#august-10 — Public Fediverse posts

A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park

Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.

The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.

In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.

For the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.

The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.

It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.

Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:

[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow

The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.

Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.

A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.

Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.

The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.

At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.

Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.

Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!

Ken Jones, writing to the Editor of the Scotsman, 19th January 1962

As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.

If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.

A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.

However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.

It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!

In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.

The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.

We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.

David Mowat, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, 7th November 1979, The Scotsman

Lothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!

NCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.

With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.

And if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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.

A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park

Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.

The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.

In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.

For the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.

The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.

It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.

Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:

[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow

The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.

Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.

A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.

Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.

The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.

At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.

Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.

Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!

Ken Jones, writing to the Editor of the Scotsman, 19th January 1962

As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.

If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.

A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.

However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.

It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!

In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.

The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.

We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.

David Mowat, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, 7th November 1979, The Scotsman

Lothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!

NCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.

With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.

And if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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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.

A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park

Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.

The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.

In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.

For the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.

The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.

It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.

Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:

[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow

The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.

Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.

A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.

Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.

The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.

At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.

Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.

Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!

Ken Jones, writing to the Editor of the Scotsman, 19th January 1962

As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.

If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.

A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.

However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.

It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!

In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.

The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.

We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.

David Mowat, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, 7th November 1979, The Scotsman

Lothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!

NCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.

With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.

And if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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.

A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park

Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.

The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.

In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.

For the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.

The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.

It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.

Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:

[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow

The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.

Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.

A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.

Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.

The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.

At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.

Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.

Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!

Ken Jones, writing to the Editor of the Scotsman, 19th January 1962

As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.

If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.

A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.

However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.

It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!

In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.

The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.

We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.

David Mowat, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, 7th November 1979, The Scotsman

Lothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!

NCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.

With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.

And if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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.

A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park

Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.

The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.

In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.

For the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.

The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.

It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.

Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:

[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow

The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.

Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.

A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.

Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.

The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.

At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.

Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.

Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!

Ken Jones, writing to the Editor of the Scotsman, 19th January 1962

As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.

If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.

A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.

However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.

It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!

In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.

The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.

We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.

David Mowat, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, 7th November 1979, The Scotsman

Lothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!

NCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.

With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.

And if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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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.

The sunset tonight, August 10, 2025.

A very wide panorama with many fuzzy pixel pixels but not made with the pixel pano-broken-ator but 7 vertical photos stitched in hugin. In case you were interested in those details.

#sunset #August10 #panorama #sky #clouds #twilight #hugin

The sunset tonight, August 10, 2025.

A very wide panorama with many fuzzy pixel pixels but not made with the pixel pano-broken-ator but 7 vertical photos stitched in hugin. In case you were interested in those details.

#sunset #August10 #panorama #sky #clouds #twilight #hugin

The sunset tonight, August 10, 2025.

A very wide panorama with many fuzzy pixel pixels but not made with the pixel pano-broken-ator but 7 vertical photos stitched in hugin. In case you were interested in those details.

#sunset #August10 #panorama #sky #clouds #twilight #hugin

The sunset tonight, August 10, 2025.

A very wide panorama with many fuzzy pixel pixels but not made with the pixel pano-broken-ator but 7 vertical photos stitched in hugin. In case you were interested in those details.

#sunset #August10 #panorama #sky #clouds #twilight #hugin

The sunset tonight, August 10, 2025.

A very wide panorama with many fuzzy pixel pixels but not made with the pixel pano-broken-ator but 7 vertical photos stitched in hugin. In case you were interested in those details.

#sunset #August10 #panorama #sky #clouds #twilight #hugin

Russia-Ukraine war: Frontline update as of August 10

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russia-ukraine-war-frontline-update-as-of-1754808687.html

#WarOfAggression #Europa #Ukraine #August10 #Frontline #army #update #war #Russia #WarCriminal #drones #occupiers #defenders
#перемогаYкраїни

Russia-Ukraine war: Frontline update as of August 10

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russia-ukraine-war-frontline-update-as-of-1754808687.html

#WarOfAggression #Europa #Ukraine #August10 #Frontline #army #update #war #Russia #WarCriminal #drones #occupiers #defenders
#перемогаYкраїни

Russia-Ukraine war: Frontline update as of August 10

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russia-ukraine-war-frontline-update-as-of-1754808687.html

#WarOfAggression #Europa #Ukraine #August10 #Frontline #army #update #war #Russia #WarCriminal #drones #occupiers #defenders
#перемогаYкраїни

Russia-Ukraine war: Frontline update as of August 10

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russia-ukraine-war-frontline-update-as-of-1754808687.html

#WarOfAggression #Europa #Ukraine #August10 #Frontline #army #update #war #Russia #WarCriminal #drones #occupiers #defenders
#перемогаYкраїни

Russia-Ukraine war: Frontline update as of August 10

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/russia-ukraine-war-frontline-update-as-of-1754808687.html

#WarOfAggression #Europa #Ukraine #August10 #Frontline #army #update #war #Russia #WarCriminal #drones #occupiers #defenders
#перемогаYкраїни

Milwaukee Brewers to give away ‘The Miz’ T-shirts https://www.rawchili.com/mlb/180116/ #"TheMiz" #AllStar #AllStarPitcherJacobMisiorowski #AmazingStart #August10 #awareness #Baseball #Brewers #career #cause #DominantInning #FirstPitcher #giveaway #JacobMisiorowski #Milwaukee #MilwaukeeBrewers #MilwaukeeBrewers #MisiorowskiSupport #miz #MLB #OfficialSymbol #parkinson #pitcher #rookie #sunday #TShirt #TShirtDesign #TShirts

Milwaukee Brewers to give away ‘The Miz’ T-shirts https://www.rawchili.com/mlb/180116/ #"TheMiz" #AllStar #AllStarPitcherJacobMisiorowski #AmazingStart #August10 #awareness #Baseball #Brewers #career #cause #DominantInning #FirstPitcher #giveaway #JacobMisiorowski #Milwaukee #MilwaukeeBrewers #MilwaukeeBrewers #MisiorowskiSupport #miz #MLB #OfficialSymbol #parkinson #pitcher #rookie #sunday #TShirt #TShirtDesign #TShirts

🍼🪦 10 août, un jour, une vie, un décès https://www.election-politique.com/election.php?ref=915

#Anniversaire #Birthday #10Aout #10Agosto #10deAgosto #10August #August10 #JuanManuelSantos #YahyaKhan

🍼🪦 10 août, un jour, une vie, un décès https://www.election-politique.com/election.php?ref=915

#Anniversaire #Birthday #10Aout #10Agosto #10deAgosto #10August #August10 #JuanManuelSantos #YahyaKhan

Song of the Day August 10 2024

In remembrance of the birth of Veronica Yvette Bennett bka Ronnie Spector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Spector

The Ronettes - “Be My Baby”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSPpbOGnFgk

#SongOfTheDay #SOTD #SOTD2024 #August10 #RonnieSpector #TheRonettes #BeMyBaby #PhilSpector #Pop #Soul #EllieGreenwich #AudioRecording #Music #1960s

Song of the Day August 10 2024

In remembrance of the birth of Veronica Yvette Bennett bka Ronnie Spector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Spector

The Ronettes - “Be My Baby”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSPpbOGnFgk

#SongOfTheDay #SOTD #SOTD2024 #August10 #RonnieSpector #TheRonettes #BeMyBaby #PhilSpector #Pop #Soul #EllieGreenwich #AudioRecording #Music #1960s

Song of the Day August 10 2024

In remembrance of the birth of Veronica Yvette Bennett bka Ronnie Spector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Spector

The Ronettes - “Be My Baby”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSPpbOGnFgk

#SongOfTheDay #SOTD #SOTD2024 #August10 #RonnieSpector #TheRonettes #BeMyBaby #PhilSpector #Pop #Soul #EllieGreenwich #AudioRecording #Music #1960s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XutKfAL7wx8&list=RDEMbTQbVmPWCforiu0jqZMDTg&start_radio=1

#musica #music #musik #musíque

#Khruangbin #August10

#WeAreTheRadio #tootradio #pouetradio #mastoradio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XutKfAL7wx8&list=RDEMbTQbVmPWCforiu0jqZMDTg&start_radio=1

#musica #music #musik #musíque

#Khruangbin #August10

#WeAreTheRadio #tootradio #pouetradio #mastoradio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XutKfAL7wx8&list=RDEMbTQbVmPWCforiu0jqZMDTg&start_radio=1

#musica #music #musik #musíque

#Khruangbin #August10

#WeAreTheRadio #tootradio #pouetradio #mastoradio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XutKfAL7wx8&list=RDEMbTQbVmPWCforiu0jqZMDTg&start_radio=1

#musica #music #musik #musíque

#Khruangbin #August10

#WeAreTheRadio #tootradio #pouetradio #mastoradio

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XutKfAL7wx8&list=RDEMbTQbVmPWCforiu0jqZMDTg&start_radio=1

#musica #music #musik #musíque

#Khruangbin #August10

#WeAreTheRadio #tootradio #pouetradio #mastoradio

Song of the Day August 10 2023

In remembrance of Veronica Yvette Greenfield bka Ronnie Spector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Spector

The Ronettes - "Be My Baby"

https://youtu.be/e-dr1PZZMds

#SongOfTheDay #SOTD #SOTD2023 #August10 #VeronicaYvetteGreenfield #RonnieSpector #Ronettes #BeMyBaby #PhilSpector #FirstSingle #1960s

Song of the Day August 10 2023

In remembrance of Veronica Yvette Greenfield bka Ronnie Spector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Spector

The Ronettes - "Be My Baby"

https://youtu.be/e-dr1PZZMds

#SongOfTheDay #SOTD #SOTD2023 #August10 #VeronicaYvetteGreenfield #RonnieSpector #Ronettes #BeMyBaby #PhilSpector #FirstSingle #1960s

Song of the Day August 10 2023

In remembrance of Veronica Yvette Greenfield bka Ronnie Spector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Spector

The Ronettes - "Be My Baby"

https://youtu.be/e-dr1PZZMds

#SongOfTheDay #SOTD #SOTD2023 #August10 #VeronicaYvetteGreenfield #RonnieSpector #Ronettes #BeMyBaby #PhilSpector #FirstSingle #1960s

Song of the Day August 10 2023

In remembrance of Veronica Yvette Greenfield bka Ronnie Spector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Spector

The Ronettes - "Be My Baby"

https://youtu.be/e-dr1PZZMds

#SongOfTheDay #SOTD #SOTD2023 #August10 #VeronicaYvetteGreenfield #RonnieSpector #Ronettes #BeMyBaby #PhilSpector #FirstSingle #1960s

Song of the Day August 10 2023

In remembrance of Veronica Yvette Greenfield bka Ronnie Spector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Spector

The Ronettes - "Be My Baby"

https://youtu.be/e-dr1PZZMds

#SongOfTheDay #SOTD #SOTD2023 #August10 #VeronicaYvetteGreenfield #RonnieSpector #Ronettes #BeMyBaby #PhilSpector #FirstSingle #1960s

Henry Robb at War: the thread about ships built in Leith during World War 2

I have previously gone into a bit of detail about the last days of Henry Robbs, Leith’s last shipyard. But thought I might also fill out a bit of the middle history too.

The company of Robbs was quite late on the Scottish shipbuilding scene, only forming in 1918 when one of the yard managers from Ramage & Fergusons, Leith’s then major shipbuilder, struck out on his own. That was Henry Robb and his company grew in the post-war slump by buying up slipway capacity from older shipyards. By 1934 they bought over Ramage & Ferguson themselves and became the only major shipbuilder in Leith. The company’s speciality was small, commercial vessels, coasters, tugs, dredgers, trawlers and the like. in the order of 500-1,500 tons displacement and up to 300 feet length. Practices were traditional, ships were riveted together and generally steam powered. In that respect they were little different from any other small Scottish shipyard outside the Clyde. As the clouds of war gathered in the late 1930s, the government suddenly needed *lots* of warships and ways had to be found to get small commercial shipbuilders to build them.

The most pressing needs were for convoy escorts, and to get them build in yards such as Robbs they needed to be small enough, built to largely commercial standards and with traditional techniques. There was initially no time to introduce things like prefabrication or welding. So before war even began, like commercial yards across Britain, Robbs was getting orders for warships. Things started off quite simply but as the war went on, they would produce more, bigger and more sophisticated ships. The first 2 warships were HM Trawlers Hickory and Hazel, Tree-class vessels. Little more than militarised versions of large commercial steam trawlers, they had basic weapons for fighting submarines and were most useful as minesweepers. Both were laid down in 1939, and commissioned in March and April of 1940 respectively. Hickory would be lost 6 months later when she hit a mine and sank off of Portland. 20 men were lost, the survivors were picked up by sister ship Pine. Hazel survived the war.

The next 4 ships built were ordered in 1939 & 40 and were Flower-class corvettes. These were based on the design of a commercial steam whaler by the Smiths Docks Company. They were intended for coastal use but ended up being the initial mainstay of the North Atlantic convoys. Much has been written about the Flower”. One phrase that always follows them around is that “they would roll on wet grass“. They were much too small for mid-ocean use and you can imagine how the Atlantic bobbed them around like corks. But built they were and in large numbers too, and for all their design faults and shortcomings their were there and they were available. Robbs built HMS Dianthus, Delphinium, Petunia and Polyanthus in this initial batch.

Like most Flowers, Dianthus had a busy, tough war, but she also was quite “productive”, sinking the German submarines U-379 off Greenland on 8th August 1942 and U-225 off the Azores on 22nd February 1943.

That last picture is a depth charge; the standard anti-submarine weapon until late in the war. Basically a 400lb drum of high explosives with a hydrostatic detonator that would set it off at a pre-determined depth. It was projected out from the side of the ship by an explosive charge using a device called a “K-gun” (from the shape of the casting). The depth charge could also be simply rolled over the stern from a rack. You then had to vacate the area ASAP or risk being badly damaged by your own weapon. It was crude, it was imprecise, it was hard to use but it was devastating if it got close to a submarine

Polyanthus was assigned to the Newfoundland Command of the Royal Canadian Navy and was lost on September 21st 1943 in the mid-Atlantic, 1,000 miles from Iceland. She was hit by a German homing torpedo of the sort designed to target escort ships. Only 1 man survived. The survivor was picked up by the Frigate HMS Itchen. Just 3 days later, Itchen herself was hit by another homing torpedo and nearly all, including the survivor from Polyanthus were lost. These would be the first 2 ships lost to homing torpedoes.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jcinanshan/16438349711

The others survived the war. Delphinium was scrapped, Dianthus and Petunia were sold into commercial service. The “Flowers” came from a commercial whaler design and were readily adaptable back into such a ship.

In 1940, 7 smaller warships were laid down. Two Bangor-class minesweepers, two Dance-class trawlers and three Bird-class minesweepers for New Zealand. The Bangors were small coastal minesweepers, named after seaside towns. Robbs built Sidmouth and Stornoway. The picture shows Sidmouth (left) next to Bangor. Both survived the war and were sold soon after

The Dance-class were very similar to the two “Trees” built by Robbs the previous year. They were HMT Saltarelo and HMT Sword Dance. Both were sold into commercial service after the war.

The three “Birds” were HMNZS Tui, Moa and Kiwi. Built as minesweepers for New Zealand, they were basically overgrown trawlers and originally intended as training ships for the fledgling service. The little Birds served far from Leith. Moa and Kiwi sank the Japanese submarine I-1 off of Guadalcanal in the pacific on 29th January 1943. Tui sank I-17 off of Noumea on 19th August 1943. Moa was hit by a Japanese bomb and sank while in harbour in the Pacific island of Tulagi. Five men were killed. Her two sisters would survive the war.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/42117802@N06/4374819037

In 1941, Robbs laid down 9 ships. Two more Flower-class corvettes, 2 Bustler-class salvage tugs, 2 Isles-class trawlers, 2 River-class frigates and a single landing craft. The Flowers were HMS Lotus and Pink. Both were commissioned in 1942. Lotus‘ first war action was part of the escort of the disastrous convoy PQ17 in June and July 1942. She sank the submarine U-660 off Oran in the Mediterranean with her sister Starwort on 12th November 1942. Days later they attacked another submarine contact and are credited with sinking U-605, although it may have been U-77 which would escape with damage.

The strange A-frame hung off the front of the ship is an “acoustic hammer”. Basically a modified jackhammer sealed in a steel drum that it would impact against, it was hung in the water and the terrific noise could detonate acoustic mines ahead of the ship. In theory.

Here is a remarkable British Pathé newsreel of HMS “Pink” being launched in Leith, on a chilly day in February 1942.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCoGMllwwjc

Pink heavily damaged the submarine U-358 in the North Atlantic on 5th May 1943, but was torpedoed a year later in the English Channel and was a “Constructive Total Loss”, i.e. she didn’t sink but she would never sail again. She was scrapped in 1947

Lotus was ordered as HMS Phlox, but her name was changed. She was transferred to the Free French Navy as Commandant d’Estienne d’Orves. She survived the war, was returned by France in 1947 and was converted into a whaler, joining Leith’s own Christian Salvesen fleet as Southern Lotus. Her last whaling season was 1962/3. She was towed from Leith (South Georgia) to Norway and laid up to be sold for scrapping in 1966, but was wrecked on tow to Belgium.

The two tugs were Bustler and Samsonia, unusual for British ships of this time in that they were diesel-powered. These were military tugs, designed to sail with convoys and act as rescue and salvage ships. Robbs would build eight Bustlers during the war.

The two Isles-class trawlers were again very similar to the earlier Dance and Tree classes. They were the main class of British WW2 naval trawlers, with some 145 built. Robbs built HMT Skye and Staffa, both of which survived the war.

The landing craft built by Robbs would be the only one they ever built. She was ordered as a Mark II LCT TLC.47 but renumbered LCT.115 for service (LCT = Landing Craft, Tank) She was bombed and sunk off Kasteleriso in the Dodecanese on 28th October 1943.

The last pair of ships from 1941 were the River-class frigates HMS Ness and Nith. The frigates were a much better design of ocean convoy escort than the Flowers, they were basically two sets of corvette machinery in a longer hull. They also incorporated much of the newly developed anti-submarine equipment and weaponry from scratch and many of the lessons of how to try and make the ships more habitable and efficient for their crews.

Nith was present at the Normandy landings. She would be hit by a “Mistel”, a gigantic remote control flying bomb with a 1.8 tonne warhead, on 23rd June 1944 but somehow survived with only light damage. 10 men were killed but Nith was returned to service. In 1948 she was transferred to Egypt as Domiat. In 1956 she was sunk by the cruiser HMS Newfoundland during the Suez crisis after picking a fight she couldn’t hope to win. She became the only ship sunk during the conflict. 69 of her crew of around 110 were rescued.

In 1942, seven ships would be launched. That year was also the peak of production at Robbs in terms of both total launches and total displacement of ships launched. Two Bustlers, four River-class frigates and another Isles-class trawler were laid down. The tugs were Growler and Hesperia. For reasons I’m unclear about, the latter was renamed from Boisterous before commissioning. She was wrecked off Libya in February 1945. Growler was sold in 1947. The trawler was HMT Wallasea, commissioned on 31st July 1943 she would be lost in Mounts Bay just 5 months later on 5th January 1944 after the convoy she was escorting was attacked by German “E-boats”. 17 of the crew of 40 were lost.

The four Rivers laid down in 1942 were Derg, Glenarm, Windrush and Wye. They each took between 350 and 448 days to build, commissioning between June 1943 and February 1944.

Glenarm, named after the Northern Irish river, sank the submarine U-377 on January 17th 1944 in company with the corvette Geranium and the old destroyer Wanderer. She was renamed Strule in February of that year before transferring to the Free French as Croix de Lorraine.

She joined her sister Windrush, which had transferred to France in February as Découverte. Both survived the war and were decommissioned in the late 1950s/early 1960s. Derg would be present in Tokyo Bay in September 1945 when Japan officially surrendered. She was scrapped in 1960. Wye would also survive the war, to be scrapped in 1955.

1943 saw 8 ships laid down and 7 launched. Those laid down were three Castle-class corvettes, three Loch-class frigates and two more Bustler-class tugs. The Castles were an attempt to keep small slipways productive by building a smaller than ideally desirable escort ship that incorporated wartime advances and all the lessons learned with the Flowers. Some prefabrication was used but generally they remained built to old commercial practices.

Flint Castle survived the war, she appeared in the 1955 film “Cockleshell Heroes” portraying a German warship. She was sold for scrap in 1958. The other two Castles were HMCS Orangeville and HMCS Hespeler, they lacked castle names as they were transferred to the Royal Canadian Navy while building. Both were sold for merchant use in 1947, the former to China and the latter in Italy.

The Loch class were a new design based on the earlier Rivers, a design for an ideal anti-submarine ship, incorporating wartime lessons and technology and a design rationalised for rapid building, and modern prefabrication and welding. They had the latest radar, sonar and direction finders, but the main advance was the “Squid”, a weapon that threw three bombs ahead of the ship to land in a triangular pattern around a submerged target.

The Lochs carried two “Squids”. The bombs from one were set to detonate slightly below the other, creating a pressure wave in which the submarine target would be trapped and crushed. It was a horribly effective device, with a 34% success rate; by comparison it could take hundreds of depth charges dropped over hours (or longer) to sink a submarine. Robb-built HMS Loch Insh demonstrated the effectiveness, sinking U-307 in the Barents Sea on 29th April 1945 then U-286 later the same day with the frigate Anguilla and the corvette Cotton. She was sold to Malaysia after the war.

The other Lochs were Loch Fada, Loch Achanalt and Loch Katrine. The latter was built in a remarkable 364 days, entering service on 29th December 1944. Loch Achanalt took a more leisurely 645 days and commissioned just before the war’s end. Both ended up in New Zealand service.

The 1943 Bustlers were Mediator and Warden; the former completed in November 1944 and was sold in 1965, the latter in December 1945 and was sold in 1946. By 1944, with the outcome of the war much more certain, orders were scaled back a bit with only 5 ships laid down, although production of existing orders reached a peak, with 9,347 tonnes of warships launched in Leith.

1944s ships were another pair of Bustlers and three Bay-class frigates. The Bustlers were Turmoil, which completed in July 1945 to be sold in 1946 and Reward. The latter was sold in 1963 but returned to naval service as a tug in 1970. In 1975 she was converted to a patrol vessel to help protect North Sea oil interests as HMS Reward. She was rammed and sunk in an accident in the Firth of Forth, just a few miles from where she was launched, off of Inverkeithing the following year on August 10th by the German cargo vessel Plainsman. She was salvaged the following month and scrapped.

The Bay class were Lochs that had been re-purposed as anti-aircraft vessels. This decision was made as these sorts of ships were much more in need for the Pacific theatre than anti-submarine vessels. None of the three Bays built by Robbs, Cardigan Bay, Padstow Bay or Carnarvon Bay would see any active service in WW2, completing too late.

No more warships were laid down by Henry Robb during WW2, the launches in 1945 being outstanding orders. Three 1943 orders for Lochs were cancelled that would have been 1945 lay-downs; Loch Nell, Loch Odairn and Loch Kishorn. In the 6 years of WW2, Henry Robbs built 42 warships in Leith totalling 42,725 tonnes displacement;

• 7 trawlers
• 8 tugs
• 9 corvettes
• 12 frigates
• 5 minesweepers
• 1 landing craft

1942 was the peak year for number of launches, although a marginally greater displacement was launched in 1944 as fewer, larger vessels were built.

Leith would also be the principle fabrication and assembly yard for parts of the “Mulberry Harbours” used off of the Normandy Beaches, but that’s another story (which you can now read over on this thread).

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