The Gaff: the thread about Craigmillar’s picture houses
Our previous thread explored the history of East Pilton’s Embassy cinema. Many of Edinburgh’s interwar picture houses followed a similar timeline: a briefly glamorous heyday, a long decline as a bingo hall and then being disappeared by the wrecker’s ball. There’s usually a fire in there somewhere for good measure too. Our subject for today are the pair of cinemas that served the districts of Niddrie and Craigmillar – the Rio and the County – and are no exception to this narrative. Outside of their own neighbourhood they are probably also the least weel-kent such establishments in the city.
To your average Edinburgh citizen, equally mysterious probably is what the very words “Niddrie” and “Craigmillar” actually define. They might use them interchangeably to vaguely describe anything and everything in the great unknown east of Peffermill. Such is their reputation that the very mention will inevitably conjure up an inner sense of unease, fear, derision or pity. Many would confidently pronounce an opinion on the places in the same breath as telling you they’ve never actually been there for themselves. They might struggle to pinpoint them on a map but will definitely be able to tell you a dreadful tale or sobering statistic about them. When your author was growing up in the comfortable bubble of west Edinburgh in the 1990s, Niddrie was a word used to strike fear into the hearts of children from Corstorphine and Nidrons were a mythical terror to be avoided at all costs. In retrospect; slanderous nonsense, of course. Such is the shroud of mystery, misunderstanding and misinformation that cloaks this corner of southeast Edinburgh from much of its own city that it’s worth briefly bringing ourselves up to speed on the subject. (If you’d rather jump straight to the Rio cinema, you can click here, but you’ll be missing out!)
In most people’s minds the probably imagine Niddrie or Craigmillar as one vast, contiguous council housing scheme: the reality there is a patchwork of schemes with different names built progressively throughout the 20th century. Up until 1920 the City of Edinburgh stopped where it met the Braid Burn (red and white line on the map below). Beyond this, from an administrative point of view, lay the Parish of Liberton in the County of Midlothian. Moving eastwards you would first have come to the community of Craigmillar – dominated by its industrial creamery, breweries and maltings – before passing through the fields of Niddrie Mains farm. Next, on your right would be the Policies of Niddrie Marischal, the rambling pile of the house of that name in the distance. Keep going and you would come to the pit villages of Niddrie Mill and Jewel before finally encountering the numerous collieries that took the name Niddrie and brought vast wealth to those in the aforementioned big hoose. This would all change after the Edinburgh Boundaries Extension and Tramways Act 1920, which subsumed the parish of Liberton (and others) into the city.
Coloured aerial photograph showing the development of the principal housing areas in the Niddrie and Craigmillar schemes. The red and white dashes line is the pre-1920 municipal boundary. Niddrie Mains has been entirely demolished (With the exception of a single block) and rebuilt-upon, as has Greendykes (except its multi-storey flats). Parts of the original perimeter blocks of Craigmillar have been refurbished but the majority again has been demolished and rebuilt. The 1954 parts of Niddrie Marischal have been redeveloped. Niddrie House, the last major addition to Niddrie, was very poorly built and was given an early rebuilt and refurbishment. All except the small SSHA area of Niddrie Mill and the Thistle Foundation were originally built by Edinburgh Corporation. Not shown are the temporary housing areas, which were located around Craigmillar and at Greendykes from the late 1940s through to 1961.The city’s expansion brought vast new tracts of greenfield land within the Corporation’s reach and they soon began planning council housing upon it. Modern Niddrie began in 1928 when work started east of old Craigmillar on the Niddrie Mains housing scheme. This lay to the north of Niddrie Mains Road on the fields of the farm of that name. The first houses at Harewood Drive were ready for occupation in late 1930 and were formally inaugurated by HRH the Princess Mary, Countess of Harewood, for whom the street was named. Work progressed slowly eastwards and the last of some 2,000-odd houses were completed in 1935. After this came the Craigmillar housing scheme to the south of Niddrie Mains Road. Although it is “habitually lumped in” with Niddrie Mains, “the schemes were wholly different” writes Steven Robb in his history of “Ebenezer Macrae and Interwar Housing in Edinburgh“. Some of this confusion around placenames can be excused by the fact that both of these schemes were in the Craigmillar Ward for town council elections and given the postal address of Craigmillar. Historically however, Niddrie Mains was on the Niddrie estate and Craigmillar on the Craigmillar and Inch estate, two different landholdings.
Newsprint photo of 11 Harewood Drive being prepared for inauguration by HRH Princess Mary, a small gazebo being erected for the ceremony. The black rectangle on the tenement wall is the memorial which read “This Tablet Commemorating the Opening of the Niddrie Mains Housing Scheme was Unveiled by HRH Princess Mary on 17th Sept. 1930″. What became of the tablet is unknown. Scotsman, 17th September 1930.Niddrie Mains was built to house families cleared from the worst of the slums of the Southside, with a mix of local pit workers added for good measure. Edinburgh’s city fathers considered that these classes of people could best be dealt with by forcing them into better housing, far from the overcrowding and disease of the city and also its temptations and vices. From the very beginning therefore the scheme was fundamentally a sink into which the city could decant its most disadvantaged citizens. Here they were quite literally hidden away, beyond the periphery and out of sight behind Arthur’s Seat. Although their new homes were a vast improvement on where they had come from, people found the scheme a bleak place to live from the outset. The streets were a monotonous grid composed entirely of utilitarian three-storey tenements offering little variation in design. People who were used to their entire worlds being contained in a few surrounding streets found themselves scattered far from their roots, their families and their places of work and entertainment. In case they were tempted to head back “home” and into the city, they were discouraged by the scant public transport and a long bus journey. The Corporation, aware that education was a lever that could be pulled in the name of bettering the populace’s lot, provided fine new schools. The churches too moved in, seeing an opportunity to shepherd what they considered to be their wayward flocks back into their fold. A handful of shops (which took some years to appear) were provided but other public facilities were almost entirely lacking and there was no provision by way of entertainment – and certainly no pubs!
Come 1935 the scheme was nearing completion and had almost 8,000 residents, but there was still precious little for folk to do of an evening. That was all about to change however in the bold form of cinema proprietor Mary Elizabeth Broadhurst (neé Phillips). On July 12th that year her plans for a modern picture house at for 8 Wauchope1 Avenue, by Thomas Linton of Linton and Grierson, were approved by the Dean of Guild Court. With her husband (James Thomas Broadhurst) she had started in the world of the silver screen by taking on the lease of the silent Abbey picture house on North Richmond Street before moving on to the Tollcross on Lauriston Place. It is interesting to note that when Craigmillar finally got its pub (The White House, approved only because it was a “roadhouse”) in 1936 that it was also the enterprise of a woman.
- Wauchope, pronounced Wawcup, was named for the Wauchope family of Niddrie Marischal House, from whom the land for Niddrie Mains had been purchased by the Corporation ↩︎
The Rio, as it came to be named, was the first picture house built for one of Edinburgh’s new housing estates. It was opened on February 6th 1936 by the Aberdonian stage comic Harry Gordon. The Evening News reported that “it compared favourably with those in Princes Street in so far as comfort, seating and central heating was concerned“. Introducing him, Councillor David Moir joked that the ticket prices (6d for the front stalls, 6d for the circle and 1s for the balcony) “were such that even an Aberdonian would not object to paying them.” Gordon replied he was proud to have been the first person to have gotten in without paying.
Harry Gordon, the “Laird O’ Iversnecky”. 1940 Radio Times advertThe opening show was a double-bill of Dick Powell and Roby Keeler in Flirtation Walk and Edward G. Robinson in Passport to Fame after which the usual programme was two pictures, plus newsreels and cartoons, changing twice weekly. The venture cost Mrs Broadhurst £15,000 (approximately £950 thousand in 2026) and had 1,135 seats – not too big but not too small. It had a pared-back moderne styling – fashionable but on a budget – sadly I cannot find a picture but it probably shared the same façade with the later County. The sound system was provided by Film Industries Equipment (FIE) and seems to have been a unique installation. Further details are hard to come many. However the 1937 trade journal Kinematograph Year Book gives the prices as being 4d to 9d and the number of seats as 1,235, from which we might surmise that it had been found necessary to reduce prices and increase the number of seats to make the place pay.
Opening advert for the Rio, “Super Cinema”, 1st February 1936, Edinburgh Evening NewsA few further snippets in the short life of the Rio can be gleaned from the pages of the Evening News. Mrs Broadhurst was fined £3 in March 1938 at the Burgh Court for allowing overcrowding during children’s matinees and for failing to keep an attendant stationed at each exit door. The authorities took such a charge very seriously after the 1929 Glen cinema disaster in Glasgow in which 71 children had died as the result of a panic and subsequent crush in the overcrowded cinema. The City Prosecutor charged that this was a regular occurrence at the Rio and the police had followed up on complaints by sending plain clothes officers to investigate. On the afternoon of Saturday 26th February they found that there were more children in the auditorium than there were seats: in the front row alone there were 17 occupying 10 places! Mrs Broadhurst acknowledged that her house had been understaffed and overfilled but maintained that it had been a one-off, accidental oversight.
There were no other public halls beyond church halls in the area, various community fund-raising events for the district were held at the cinema (“the use of which was readily granted by the proprietrix“) and Mrs Broadhurst would pay each Christmas for members of the Niddrie Mains and Craigmillar branch of the Old Age Pensioners Association to have their tea and a concert at the University Settlement. Like many cinemas, vandalism proved to be a problem, particularly so in the war years. In October 1944, Dennis Muldownie (19) of Craigmillar Castle Terrace was fined £2 for maliciously breaking the wooden back of a tip-up seat. The city prosecutor commented that this sort of offence was “becoming increasingly common” and Mrs Broadhurst told the court she had spent £60 on seat repairs in the past year alone.
The short life of the Rio came to an abrupt end on October 5th 1946 when it was gutted by fire. The alarm was raised at 2:15AM that morning and by the time the fire brigade arrived from Lauriston Place fifteen minutes later they found a “raging inferno“; the whole auditorium was ablaze and the stalls, circle and gallery already totally consumed. The adjacent tenement had to be evacuated as a precaution and one hose was set on watering it down to prevent the fire spreading to it. Once the last embers were dampened down and the smoke cleared all that was left was the façade, the outside walls and the fire-proof projection box.
The Rio after the fire, showing how total the destruction was. Anything flammable was consumed by the flames and all that remains inside is the steel structure of the balcony and the supports and springs of the seats. Daylight streams in through the collapsed roof structure. Edinburgh Evening News, October 5th 1946Mrs Broadhurst was determined to rebuild and within a month the Dean of Guild Court approved her application to reconstruct to plans by M. Cormie. It was not quite that simple however as final authority in the stringent post-war austerity regime had to come from the Ministries of Works and of Labour. The Town Council lent its support to a public petition organised by local social and welfare bodies in the Craigmillar area, declaring that having a cinema in the district was a social necessity. In the mean time the city magistrates granted the Craigmillar Community Association an entertainments licence to show 16mm films on Friday evenings to schoolchildren. The Ministry approvals were not forthcoming until February 1949 and by this time it was owned by Harry Paulo (known locally as Harry Polo) and Robert Scott, the Broadhursts appear to have retired to the Isle of Man instead. Paulo & Scott owned the County in Portobello and the New County in Haddington and perhaps took the place on after their own experience. The New County had burned down in 1933, leaving little more than a facade, and had been rebuilt and re-opened by them in had the reconstruction undertaken by none other than Thomas Bowhill Gibson. Unsurprisingly Paulo & Scott renamed their new venture the County: to locals however it was simply The Gaff. It re-opened in a low key ceremony on August 29th 1950 conducted by Bailie Jack Kane, later Lord Provost and after whom the Jack Kane Centre is named.
An aerial photo of Niddrie Mains in 1960, with the rebuilt County Cinema highlighted in yellow. Along with Craigmillar School in the middle distance, it is one of a handful of buildings that added variety the austere ranks of tenements of Ebenezer J. Macrae’s housing scheme.Gibson is perhaps the most prominent interwar Scottish cinema architect and as well as Porty’s County designed the Dominion in Morningside and the Rutland at the West End. The austere, boxy lines of the rebuilt house are less than typical of his work and suggest that much of the original façade had been retained. The first screening was a double bill of Robert Paige in Red Stallion and Donald O’ Connor in Feudin, Fussin and a’ Fighting.
The County (aka Terror Land), in 1971. Photo credit Kevin & Henry Wheelan via Edinburgh & Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.Robert Scott died in 1953 and Harry Paulo sold the other cinemas; that in Portobello becoming The George. This left him in sole charge in Craigmillar where he was known as Harry Polo. He has the reputation of having been a very hands-on proprietor and would mingle with the queues of children for the Saturday morning shows, welcoming them. He was also something of a mystery. When Edinburgh’s original cinema and theatre historian, George Baird, visited the establishment in 1962 to catalogue it he was perplexed to find a Mr Butcher in charge who refused to talk to him and had forbidden any member of his family and staff to do so either. This confusion arose as “Mr Paulo” was a member of the extended Paulo family of circus and amusements promoters, whose principal family name was actually Butcher and many of whose sons were Christened Henry but known as Harry. Harry Paulo of the County was actually Francis Henry Butcher (1899-1978), also a member by marriage of the Codona family of Fun City.
Mr Butcher was the only cinema owner who refused to give me any information. However, I got the ‘gen’ necessary to put it on the map. The intervention of the fire caused a four year gap, which took me three hours to track to its source.
George Baird writing on the County and “Mr Paulo” in Edinburgh Theatres, Cinemas and Circuses 1820-1963.
When Baird visited the County it had recently become a “dual purpose house”, showing films five nights a week and catering to the growing craze of bingo the other two. Such was the success of the latter venture that in late 1963 it went over to it exclusively and like many of its contemporaries would have a much longer career as a bingo hall than a picture house. The last films were shown without ceremony on October 18th; a double bill of Herhard Reidman in Arena of Fear and Don Borisenko in The Fast Ones. In 1970 a licence for County Bingo was granted to Thomas J. Paulo (I believe this was Harry’s son) who transferred it to his company County Properties and Developments Ltd. in 1977. Starting with in Craigmillar, this Paulo built up a chain of bingo halls across the Scottish Central Belt.
A (probably) 1970s scene on Wauchope Avenue looking towards The County. Credit Edinburgh College of Art, via Scran DP579335Like its predecessor, the County remained one of the very few places of entertainment in Niddrie and Craigmillar. It survived the grim years of the 1980s as Niddrie Mains entered a decline from which it would never recover, the community being slowly crushed by unemployment, addiction, crime, social deprivation and official indifference. These are things with which its name has become (often unfairly) synonymous.
The Rex launderette and the County Bingo in 1987 on a dreich day in Niddrie Mains. A little over 20 years later everything in this scene that hadn’t already been pulled down or fallen down would be swept away by the council’s wrecking ball. Photograph © Graham Macindoe, reproduced with kind permission.I have not been able to find out exactly when the County Bingo closed, however its licence was renewed as late as 1996 and it has a cameo appearance as a backdrop in the 1998 film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House. In the second chapter the character Johnny (Kevin McKidd) can twice be seen walking past the hall, cheerfully painted in a Neapolitan colour scheme of pastel pink, chocolate and vanilla. The graffiti plastered across the boarded up doors suggests it was abandoned by this time.
Scene from chapter 2 (“A Soft Touch”) of the 1998 film adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s The Acid House. Johnny (played by Kevin McKidd) walks past the boarded up County Bingo.By this time the city of Edinburgh had decided that Niddrie Mains was unsalvageable and the best thing to do with the place would be to erase it entirely from the face of the earth and pretend that it had never existed. Demolition of some burnt-out properties had begun in the late 1970s and by the new millennium clearance started with some determination. This was despite the fact that for all the failings of the scheme, its houses were fundamentally well built and well designed: thousands of identical ones remain in use to this day and can be brought up to modern standards with the will and the investment. As the neighbourhoods blocks were depopulated and became vacant they were boarded up to await demolition. This resulted in many being heavily vandalised. As a result, life became worse for those who remained. Their number dwindled along with the housing stock, leaving behind houseless streets-to-nowhere to be slowly reclaimed by weeds.
The Niddrie Mains ghost town, Looking along Wauchope Avenue in 2007. The County stood behind the Rex Launderette, the red building in the middle. By this time much of the Niddrie Mains estate had been demolished or was boarded up awaiting that fate, with the exception of a few hold-outs. Photo by Dave Henniker of Henniker.Scot, used with kind permission.A few determined residents held out until the end but by 2008 everything was gone, including the County. If you were to go looking for the it today, you will find a short stub of tarmac off of the access road around the back of Lidl where it once stood. A vast, multi-million pound transformation has taken place since then with new houses, streets and facilities as far as the eye can see. Of the entire Niddrie Mains estate, which once had over 2,000 houses, a few street names and only a single six-flat block remains at 65 Niddrie Mains Terrace. This survived only because it had been kept by the Council as a day service hub and was transferred to the LAR Housing Trust who restored it to residential use.
If you go down to Wauchope Avenue today, you’ll be in for a big surprise. The street now finds itself the access for delivery lorries to the Lidl superstore on the left, the site of the County and the Rex are a small playpark. Beyond, all the old tenement housing has gone, replaced by modern blocks on new streets. The only constant is Craigmillar Primary School in the distance, the building having been retained as a community arts facility (despite the Council’s original intention to clear it away too). Original photo taken in 1987, © Graham Macindoe, reproduced with kind permission.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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