Wanted, Blastpipe No. 73, Scottish Railway Preservation Society, 1986.

If you stand in the car park of the Tesco supermarket at the foot of Easter Road, you could be forgiven for thinking the mighty walls you are confronted with are the remnant of some long-gone defensive rampart. And you’d be half right; they are a monument to a bitter and protracted corporate conflict waged in 19th century Scotland, a fortification thrown up by one combatant to deliberately keep another out of its territory. For these are the remains of Leith Central Station, about which everything was remarkable: its size, its cost, its short operational life, and the fact it was built by a company that never wanted it.

Leith Central owes its origins to the interminable struggle between Scotland’s two predominant Victorian railways: Edinburgh’s North British and Glasgow’s Caledonian. Wherever the two met, they fought: each built lines to block, circumvent or duplicate the other’s. The eventual result in Edinburgh and Leith was a confused spaghetti of railways that didn’t necessarily serve the travelling public well.

As the final decade of the nineteenth century approached, the North British had the upper hand in the east of the country. The completion of the Forth Bridge approached and the hostilities had somewhat fizzled out for the time being. They might have been forgiven for thinking their position in the city was unassailable; the Caley’s mainline had never got further east than its Edinburgh terminus of Princes Street Station and their route to Leith was by way of a circuitous backtrack of a branch. The NB was content with this situation but the Caley had other ideas and was hatching a plan to upset this status quo. They would build a fourth line to Leith and would do so in the most bold and direct manner: tunnelling east beneath Princes Street to a new underground station at Waterloo Place. From there they would continue staight through the Calton Hill and over London Road before turning towards the heart of Leith. And they wouldn’t stop there, they would press on to connect with their existing line at Newhaven, thus completing a circular suburban line around the north of Edinburgh. This would be a counterbalance to the NB’s suburban circle around the south of the city. The threat to the incumbent did not end there, crucially this scheme would give the aggressor a direct route to Leith docks from the east, wherein lay access to the black diamonds of the Midlothian coal traffic.

Leith Town Council was desperate for better transport links to the burgh and enthusiastically threw its support behind the plans. But the full weight of the Edinburgh establishment was dead set against them: they would defile Princes Street and the disruption would far outweigh any benefits. The city thus sought to scupper the scheme. This was a point not lost on the North British, to whom the Caley’s plan was a direct declaration of war in its own front yard. That railway didn’t really want to build another line to Leith, but came to realise one could be used as a means to ruin the Caley’s eastern aspirations once and for all. More importantly, it could be used as political leverage to get them what they truly desired and desperately needed. The completion of the Forth Bridge had shown the capacity and facilities of Waverley, what should have been their premier station, to be totally inadequate. Transport chaos was reigning there and a complete rebuild and expansion was urgently required.

What would become the Leith Central scheme was not therefore a stand-alone proposal. It was actually just one part of a wider bill, passed as the Waverley Station Extension Act 1891 on August 5th that year. With this the NB got what it wanted; Leith Central was the price it had to pay the Corporations of Edinburgh and Leith for their support. From the very beginning  it was thus an unusual railway, built not because there was any real need for it, or because it would make its operator any money, or because the company even wanted it. It was purely to be built to spite the competition.

The Act gave powers to acquire twelve acres of land in Leith for a new station – a whole block between Leith Walk and Easter Road, bounded by Duke Street to the north. A third of this was to be made available as compensation to the Caley; Leith Town Council remained naively hopeful that the two sworn enemies might come to terms and open a joint station. This area was already well developed and a significant amount of property would have to be acquired and demolished. This included the Central Hall, a billiards emporium that had begun life as a Methodist Chapel, and the Central Bar just around the corner. The railway agreed to provide the proprietor of the latter, John Doig, with a replacement establishment. To this day that remains called the Central Bar and Doig’s name is still to be found within the stained glass panels displayed in its windows.

If Leith thought it would get its new railway any time soon then it was badly mistaken. The NB was focussed on the Waverley redevelopment and so deliberately dragged their heels. Progress was glacial, especially by Victorian standards. They took five years to authorise the start of work, which did not begin until February 1896. It took eighteen more months to complete the plans and submit them for approval of Leith’s councillors. Despite the latter’s chagrin at the pace they were most pleased with what they saw. Their only amendments were to request a prominent public clock on the corner with Duke Street and the raising of the height of the approach bridge over Easter Road by two feet. The railway readily agreed to the first but counter-proposed on the second that the Burgh should instead lower the street level by fifteen inches. This was accepted and to maintain the existing thresholds the pavement was stepped down to the carriageway, something that has long caught out drinkers stumbling out of the Persevere bar.

The appointed engineers were Cunningham, Blyth and Westland of George Street, who had recently completed the new North Bridge and doubled the approach tunnels to Waverley. In September 1898 the Railway Times reported that demolition works had concluded and initial construction begun on the station’s frontage onto Leith Walk (200 feet long) and Duke Street (220 feet). This was the only part of the project completed in any sort of haste: by the summer of 1899 its commercial premises were being let and bringing in valuable rental income. Work did not commence on the actual branch line from Waverley until 1901, a decade after the Act of Parliament. The pace remained positively lethargic and it took two further years to complete that mile of track.

As Leith Central began slowly to rise from the ground though, it was clear for all to see that the scale of it was staggering. It was 830 feet long from end-to-end. Its footprint was 15,900 square metres (about 4 acres), making it almost a quarter the size of Waverley. It was just a smidgen smaller than the Caley’s Princes Street terminus (16,500 square metres) and totally dwarfed Haymarket (8,400 square metres), the NB’s second station in the city.

The concourse and platforms were raised up to first floor level to allow the approach tracks to cross over Easter Road. Offices and waiting rooms were at this level and there was 4,500 square feet of vault space beneath. In sharp contrast to the notoriously low and claustrophobic Waverley, the whole lot was topped off with a lofty glass roof it engineered by none other than Sir William Arrol and Co. who had built the Forth Bridge. Rising above the four storey tenements adjacent, author Alasdair Wham described it as a “huge glass cavern over sixty feet high… which broadened from 100 feet at the Easter Road end to more than double that width”. A Scotsman columnist would later write “when a gale is blowing off the [Forth], the whole roof rattles and groans“. Despite the vast scale though there were only four platforms, although each was 790 feet long. The interior was electrically lit and so was the clock – the latter at the request of Leith Town Council who agreed to pay the meter.

Above the frontage on Duke Street were two further storeys containing flats for railway servants. The rear windows of these looked down upon the concourse and there was a private stairway down to platform level. One of the more notable occupants would be a clerk called George Mathers who in 1935 he was elected as MP for Linlithgowshire. He boasted to the newspapers that his commute to London was unique: he could get from his “own back door” to London Kings Cross without ever stepping out from a station and “getting his feet wet“.

The station was advantageously located at the Foot O’ the Walk with its principal public entrance was on the corner below its clock. Around the corner there was a ramp up to a vehicle entrance on the corner of Crown Place and from Easter Road there was a further entrance giving access through a subway beneath the tracks. (the extreme length of the station however gave a rather long hike to reach trains from this direction.)

To control the complex arrangement of approach tracks and carriage sidings, there was an 81-lever signal box located at track level at the eastern end. This also controlled access to a turntable on the opposite side of Easter Road, used for turning locomotives around at the end of their journey.

As 1903 dawned, Leith Town Council was frustrated that it was still not open. They wrote to the railway in April to enquire when that might change; the reply came that Major Pringle of the Board of Trade would begin his approval inspection on May 30th. This passed off without difficulty and opening was finally set for July 1st. The North British was now confronted with a final bill as monumental as the building: £500,000 (c. £57 million in 2026). This was a huge sum for the time, to put it into context it was a third of what the entire reconstruction of Waverley had set them back. The company had a long-standing reputation for this sort of spendthriftness, much to the frustration of its shareholders.

Yet the North British was also notoriously penny-pinching, and they took this to extremes in the utterly minimal effort they put into the opening of Leith Central. There was little in the way of advance advertising; a stationmaster had not yet been appointed; only a single ticket window was staffed and the refreshment rooms remained shuttered. No ceremony was arranged, and the Town Councils of Edinburgh and Leith weren’t even invited. On the appointed Wednesday morning, the 5:55AM to Waverley simply departed the station as the new timetable stated it would and that was that. The Edinburgh Evening Dispatch likened the little engine that pulled the first train out of the huge station to a “Skye Terrier pup in its four storey kennel“.

Such was the railway’s disinterest that they didn’t even bothered to open the entrances! Instead a single, poorly-signed and half-hidden door served as the only way in or out. This caused problems to members of the public who were trying to find their way in. The Rev. Thomas Crerar of North Leith United Free Church soon wrote to the company to complain that he had been unable to find it and instead “accidentally” found himself in the Central Bar. To begin with the only service offered was a shuttle service to Waverley. This took just 6 minutes from Leith (uphill) and 5 minutes on the return (downhill). These trains were nicknamed Penny Jerks on account of the short, sharp journey, but their frequency – just twice an hour – was poor. The Saturday service was lighter yet, but on the opening week a one-off excursion was run to Portobello and Musselburgh. Come the Sabbath however and the gates remained firmly locked to the travelling public, a precedent that was maintained for the entirety of its working life.

Despite their best efforts to discourage patronage the NB soon found they had a hit on their hands. Almost 16,000 tickets were sold in the first four days. The reason proved obvious – the competing tramway to Edinburgh remained horse-drawn for half the route before a change on to Edinburgh’s cable system; the infamous Pilrig Muddle. Slowly the railway began to respond to the success of their massive investment. Within a month they opened the main entrance beneath the clock, followed shortly thereafter by that on Easter Road. In September a permanent station master was appointed: Alexander Somerville from Abbeyhill. The same month the list of destinations was expanded by making Central the start and end point of the half-hourly “circle” services that ran around the Suburban & Southside Junction line (aka the South Sub). This was an operational benefit to the railway as previously trains had to be held at Waverley for 15 minutes, time instead used for the additional revenue-making run to Leith. Abbeyhill thus became the only intermediate direct stop between Central and Waverley, although space had been left between the tracks for another at Hawkhill. Finally, in December a second ticket window was opened.

The revised circle service proved a success too, having hitherto been rather unpopular. As a result the prices were lowered a new “Zone Ticket System” for regular commuters was introduced. It also allowed the old South Leith Station to finally be closed, its handful of services to and from Midlothian being relocated to Central. Further expansion of the destination list was limited to extending a few Glasgow and Dundee services through from Waverley. Thus for most of its life, Leith Central essentially remained an outsize terminus for weekday local commuters, punctuated by occasional busy spells for holiday, excursion and football specials.

Much of the initial bump of success was at the company’s own expense however: the North British found patronage at their North Leith station on Commercial Street suffered a 20% drop. The truth was that Leith only had so many passengers to offer and while the new station provided the quickest route to Edinburgh they were happy to use it. But the NB seemed content with this arrangement; they had seen off the challenge from the Caley and now they could sit back and profit from the lack of direct competition with minimal further effort.

On May 23rd 1915, Leith Central had the grim honour of receiving the first of over 120 local victims who had lost their lives in the Quintinshill Railway Disaster the previous day. These were the remains of the men of A & D Companies, 1/7th Royal Scots, a unit formed largely of volunteers from Leith. Most had departed the same station just a month earlier for Stenhousemuir, where they would complete their basic training before being ordered to the front at Gallipoli. On their return they were taken the short distance to a makeshift morgue in the Battalion’s drill hall on Dalmeny Street. This catastrophe caused an estimated 227 deaths and 246 injuries: the worst rail disaster in British history. The shattered remnants of the regiment would return through Leith Central once more after the war’s end to a heroes welcome.

When peace returned, the NB’s still maintained its competitive advantage on the Leith to Edinburgh traffic, but not for long. In 1922 the Pilrig Muddle was finally resolved after 28 years when Leith was integrated into Edinburgh’s new electric tramway. This caught the railway not just caught napping, but fast asleep: the “cars” served far more destinations, more frequently, were much faster for cross-town journeys and were cheaper.

The effect on Central’s traffic was immediate; it crashed. With its principal source of revenue largely poached, it was now patently obvious to any remaining doubters what Leith Central really was:

A massive White Elephant

W. A. C. Smith, writing about Leith Central in “Edinburgh’s Last Days of Steam”, 2003

The NB has been accused of taking its eye off the ball, however perhaps this can be excused. It was a time of great upheaval in the industry and it was facing a far more existential threat than trams. In 1923 the Government took the drastic action known in as “The Grouping“, which rationalised over one hundred companies into just four in an effort to make them profitable. The NB found itself merged into the new London and North Eastern Railway (LNER). This vast new organisation had much more pressing matters to worry about as than a provincial commuter station (even a very big one). They would therefore refrain from efforts to try and stimulate new sources of traffic on or modernise the Central branch and it remained steam worked until the end.

With not much to do around the place, one of the station master’s principal duties appears to have been holding the keys for the large numbers of flats and shops for let within the station. The railway tried to find uses for the excess of unused space around the place. A number of rooms were given over for training of their volunteer ambulance teams and competitions between the different stations were frequently held here. They also used it for the annual auction of the unclaimed lost property from across their network. The Evening News reported on a real Ali’s cave of bargains up for grabs. Lots ranged from expected items such as watches, golf clubs, tennis rackets, umbrellas, musical instruments, suitcases, spectacles, prams, bicycles and jewellery to the more unusual: deck chairs, a trouser press, a sewing machine, a wheelbarrow, false teeth, a basket of pot lids, a bell tent, sails for a yacht and even a collapsible boat!

For most of the ‘twenties and ‘thirties, Central lived the life of a quiet, if vast, backwater. That changed in 1937 when it had its most eventful and unusual year. On June 23rd there was a “melee” outside when a party of Fascists – intent on making a public speech – was met, surrounded and attacked by the Leith Mob. Police who had been waiting for the trouble in the station took some time to restore order. On August 6th a workman, George Fraser of 53 Dumbiedykes Road, was killed when he fell through the station roof onto the platform below. He landed on his colleague Robert Beveridge, also of Dumbiedykes Road, who was seriously injured as a result.

On 29th October there was a serious early-morning fire, which spread from a waiting room and took nine hours to extinguish. Firefighters had to contend with the panes of glass in the roof above shattering in the heat and raining down shards upon them. When the smoke cleared it was found that the timber facings and decking of two of the platforms had been destroyed for a length of 112 yards. Five coaches and three horse vans were also burnt out. Little in the way of permanent damage was done though and services were back up and running the next day at 9AM. The same cannot be said for the resident pigeon population however, most of whom were asphyxiated by the smoke. A further fire in the roof on 30th November was more minor and was brought under control by a single fire engine, causing just £100 of damage.

The station had a relatively quiet war, with services cut back and the Easter Road entrance closed for reasons of economy. The long platforms meant it was regularly used for troop and hospital trains. The sales of lost property were particularly competitive during wartime as eager buyers sought to get items that were no longer readily available, particularly clothing.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/47179713432

When peace returned the 1946/47 timetable issued by the LNER would be their penultimate. It shows the Jerks were week days only, with a small number of services working morning, mid-day and evening commuter patterns. There were twelve services per day from Leith. Three in the morning (the first at 5:41); five around mid-day including and four for the evening – the last departing at 18:10. There was a single through-train to Glasgow each day. From Edinburgh there were ten trips in the opposite direction; four for the morning (the first at 7:21), four for the mid-day and two in the evening, the last at 18:55. There were seven departures from Leith a day on the Suburban “outer circle” line, and ten in the opposite direction. As with the Jerks, these were concentrated in morning, mid-day and the early evening. The last train left Central each week day at 18:11, the last arrived at 19:00. On Saturdays the service was lighter yet and on Sunday there remained no service at all.

The following year, the second major change of ownership came and on 1st January 1948 the railways were nationalised. The first timetables issued by the new British Railways basically maintained the LNER’s scant service pattern at the station. An unusual visitor arrived in 1948 when an exhibition of new and unusual rolling stock was put on for the public. The star draw was the Silver Princess, a modern American showcase design built by the Budd company and with a striking exterior finish of polished, corrugated stainless steel.

Nationalisation ushered in a new era for the railways but for Leith Central it meant rationalisation. It was an obvious early candidate for cost cutting and in March 1952 the Scottish Region announced that all services would be withdrawn from April 7th that year: less than fifty years after they began. An alternative but lengthier route from Edinburgh to Leith would be maintained on the former Caledonian line from Princes Street Station to North Leith (which at this time was confusingly renamed Leith North!) Parcels traffic was re-routed to Waverley station and delivered onwards to Leith from there. The Scostman reported “there was a melancholy air of impending dissolution in the Central. A train was being prepared to go out on its journey through the suburbs. There is only one full-scale train a day from the Central – the 12:45 to Glasgow.” In a somewhat appropriate symmetry to the occasion of its opening, there were no ceremonials at closing. Just four years later, the last of the city’s trams would also be withdrawn: they had killed off Leith Central decades before and in turn were killed off by a deliberate policy of “busification”.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/49512520986/in/photolist-2irfBuW-2j3H7or-2npqwSM-XVEzW3-2kBmVuA-2orYhB6-2jkWLwJ-2aygLjN-2g4gbQM-SPyAj3-2nCsqbD-2dfiX7F-FwivHN-2jtQsbn-2jw5G61-2nu2SFg-2b4tbsC-2aXH8NC-2kBKrxP-2meizEe-ahQGYA-2iYw7be-2quoJrq-2ipAoMz-2paa5NZ-2kDaDxT-2dpLx5y-2n2zfV2-2mUEF4F-2iUACkS-2o2HJpX-2k8kAxP-G6z1jy-GatKs7-PiB7sG-2gwqdWb-2nhKRBh-2kUDVE1-2fcYeZR-2hjD4kK-QTDKkb-7KdeUY-2jURgV5-2h7TCiT-2jeutfC-2hAwefp-e3wHHc-Q9MAQr-2qyhwf1-ZFF1re

Curiously, despite the removal of all its services, the station actually remained in use and the Outer Circle suburban trains continued to start and finish their journeys there: but the carriages were empty and you couldn’t get on or off! For a few years the place was used for such marshalling of services as well as the storage and cleaning of coaching stock. A new purpose came in 1955 when work began to convert it to a dedicated maintenance facility (code 64H) for the new generation of diesel rail cars. These were taking over Edinburgh’s remaining suburban rail routes and also those to Glasgow. The depot also served as a training school for these new vehicles. It’s somewhat ironic that these were exactly the sort of modern, efficient units that really could have benefited the station when it was in operation.

The new era would prove to be even shorter than the first. Edinburgh’s suburban rail network was cut back to almost nothing over the coming decade, the last services running in 1968, and in 1972 the Glasgow multiple units were replaced by locomotive stock. Much of Leith Central Depot’s work therefore evaporated before it ever really got going and it closed in 1972, its few remaining duties relocated to Millerhill and Haymarket.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/49362392322/

A final passenger service had been worked on October 16th 1971, a special put on for enthusiasts, but in April the next year once again Central was closed without ceremony and found itself abandoned. The access bridge over Easter Road was removed within the year, definitely precluding any further railway usage.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/54917798746/

The railways could be a dangerous place to work and there were a number of fatalities at Leith Central and along its branch during its operational life.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/16881499619/

Plans did not take long to materialise for the next phase of Leith Central’s life. In March 1973 the Scotsman reported that Bovis Properties (Scotland) Ltd proposed to clear the site and redevelop it in an £8 million scheme for shops, offices and a 500 space car park. This ultimately came to nothing and in 1974 BR told the same paper they were “re-exploring the possibilities“. “Re-exploration” took four years and it was not until 1978 that Edinburgh District Council announced they were in negotiations to acquire the site and turn it into “Britain’s biggest indoor sports stadium“. This ambitious £6 million proposal would cater for twenty-seven different pursuits and would have included a central multi-purpose main arena with athletics track and further arenas for general sports, carpet bowls and squash. There would be two practice halls, a training gym and even a “projectile range“. The Council purchased the site for £440,000 in 1979 and spent a further £160,000 on planning.

The scheme was proposed by a Conservative controlled council, but in an odd reversal for the usual precedent of British politics it found itself cancelled by pressure from Labour ranks. This happened in April 1982 on account of ballooning costs and a lack of funds. The station had now been abandoned for a decade and was succumbing to the vandals as the authorities tried to work out a future for it.

With their sports centre scheme dead in the water, in 1983 the District decided to dispose of the problem site on the private housing market. There was an initial flurry of interest but only a single, derisory offer was forthcoming, one that less than half what the authority had paid for it. 1980s Leith was severely economically depressed and was already awash with brownfield residential development opportunities. The District reluctantly approved the sale to Barratt Developments but this was blocked in 1984 by an incoming Labour administration.

Once again it was back to the drawing board for Leith Central, which now entered the final and most notorious chapter of its life. Its vast interior was reduced to the haunt of alcoholics and drug addicts and would be immortalised in Irvine Welsh’s 1993 novel Trainspotting. The title comes from the chapter “Trainspotting at Leith Central Station“, a sardonic joke on the fact there had been no trains to spot there in twenty years. While the station plays a symbolic part in the story, representative of “a disintegrating and ignored community“. In the prequel, Skagboys, the character Spud will misidentify the former Caley railway bridge crossing Leith Walk as “the auld line ootay Leith Central Station“.

The Labour District Council proposed a new scheme in 1986 that included a 30,000 square foot supermarket to help fund a new leisure centre. This proposal was immediately delayed however when Lothian Regional Council counter-proposed a new Leith Academy secondary school nearby that included community sports and recreation facilities, including a pool. Updated plans were made public the following year for a £12m scheme for a 35,000 square foot supermarket and a leisure pool (“the finest in Scotland“). All but the listed station buildings along Leith Walk and Duke Street, and northern retaining wall, would be demolished. With very limited public funding available, a private sector partner was brought in to finance and build the scheme: Walker Construction (Scotland) Ltd of Livingston.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/52809440@N03/37552337810

Work was due to begin in October 1988 but an eleventh-hour spanner was thrown in the works when the Council was told that their intended leaseback financing for the pool was not viable. A revised financial package was approved in December; they would instead borrow £3m to build the shell of the pool themselves and Walkers would finance the interior fit-out and plant, which would be leased back. The Scottish Development Agency (SDA) contributed £1.4 million to clear and level the site, with the Supermarket being financed entirely privately.

The Trainspotting years came to an end in January 1989 when Dalton Demolition moved in and got to work. In March two passers-by were hospitalised and three cars were written-off when a 63 foot section of the station wall collapsed onto Duke Street. The contractors salvaged the station’s dressed stone and offered it for sale. Some pieces were acquired by the Scottish-Italian artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi who had been born next door in Crown Place. He incorporated them into the planting around his Manuscript of Monte Cassino sculpture outside St Mary’s Cathedral on Picardy Place. These stones were later relocated to London Road Gardens when the roads and public realm here were changed during the redevelopment of the St James Centre area. The statues were returned but the stones still languish forgotten and out of context there, with a nearby plaque commemorating the former Picardy Place roundabout!

In March 1990 Scotmid Co-operative were announced as the operators of the new supermarket and opened their doors on July 31st 1991. The leisure pool, by now Christened Leith Waterworld, was somewhat delayed and did not open until May 1992. In August that year, the final part of the station redevelopment began when the gap in the tenements on Easter Road, where the railway tracks had once bursty through at first floor level, was filled with a new 5-storey block of flats. If you look closely at the facade of this block you will notice large pieces of sandstone inserted in it – these come from the station.

Much like its railway predecessor, Leith Waterworld was a grand facility that had taken a long time and a lot of money to build. It too was initially highly popular with the public but was also was unlikely to have ever been profitible. It operated at a deficit from day one and by 2004 was losing £1,500 a day. In was an all too familiar tale, its operators cut back opening hours to reduce losses, but this made it ever-harder for it to pay its way. Like the station before it, the leisure pool proved to have a similarly short service life. It closed after just 20 years in 2012 despite a spirited campaign to keep it open (and re-open it as a community-owned facility afterwards). It was bitter compensation that its closure was used to find the savings to finance refurbishment of the diving facilities at the Royal Commonwealth Pool ahead of the 2014 Commonwealth Games.

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I'll be selling #GreetingCards printed by pennybatchgallery.co.uk at this year's #ColonyOfArtists!

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I'll be selling #GreetingCards printed by pennybatchgallery.co.uk at this year's #ColonyOfArtists!

And they're #beautiful! Printed on #recycled paper, with #EcoKraft envelopes and #compostable wrappers (just like my #prints).

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I'll be selling #GreetingCards printed by pennybatchgallery.co.uk at this year's #ColonyOfArtists!

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Come round the #weekend after next to #Edinburgh's #Abbeyhill to have a look ^__^

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I'll be there with Noka Novich*, all in all 81 (!? 🤯) #artists and #makers! 💖

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Hi friends! Colony of Artists* will be again on #September 16 (Sat) & 17 (Sun) in #Edinburgh, #Scotland again! ✨

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The Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon: the thread about James Tytler and the first manned aerial flight in the British Isles

This thread was originally written and published in August 2023.

Today is August 27th 2023. So what is special about this date? Well, it was today, 239 years ago, when the eccentric Edinburgh character of James Tytler ascended in his “Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon” and flew the 3,000 or so feet from Comely Gardens to Restalrig on the outskirts of the city, thus making the first, manned aerial flight in the British Isles, immortalising himself in the process as Balloon Tytler.

James Tytler hailed from Fearn in Forfarshire, the son of a minister of the Kirk of modest means, who had been sent to Edinburgh to pursue and education and make a better life for himself. He was many things, but he was mainly persistently skint and in debt. Had he not been so, he may have been remember as a polymath. He had failed as a preacher, as a doctor as an apothecary and as a poet, but succeeded in scraping a living and keeping his creditors at bay as a pen for hire; he wrote much of the 2nd edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. But we are interested in him here as an aviator.

In September 1783, a “fire balloon1” constructed by France’s Montgolfier brothers successfully flew with a sheep, a duck and a rooster on board (the animals all survived!) In late November, Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes were the first human passengers in one of the brothers’ machines. Tytler, reading of these endeavours in far away Edinburgh, was captivated and – like many of his contemporaries -caught the flying bug . Working on the second edition of the encyclopaedia at the time, he devoted a whole 8-page section of the Encyclopaedia to ballooning, writing “In future ages, it will be as usual to hear a man call for his wings, when he is going on a journey, as it is now for him to call for his boots“. “By this invention” he continued “the schemes of transporting people through the atmosphere, formerly thought chimerical, are realised”.

1. At the time, hot air balloons were known as fire balloons and hydrogen balloons as inflammable air balloons ↩︎

It was around this time, late in 1783 or early 1784, that Tytler took the bold step of determining that he would not just read and write about ballooning, he would also build and fly one of his own. This whole scheme may have arisen as an after-dinner wager in one of the dining rooms of enlightenment Edinburgh, as a scrap of handwritten paper was kept by Professor Dugald Stewart, in the style of a newspaper advertisement, announcing the intention:

We have the authority to assure the Public that it is neither Mr Tytler of Woodhouselee nor Mr Frazer Tytler, Advocate and Professor of Civil History in the University of Edinburgh, that means to go up with the Air Balloon on the 7th of May, but Mr James Tytler an ingenious chemist and distant relation of the others, whose friends it is hoped will accept of this intimation of their having no intentions of going up with air balloons at present, what ever-malicious or interested persons may chuse (sic) to give out, or credulous people may believe.

Wager or not, Tytler certainly had the brains, the self-confidence and the ambition to see this project through, but there was a big stumbling block; he had not the money. Indeed, this lack of funding would plague the project from beginning to end and seriously compromised his results. But he pressed on with planning nevertheless. On June 19th he took out a front page advert in the Edinburgh Evening Courant newspaper announcing a public demonstration of a scale model hot air balloon, both for his own testing and to try and raise precious funds by charging an admission fee:

On Monday next, the 21st current, will be exhibited
AT COMELEY GARDEN
By JAMES TYTLER, CHEMIST
A FIRE BALLOON, of 13 Feet Circumference,
AS A MODEL OF
THE GRAND EDINBURGH FIRE BALLOON,
with which he intends to attempt the Navigation of the Atmosphere

Edinburgh Evening Courant, June 19th, 1784

Comely Gardens, if you didn’t know, was a Georgian pleasure garden between Holyrood and Abbeyhill, “a wretched imitation of Vauxhall“, where for a few pennies you could stroll the ornamental garden, take tea, and listen to whatever music or entertainment had been laid on. The gardens both offered shelter within their walls and trees, from (most of) the prevailing winds, and an ability to charge people for entry. This tethered exhibition was successful and enough money was raised to fund construction of the full-scale “Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon“

James got to work at once. The basic machine was quite crude – unlike the gaily decorated French contemporaries – limited both by his funds and his skills. The design was basically a 30 feet wide by 40 feet tall linen cylinder, lined with paper to make it “leak proof” and surrounded by ropes to attach a basket for the occupant and a stove to heat the air. Unfortunately, many of those gentlemen who subscribed to the scheme refused to part with their money until after the machine had flown (or at the very least risen from the ground), so he was caught in a Catch 22 situation, between having to follow through to prove himself to his sponsors, but also lacking the money or credit to actually do so.

There was also the threat of the Edinburgh Mob, there being rumblings that they would either destroy the balloon as some sort of affront to God before it could fly or destroy it in disappointment if it failed to fly. The authorities were nervous and made it be known they might forbid the scheme entirely on public order grounds. Somehow Tytler managed to scrape together enough funds to complete the basic balloon envelope and resolved to demonstrate a public inflation of it to try and confound his doubters and convince some of the sponsors to convert their paper promises into actual money. But he needed somewhere enclosed to trial the inflation of his fragile linen and paper balloon and there was only one building big enough in town; the incomplete shell of the Register House – “the largest pigeon house in Europe“, still incomplete after 10 years of stop-start construction and a lot of finance.

And so an advert was placed in the Courant on July 17th 1784, requesting the presence of “the Gentlemen who have subscribed or intended to subscribe“. The reporters from that paper and its rival The Advertiser were also invited to help publicise the scheme. This demonstration was also a success – sort of… the balloon did inflate – but the stove was inefficient and smoky, it coated the inner walls of the envelope in soot and sent up sparks and cinders which burned holes in the paper and linen, causing it to leak like the metaphorical sieve and slowly deflate. Tytler put a brave face on things, but couldn’t afford to start from scratch or buy a better stove, so resolved to patch up the leaky balloon and go for broke. The week of the Leith Races commences on 2nd August and it would provide the crowds and occasion to launch a flight.

There was a further reason to pick race week for the demonstration; it gave Tytler the perfect cover if things went wrong and the Mob was stirred. In this event, he could say it was the fault of the races for whipping up any trouble and not his flying machine. So the day after the test inflation at Register House he took out adverts across the local papers. In these, he announced the Edinburgh Fire Balloon would fly (tethered) after the first race, and every day thereafter, and that on the Friday it would be unleashed and might “cross the Frith (sic) of Forth”. He made yet a further appeal for financial support and made sure to note that Major Masters, commanding officer of the garrison at Edinburgh castle, had offered up his men to guard the balloon and any “Ladies and Gentlemen that may attend the different exhibitions“, lest the Mob spoil the occassion.

So in amongst the drinking, the gambling, the debauchery, the freak shows and the general chaotic merriment of the Leith Races, Tytler was going to fly across the Forth! He removed the balloon back to the Comely Garden and got to work at once. For the occasion, he had tickets printed up, which he signed and numbered by hand. He also scored out the printed line “Constructed by William Brodie“, being unable to afford to pay a subcontractor he would now be doing all the work for himself.

With what remained of his scant funds, he had constructed a mast 50ft tall, with a 64ft long arm at the top, to hold the envelope of the balloon as it inflated. But his relentless scrimping meant it was built too weak, and the day before race week began, Sunday 1st August, it collapsed under test. The crowd that nevertheless assembled at Comely Garden the next day to see the tethered flight was therefore denied such a spectacle. On each of the subsequent 3 days the west wind did blow – a direction from which the site was not sheltered – so disappointment prevailed again and again. Things were getting desperate for Tytler, he needed a success, and so he moved the balloon and the repaired mast to the most sheltered corner of the garden and on Friday 6th August – the date he had promised to fly across the Forth – he lit the stove and started inflating. But the wind again started to blow as the envelope filled and it strained at its mooring ropes. Tytler’s helpers struggled to contain it and it was only the ripping of the envelope and partial deflation that probably saved it from being blown clean away. The crowds left angry and dismayed. The Courant was scathing: “The Edinburgh Fire Balloon has been struggling hard to make its public appearance during the race week. Masts and yards and scaffolds and furnaces had lent their aid, but to little purpose. Its gravity and affection for the earth cannot be overcome“.

But Tytler was irrepressible, the winds dropped and the next day he tried again. This time the balloon inflated, but as he was about to clamber aboard the basket “a gust of whirlwind, as if send by divine command to blast the hopes of this devoted projector, attacked the Balloon, drove it hither and thither and by compressing it on all sides, soon reduced it to a state of flaccidity” and it once more deflated. The Mob had finally had enough; angry scenes followed this failure and Tytler fled before he could be accosted for any refunds. When the crowd could not find him they turned instead on his balloon, detached its basket and paraded it around the local streets in triumph before throwing it on the still-glowing stove and burning it to ciders. Their anger thus sated, they drifted home. Tytler was at rock-bottom and wrote about his feelings at this time:

I was obliged to hear my name called out wherever I went, to hear the insults of every black-guard boy, to hear myself called Cheat, Rascal, Coward and Scoundrel by those who had neither courage, honesty nor honour. I was proscribed in the newspapers and pointed out by tow of the Edinburgh News-mongers as a public enemy

His name may have been mud with the Courant and the Advertiser, but the Caledonian Mercury was more sympathetic about the failure, giving him the benefit of the doubt – he could after all not control the weather. It also pointed out that if more of his claimed backers would pay up, he might have the funds needed to succeed.

Perhaps encouraged by that forgiving take on events, Tytler soon slunk back to Comely Garden to examine the remains of his machine. The main flaw of his design was that it lacked a neck, so the wind easily blew or sucked the hot air out. About this he could do nothing, but he could at least try patch it up and get a new basket. The fragile paper lining was now covered in soot and full of cinder-holes and tears, so he painstakingly removed it, and instead varnished the linen to try and make it airtight. He could not afford to build a proper basket, and so one used to carry crockery was sourced as a passenger compartment. But this meant that the stove could no longer be carried. In fact this was probably a good thing as it weighed 300lbs and had a habit of mainly burning holes in the balloon. So he had to settle to try and fly without it, using only whatever hot air he could fill it with on the ground (and keep captive within it) to provide the lift for flight. His reasoning was simple, if he could make any sort of flight in the repaired machine, he should be able to raise the money for a full rebuild. In his own words it was “the resolution of a madman and which nothing but my desperate situation could excuse“.

And so the word went out that he would try again for a flight within a fortnight. Fortunately at this time, the attention of the public and of the press was drawn to the election of a new MP for Edinburgh, giving him some breathing space from both (even if there was only one candidate and the only electors were the Town Council!) Not wanting to incur the attention of the Mob again, the next attempted inflation on Wednesday August 25th had no crowd invited. The balloon was filled for over an hour to help dry out the varnish. At about 630AM, the fire was put out and Tytler climbed into his basket. The restraining ropes were cast away, the balloon floated, and then… nothing happened! Perhaps there was not enough hot air, or the morning was too cold, but at least there had not been a disaster and he had demonstrated “the practicability of the scheme“. The previously sympathetic Caledonian Mercury was not convinced however and under the title of “The Rise and Fall of the Edinburgh Fire Balloon”, they took a satirical imagination of his first flight,with it ending with the balloon pierced by a church steeple and its occupant being cast into a duck pond.

But success was in Tytler’s grasp and after a final few tweaks and another coat of varnish, he was ready to go again. It was Friday 27th August, 1784, 239 years ago today, it was about 5AM and the stove was once again lit beneath the envelope. An uninvited crowd had formed, either to be sure to see success or to be amused by failure. The balloon slowly filled, straining at its mooring ropes. Maybe Tytler – a deeply religious but unaligned man – said a prayer for success or salvation first, but he soon climbed into his basket again and the ropes were once more undone. And this time, to everyone’s surprise, up he went, eliciting a great cheer from them. Ascending rapidly, a loose rope caught a tree and the mooring mast, but such was the lifting force it simply snapped free of both. A height of 350ft was reached, the length of that loose rope, the crowd tried to grab it but it tore free from their grasp too. Up, up, and quite literally away he went! Carried on the western breeze, he drifted slowly eastwards and away from the city. The crowd gave chase, Tytler recalling afterwards that he was much amused by “looking at the spectators running about in confusion below“.

With no stove to keep the balloon hot, it rapidly cooled and the intrepid aviator was soon drifting back to earth. He came down about half a mile distant in the village of Restalrig, possibly in the minister’s glebe (but neither in a dung heap or a duck pond as his detractors had forecast). And for once, Tytler, the crowd, his supporters, and the press were all jubilant. The downtrodden little man with a moth-eaten coat, whose shoes were falling apart and who had a hole in his hat had succeeded! The previously hostile Advertiser declared him “the first person in Great Britain to have navigated the air“. The Courant were “amazed at the boldness of the undertaking” and made something of a mealy-mouthed apology for their previous scepticism. The Caledonian Mercury called it “a decisive experiment” and that Scotland could at last “boast of its aerial navigator“.

Filled with the confidence of success a 2nd flight – well advertised to the public – was planned for the 31st, the day of the foregone conclusion of the election of Sir Adam Fergusson as the city’s new MP. After completing the requisite formalities, the newly elected member and the Council committee hastily made their way to Comely Garden to join the assembled spectators. Once again the balloon inflated. Once again Tytler climbed bravely aboard and once again it took off. But it had been under-inflated and this time it rose to only about a hundred feet, coming down not far over the garden boundary wall. But it had still flown and it was enough to convince some of his backers to finally follow through financially and he was able to raise enough money to rebuild his basket properly and to have a new stove built for it. The clock was now ticking in the “Balloon madness” capturing the country and on September 15th Italian Vincenzo Lunardi made a balloon flight from Moorfield Barracks, in London. In Perthshire, an enterprising but unknown gentleman sent up a model balloon, 22 feet in diameter, which was seen to travel as far away as Moulin, some 25 miles, before being blown back on the wind almost to where it had lifted off.

The autumn weather delayed proceedings in Edinburgh, it rained or it was too windy, or both, for weeks for any inflation or flights. But on September 29th Tytler was ready to go again. And so the balloon was hoisted on the mast and the new stove was lit beneath. A huge crowd assembled, packing out St. Ann’s Yards (now part of Holyrood Park) and the slopes of the Calton Hill. The first attempt deflated and so it was hoisted and filled again. But once again a sudden and spiteful gust of wind caught it. This time the supporting mast broke, the balloon collapsed and the whole lot came crashing down. One helper on the mast leapt for his life and landed in a tree, another was badly injured in his fall. Tytler’s luck and popularity was now trickling rapidly away from his grasp, as was the support of the press, who once again took up their sceptical stances. But he was no stranger to this and refused to give up, and went back to his repairs and planning another attempt.

That day came on October 11th. Everything proceeded as before. When the balloon tugged at its ropes Tytler climbed aboard and cast off. Nothing happened. He climbed out again to see what was wrong and now it took off! The Courant described that the balloon “rolled about a short time like an overgrown porpoise“, reaching a height of about 300 feet before falling sideways back to the ground and landing heavily, destroying itself in the process. Excuses were made – the stove was too small, the calculations had been gotten wrong, but surely now it was all over? Indeed it was not – Tytler just would not give up. He tried to raise more money for repairs but by March 1785 he had fled to the debtors’ sanctuary of Holyroodhouse (to which he was no stranger). It may have been he was being sued by the proprietor of Comely Garden for damages caused. Amusingly, his entry in the Register of Protections in the sanctuary recorded him as “James Tytler, chemist and balloon maker“. In the sanctuary, he was safe from his creditors but could not work on his balloon, and he was not safe from the fever that incapacitated him for 6 weeks.

By the time he was free of debt and fever however, ballooning had moved on and a simple half mile flight wouldn’t cut it. He would – in his own estimations – have to fly at least as far as Dundee! A date was set of July 26th. And so once more, Tytler lit his stove. And once again it began to inflate. An ominous rumble of thunder was heard in the distance, the wind suddenly got up, the balloon was torn from its moorings and upended, the stove smashed to pieces and the envelope totally destroyed. And that was that. Tytler finally admitted defeat and gave up. He was consoled by kind words in letters from none other than Vincenzo Lunardi, now a national hero. In reply, Tytler composed a sad poem, including the couplet: “Lost are my wishes, lost is all my care, And all my projects, flutter in the air“. While the two were rivals they were so on friendly terms, Tytler beat Lunardi into the air, but it was the latter who made a success of it. Edinburgh satirist John Kay captured the two of them in a caricature entitled “Fowls of a Feather, Flock Together“, Lunardi holding out a conciliatory hand.

Robert Burns corresponded with Tytler, and gives as a contemporary opinion of him:

An obscure, tippling, but extraordinary body known by the name of Tytler, commonly known by the name of Balloon Tytler, from his having projected a balloon – a mortal, who, though he trudges about Edinburgh as a common printer, with leaky shoes, a skylighted hat and knee buckles as unlike as “George-by-the-Grace-of-God and Solomon-the-Son-of-David”, yet that same unknown drunken mortal is author and complier of three-fourths of Elliott’s pompous ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’, which he composed at half a guinea a week.

Robert Burns, describing James Tytler

Tytler very soon had to flee Edinburgh, on the run yet again from his creditors, apparently a method he had devised for bleaching linen, which could have made him his fortune, had been stolen from him by unscrupulous dyers. His wife sued for divorce in 1788 on account of him having taken up with another woman with whom he fathered twins. He returned to the city in 1791 to work again on the third edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica but he did not stay long; in 1792 he wrote a seditious pamphlet calling the House of Commons “a vile junto of aristocrats” and was outlawed. In 1795 he left for America, writing a further radical pamphlet en route, “Rising the sun in the west, or the Origin and progress of liberty“. He lived out his last decade in Salem, scraping a living from his writing and selling medicines. Turning increasingly to drink as a counter his disappointments in life, he left his house one day in January 1804, inebriated, never to return. The sea washed his body up 2 days later.

James Tytler is long gone, but he’s not quite forgotten locally. On the 200th anniversary of his achievement, a hot air balloon meeting was held in Holyrood Park, over the wall from the location of Comeley Gardens, the largest balloon being decorated specially for the occassion

Two modern streets are named for him in the vicinity of where the Comeley Gardens were located, Tytler Gardens and Tytler Court and there are two murals dedicated to his aerial adventures in Abbeyhill, the most recent by the Abbeyhill Colony of Artists in 2021 at the top of Maryfield.

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When the brakes don’t work: the thread about runaway trams

On this day in 1918 (June 23rd when written) there was an “Extraordinary Tramway Incident” in Edinburgh as a result of which, miraculously, nobody was hurt. This was the days of cable traction, when the city’s public transport wound its way slowly and noisily around the streets hauled by an endless loop of moving cable beneath the setts.

It was just after 10 O’clock in the morning and an empty car (they were always called cars, never trams) was standing awaiting its next service at the Braids terminus, near where Comiston Road meets Braid Hills Road. The driver and conductor were on their break in the adjacent shelter (a replacement version of which is still there to this day). But the vehicle’s mechanical brakes had not been fully set and, imperceptibly slowly at first, the car began to creep away down Comiston Road towards the City.

The driver and conductor gave chase as soon as they noticed but were already too late and were unable to catch it as it began to speed up. The cable which moved the tramcars when in service was attached to by means of a mechanical “gripper” and whizzed anything attached to it along at a rather sedate 9½ mph (to which it was limited by Board of Trade regulations). The downhill runaway quickly passed this limiting speed and quickly caught up with the car running in service ahead of it. Fortunately there were no passengers aboard. The conductress saw the approaching danger, called a warning to the driver, and sensibly jumped for it. The inevitable collision happened and the two cars became entangled together. Luckily neither derailed. Less fortunately the driver – who had heroically stayed at his post – found that the gripper which connected his car to the traction cable had become jammed; the conjoined wreckage was thus firmly attached to the cable and was being hauled inextricably towards busy Morningside at a slightly less than terrifying nine and a half miles per hour. The danger was still real however as this was where Comiston Road changed from rural to dense urban in nature and the driver now had no way to stop at any approaching junctions, for any other tram cars ahead of him or to slow for any obstructions such as pedestrians, cyclists, horses, children crossing or workmen carrying sheets of plate glass across his path like they did in the movies then.

At Belhaven Terrace, just one mile from where the runaway had started, there was a set of points manned by a pointsman for switching the cars which had terminated at Morningside Station between tracks. The driver managed to call out his predicament to the pointsman as he sailed helplessly past. The pointsman’s hut had a telephone connection to the winding house at Tollcross which was powering the cable and after a brief call the winding engine was stopped. This brought the runaway – and half of the tramway network in the south and west of the city which shared that cable – safely to a halt. It took time to untangle the damaged cars and extricate the gripper from the cable but within an hour and a quarter from the start of the incident the network was back up and running again as if nothing had ever happened. Sadly no further details were reported in the papers

Runaways tramcars were fortunately very rare, but not unheard of. In April 1890 a horse-drawn vehicle had ran away down Montrose Terrace in the east of the city. One of the animals fell but its panicked companion dragged it and the tramcar along the ground a further 1,000ft before coming to rest outside the Abbey Church. “The passengers, who were greatly alarmed, were not, however, injured”. The same cannot be said about the poor fallen horse, as “on examination it was found… [to] not likely be of any more use.” Sadly it was probably a one way ticket to Cox’s Glueworks in Gorgie for that victim.

On September 30th 1909 a cable tramcar was involved in a potentially much more deadly accident at Waterloo Place. The car approached the terminus from the direction of Abbeyhill to pick up passengers from a large crowd intending to travel to Musselburgh for the races, but failed to stop in the right place. The driver brought it to a halt further on at the top of Leith Street – outside the General Post Office – and got out to inspect why it had failed to stop in the correct place. The curious and frustrated crowd naturally gravitated towards the vehicle to see what the problem was and if they could board it.

Perhaps the driver prodded around underneath too hard, or perhaps an onlooker knocked something they ought not to have, but in an instant the car suddenly lurched back in the direction of Waterloo Place – and the thronging crowd – seemingly attached to the return cable by forces unknown. The vehicle ploughed through the crowd resulting in six people (including three police men) being injured. Again it was lucky that cable haulage did not work at faster speeds. But all was not yet over; “just at that moment a motor car.. appeared on the scene“. The motor became entangled in the front of the tramcar and was dragged along the road by it for thirty yards. The driver jumped clear, narrowly avoiding behind run over by another tramcar coming up Waterloo Place from Regent Road. And then, as soon as it started, the excitement was over: the tramcar released its unexpected grip on the traction cable and the tangle of public and private transportation ground to a halt.

Of the four hospitalised, three had been in the car; the driver Archibald Carmichael and his passengers John McArthy and James Paton, through for the day from Gourock and Port Glasgow for the races. The fourth was a pedestrian, Mrs Mathieson of Gayfield Square. This wasn’t the result of black magic or enchantment however as a simple explanation was soon found. As the tramcar had approached Regent Road it had to switch between traction cables by releasing one cable with the rear gripper and grabbing the other with the front gripper (each tramcar had a front and rear gripper to attach itself to the cables.) At it had moved across the junction where Montrose Terrace branched off London Road the gripper had damaged the cable running in the slot between the rails. This had cut into some of the wire strands which had came started to unravel, preventing the gripper from releasing properly when the driver tried to stop on reached Waterloo Place. The fraying cable meantime had run around the pulley and come back towards the now stationary tramcar from the opposite direction and when the tangle of loose strands passed through the released gripper they quickly became tangled in it and enough unravelling wire built up to suddenly start the car in motion again in the return direction.

It would prove to be a bad day for the Edinburgh & District Tramways Co. and there had already been an accident earlier that morning when at 11:40AM a car overshot a set of points and collided with the pawl near the Abbey Church between Abbeyhill and Meadowbank. This was an emergency stop device mounted in the traction cable slot beneath the road surface which, if it was hit by a tramcar gripper, detached it from the traction cable and brought the tram to a very instant stop. The pawl was a violent but important measure which prevent the gripper from entering and becoming entangled in the large underground pulleys around which the cable ran. The shock of hitting the pawl in this case was severe enough to snap the car’s front axle. But these were different and more efficient times; the tramway depot at Shrubhill simply sent out a gang with a complete new bogey, which they swapped out at the side of the road in Abbeyhill before getting the car quickly back in service.

The return to service lasted just 15 minutes following the accident before the network had to be stopped again! A tramcar going from the Bridges to Leith Street had collided with another motor car and once again the pair became entangled and took some time to clear. This was the third and final accident of the day.

An altogether more tragic runaway accident took place on Saturday 17th October 1925 when an electric tramcar proceeding down a single line section on Ardmillan Terrace ran away and jumped the points at the foot of the hill, crashing into St. Martin’s Episcopal Church. Young Edward Stirling, aged just 8, had been out to buy a toy train for his brother who was in hospital. He was killed instantly when struck by the tram and was buried in Saughton Cemetery on Wednesday 21st. The tram driver, 3 passengers and another pedestrian were hospitalised. The Corporation sent a wreath and his funeral was attended by Councillor Mancor, Convenor of the Tramway Committee and R. S. Pilcher, the general manager of Corporation Tramways. The Lord and Lady Provost sent a letter of sympathy. A subsequent Board of Trade enquiry found no fault with the tramway equipment or tramcar and did not apportion blame to the driver, who had tried to use the resistance brake to slow the tram followed by the hand brake. There was some popular discontent with the Tramways, a correspondent by the pen name of A. Mother wrote to the ‘News to complain about the speed of the electric trams – “too fast for either safety or comfort“- and to protest about plans to increase their speed even further.

The next runaway took place in spectacular fashion on Saturday June 1st 1929. Miraculously, nobody was injured when car No. 349, waiting at the Liberton terminus with no crew but four elderly passengers aboard ran off down Liberton Brae. Anyone who has ever tried to cycle up (and down) that road can attest just how severe the gradient quickly gets! As the crew availed themselves of the facilities in the terminus shelter they didn’t notice their vehicle slowly begin to roll off down the hill; they had not applied the mechanical hand brake and the pressure had leaked out of the air brake hose causing it to slowly release.

The four passengers (aged 59, 71, 71 and 84) were subjected to a terrifying half mile ride down the Brae before No. 349 came to the corner at Alnwickhill Road, jumped the tracks, slid across the road and pavement and impaled itself on a pole for the overhead wires before caming to rest in the garden of 42 Liberton Brae.

Quite how only one passenger suffered only light bruising and all four had walked away from this defies logic. Indeed the two 71 year olds who had been aboard, a married couple from Leith Walk, simply waited for the next car and carried on home as if nothing else had happened. The house at number 42 was similarly unscathed, although the same could not be said for its garden wall, gate and neat privet hedging.

As a result of this incident protective barriers were installed on the corner outside numbers 42 to 46 where they remain to this day; the dents in their metalwork show they still serve their intended purpose well.

Six years later, in 1935, an accident took place only a few hundred metres down the Brae at Braefoot Terrace. The current collection pole of a tramcar proceeding uphill became dislodged from the current wire and the vehicle lost power and ground quickly to a halt. The trailing SMT bus was following too closely to stop in time and swerved off the road to avoid a collision. Instead it demolished the shopfronts of a James Baxter’s butchers, Adam Smith’s chemist and the branch of the Commercial Bank of Scotland. There were fortunately no major injuries; the butcher’s boy had a lucky escape as he had just been sent outside to clean the windows only to find a thirty-two seater bus baring down on him. He was able to jump clear in the nick of time.

On 25th October 1945, 64 year old Brownlow Grigor of Leith, a Corporation tram driver with 30 years experience was fined £3 by the Burgh Court for “having driven a tram culpably and recklessly“. Grigor was in charge of car No. 42 and had not been paying sufficient attention as he was trying to stow away his thermos flask. He had approached the sharp bend where cars travelling between Morningside and Marchmont turned off Church Hill and onto Greenside Gardens too fast and the laws of physics did the rest. His vehicle jumped the tracks and demolished a 24-foot section of the wall of – coincidentally – number 42 Greenhill Gardens. The embarrassment was all the more severe as this house was St. Bennets, the official residence and private chapel of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Edinburgh and St. Andrews! Grigor’s claim that it was defective rails that were at fault was not upheld.

Our last calamity took place in 1951 and it was the heroic figure of James Ferguson, a 53 year old worker from Portobello Power Station, who averted a real catastrophe. The busy tramcar he was on was hit by a lorry near Piershill which injured the driver and caused him to lose consciousness. Ferguson leapt to his feet, ran the length of the car, punched through the glass door to the driver’s compartment with his bare fist and let himself into the cab to disengage the power lever and apply the brakes. Ferguson was treated in hospital for cuts to his hands but was otherwise unscathed.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/26917130321/

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.

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City of Brewing: the thread about 150 years of brewery opening and closure in Edinburgh

In December 2019, the Edinburgh Evening News ran an article about a new brewery planned for the city which it claimed “will be the first major brewery to be built in Edinburgh for 150 years.” (and also the biggest).

By my count (luckily, I keep a handy spreadsheet of such things for such counting eventualities) there were actually fifteen major breweries built in Edinburgh in the last 150 years and a good number of these were larger. So let’s take a closer look at them.

Starting us off at number 15 is the Caledonian Brewery – universally known as The Caley – it was opened by Lorimer & Clark 150 years ago (at the time of first writing) in 1869 in Shandon. This was one of the first Edinburgh brewers taken over by an English firm, Vaux, in 1947, who closed it in 1985. It reopened soon after in a management buyout and was one of the pioneers of the real ale revival locally. It was still going strong currently under threat of closure closed by then owners Heineken in 2022 and will likely be sold off for housing.

At number 14, G. & J. Machlachlan’s Castle Brewery opened in the Grassmarket in 1875, some 144 years ago. It relocated out to Craigmillar in 1901 as the New Castle Brewery (not to be confused with the Newcastle Brewery!). The Grassmarket site was sold in 1913 and was used as a mines rescue and research station by a consortium of Lothians mining companies. It is now part of the site of George Heriot’s School.

A non-mover at number 13, Jeffrey’s opened the New Heriot Brewery at Roseburn in 1880. This replaced a facility in the Grassmarket along from the Castle which was known, unsurprisingly, as the Heriot Brewery and took its name from that nearby school (see picture). Brewing took place at Roseburn until 1992, by which time it was an outpost of Glaswegian lager manufacturer Tennent Caledonian. Coincidentally the Grassmarket brewery was built on top of the Crawley Pipe which brought water into the town. That little brown wooden door you can see to the left of the gateway gives access to the conduit in which the pipe runs.

Holding steady at number 12, brothers Thomas & James Bernard opened the New Edinburgh Brewery on Robertson Avenue in Gorgie in 1888. For obvious reasons the firm used a St. Bernard dog as its mascot and logo (a Saint that has a local connection too), except with a bottle of their beer around its neck instead of a flask of brandy. They were bought up by the industry giant Scottish Brewers in 1960 who shut them down in order to reduce the competition and industry over-capacity.

At 11, the Edinburgh United Breweries of 1889. This company consolidated the existing smaller brewers of David Nicolsons; Robin, McMillans; Dishers and George Ritchies. The Robin, McMillans site at the Summerhall was demolished to make way for the new buildings of the Royal Dick Veterinary School, Dishers’ facilities were sold to rivals Aitchisons, and brewing was consolidated at Nicolson’s Palace Brewery at Abbeyhill and Ritchie’s Bell’s Brewery at the Pleasance. EUB’s remaining assets were acquired by Jeffrey’s in 1935 after what was (at that point) the UK’s largest tax duty scandal; the firm had been brewing off the record out of hours for years and avoiding taxation.

Sneaking in at number 10, the Craigmillar No. 1 Brewery was opened in 1891 by the firm of William Murray & Co. Murrays were an old, established brewer in the town of Jedburgh at the Caledonian Brewery but Mr Murray and his Wife died on the same evening on Wednesday 6th January 1886 leaving no living partner to take the firm on. The business was sold and its new owners relocated it to just outside the (then) city boundary at Craigmillar in 1890, where transport links were good, as was the water, and land was plentiful. This was the first brewer to locate to what would become a hotspot of this industry in this district. This operation was bought by United Breweries in 1960 and closed in 1963 by which time they were United Caledonian.

Holding steady at number 9, Drybrough’s were one of the bigger Edinburgh brewers. They were long established on the North Back of the Canongate but followed the lead of Murrays and joined them in the Craigmillar suburb in 1892 at the Duddingston Brewery. They were bought out by the firm of Watney Mann in 1965 as the big English brewers moved north of the border to expand into the Scottish market and were closed by Allied Lyons in 1987. Most of the brewery buildings remain here, in various uses as workshops, storage and offices .

A new entrant at 8, Daniel Bernard was a son of the T. & J. Bernard family, but fell out with the other partners in that business in 1889 in an acrimonious dispute that ended up in him leaving the firm and taking them to court. He set himself up in business in the Canongate as Bernards Ltd, and moved to a site in the Damhead area of Gorgie in 1893 where there were some good wells, just down the road from the family’s New Edinburgh site. When Daniel died in 1901, there was nobody to take it over. It was used for a while as a distillery before pharmaceutical company T. & H. Smith of Canonmills moved there in stages between 1904-1908. It is still in use for those purposes by their successor company.

At number 7, Pattisons were a big new name in the Leith whisky distilling, blending and bottling industry. Formed from the dairy of Pattison, Elder & Co., they were also the sole Scottish agent for St. Anne’s Well beer from Barnstable in Exeter and decided to enter the brewing market for themselves. This they did in 1896 at Craigmillar, the third such operation in the district. They were known for lavish spending on facilities, advertising and their directors personal lives. But their empire was built too quickly and built on sand; sand sitting atop a huge financial bubble which collapsed in spectacular stile 1899, bringing down much of the Scotch whisky industry with it. The Pattison brothers ended up in court for mixing cheap grain whisky with malt and passing it off as mature malt to increase their profits and ended up in jail. Their brewery assets were taken over by Robert Deuchar, a name now associated with Edinburgh brewing but actually from the northeast of England. Deuchars were closed by Scottish & Newcastle in 1961.

Up one at 6, Somerville’s joined the growing brewing suburb at Craigmillar in 1897 when they opened the North British Brewery. Messrs. John Somerville & Co. were an established wine and spirits merchant on Quality Street in Leith who amalgamated with Blyth & Cameron, a company formed that same year by business partners of Somerville to build the new brewery at Craigmillar. The consolidated firm was known as John Somerville & Co. Ltd. Neighbouring Murray’s took it over as the Craigmillar No. 2 in 1922 and when United Breweries took over Murrays in 1960 they quickly shut it down.

We’re in the top 5 territory now. Robert Deuchar (whose name would later be given to that pioneer India Pale Ale of the 1980s real ale revival in Edinburgh) built their own premises at Craigmillar in 1899 to complement those they had recently taken over from Pattisons. Deuchar is an old Scottish family name from Lauderdale in the Borders, but their brewery was established in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1888. They made the move up the railway to Edinburgh when they bought Pattisons and would transfer all their brewing operations north in 1920, but kept their tied public houses in the northeast of England. They were bought by Newcastle Brewery in 1954 and closed by that firm’s successor, Scottish & Newcastle, in 1961.

Straight in at number 4; T. Y. Paterson & Co. opened the Pentland Brewery, the smallest of the Craigmillar breweries, in 1898. Thomas Yule Paterson was a brewer and maltster established in Glasgow’s Bridgeton in 1884 who decided to move to Edinburgh when the advantages of the Craigmillar location became obvious. They were bought out by Edinburgh brewer Aitkens in 1936 and the site was used for other purposes thereafter. Only the gates remain now.

Another entry for Maclachlans in at 3. They moved from the Grassmarket to Duddingston (a bigger site, a more modern brewery and a rail connection beckoned) in 1901 at the New Castle Brewery. In 1960 the company were bought by Glasgow’s Tennent’s, a move which made sense as Maclachlan’s main market was in that city (as was their head office). But this was a period of rapid industry consolidation and Tennent’s in turn was in turn taken over by London’s Charrington United in 1963. A further reorganisation took place, with Charrington merging their Scottish subsidiaries – United Caledonian – with Tennent’s to form Tennent Caledonian. But it did not end there; in 1967 Charrington merged with Bass of Burton-upon-Trent to form Bass Charrington, under whose ownership the New Castle was shut down, Edinburgh operations of Tennent Caledonian were instead concentrated at Jeffrey’s former New Heriot Brewery in Roseburn

At number 2, W. & J. Raeburn were the last to open a brewery at Craigmillar, in 1901. Raeburn’s Brewery relocated from Merchant Street off the Cowgate in the Old Town where they had brewed since 1863. They were bought over by Robert (not William!) Youngers in 1913. They in turn sold it to the Brewer’s Food Supply Company of Fountainbridge in 1919, formed by a syndicate of Edinburgh brewers. They turned it over to dry waste brewers malt, enriched with surplus yeast, for use as cattle and poultry feed. The Inland Revenue took exception to the missed tax potential of turning a waste product into a commodity and took them to court, but lost. The War Office requisitioned the site over in 1939 to produce industrial yeast. It was returned to the BFSC and later found its way into the Scotish & Newcastle empire and the site seems to have closed around 1975.

And no surprises and still at no. 1, for the umpteenth year in a row since 1973, Scottish & Newcastle built the then ultra-modern Fountain Brewery in that year to replace the older William McEwan brewery of the same name on the other side of the road. S&N dominated the Scottish brewing scene and, along with the big English brewer, bought it up bit by bit then slowly tried to kill it. They very nearly almost did.

The graph below charts the rise and fall of the brewing industry in Edinburgh – note there would have been many more brewers operating prior to 1800, but small concerns rather than on an industrial scale. Treat the earlier end of the timeline with caution therefore. It can be seen that by numbers alone, the 1890s were the peak but there was a long, slow decline thereafter, with things falling off a cliff after the 1950s.

It’s worth noting too that many of these were, even by the standard of the day, relatively small concerns and overall production would actually have increased into the 1960s even though numbers were dropping due to modernisation of the larger breweries on the periphery of the city and closure of older, smaller, less-efficient city-centre sites.

If you look in the right places, it’s not hard to find the evidence of many of those old breweries not already covered in this post. Alexander Melvin’s at the Boroughloch Brewery has surviving outer walls and buildings, with tenement flats long ago built within its courtyard. If you get a chance to see it, the former brewery office off of Boroughloch Lane has a cracking Melvin’s frosted glass window still in place.

Robert Younger , one of the three Youngers of Scottish brewing, brewed at St. Ann’s in Abbeyhill. Their brewery site was converted into sheltered housing, with some of the original buildings preserved. Look out for the RY monogram above the former office door on Abbeyhill.

Archibald Campbell, Hope & King were an ancient name in brewing and distilling, they brewed at the Argyle Brewery off of Chambers Street, but which was at one time Argyle Square. They were one of the last old surviving city centre brewers when they were closed in 1970 by their new English owners, Whitebread. Many of the buildings have now been incorporated into the University of Edinburgh.

Someone later built the King’s Theatre on top of it, but Taylor, Macleod & Co. brewed on the old site of Drumdryan House at the Drumdryan Brewery, an old placename that you can still find in a neighbouring street. Drumdryan comes from the Gaelic – Druim drioghion – a ridge covered in thorn bushes, describing the local topography at one time. Interestingly the nearby street Thorniebauk comes from Scots and means exactly the same, also called Brierybauk at one time.

Steel, Coulson & Co. brewed at the Croft-an-Righ Brewery at Abbeyhill, next door to Robert Younger’s at St. Ann’s. Croft-an-Righ, named for the adjacent old house, at first glance seems an ovbvious Gaelic name meaning “King’s field” but is actually romantic corruption of an older Scots name, Croft Angry – with a possible German root. Some of the buildings were preserved and are in use by Historic Environment Scotland as workshops. These are called St. Ann’s, despite note being on the St. Ann’s brewery site, as St. Ann’s Yards is an even older placename for this area.

Charles Blair started brewing in the Canongate around 1886 at a site known as the Craigwell and within a few years it was rebuilt and expanded into a model Victorian brewery; the Craigend Brewery. In 1898, Blair combined with his relatives James and Charles Blair who brewerd in Parkhead in Glasgow and with James Gordon, a wine merchant in that city, to form Gordon & Blair Ltd. The firm was taken over by local firm Mackay’s in 1955 and closed before 1963 when the latter were bought by Watney Mann. It was used as a cash & carry warehouse before being sympathtically convereted into flats in 1986.

Thomas Carmichael’s Balmoral Brewery was on what is now Calton Road but was then the North Back of Canongate. This place appears to have always struggled financially (apparently due to water supply problems) and the site was used principally for its maltings or sublet to other brewers before being bought by Charles Blair in 1895 for use as the maltings for the Craigwell over the road.

And lastly, until recently you could still see the ground storey of the Calton Hill Brewery on Calton Road in use as a rental car garage. The brewery went through a variety of ownerships, apparently founded in the first half of the 19th century by John Muir & sons before it too was taken over by Charles Blair in around 1890 to be incorporated with the Craigwell. The remains were demolished around 2019 to be replaced by student flats.

In terms of numbers and production, Edinburgh was second only to Burton-on-Trent as the Empire’s second city of brewing. Most cities had breweries but to serve their local market, Edinburgh was notable as serving not just the whole country but also world. The McEwan’s logo, before the recognisable Laughing Cavalier, was a self-confident declaration of the Globe being supported by the strong hand of the Union Flag and the Royal Standard. This was as a result of the importance to McEwan’s business of export and military sales.

Long story short. Don’t let your local paper fool you into believing things about the history of brewing in Edinburgh!

Footnote. My personal ambivalence towards S&N is sincere; I believe they were a good company who lost their way and lost sight of what they did, and tried to grow fat by eating themselves; in the end nothing much was left worth mourning. I also have absolutely nothing against Innis & Gunn. Personally I think their beers taste of a mix of soap and marshmallows, but I also really like Tennent’s lager so I’m no authority on the matter of what “good beer” tastes like.

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:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Turns out these weird Ikea frames are perfect for my weird ultra-wide illustrations ^__^

Come and see them next week 17/19 Sept @colonyofartists with @nika.novich.art !

#MastoArt #CreativeToots #illustration #winter #snow #viking #horse #snowstorm #forest #journey #traveling #travelingram #nordic #vector #vectorillustration #adobe #adobeillustrator #creative #print #frame #giclee #gicleeprint #art #artprints #abbeyhill #abbeyhillcolonies #colonyofartists #colobee #edinburgh #localartist