#councilhousing — Public Fediverse posts

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Me8KJlzYymI

#Britain's fucking #housingcrisis

#housing #globalhousingcrisis #councilhousing #classsolidarity

#MoreCouncilHousingNOW

#SocialHousingNOW

There's enough in this country for EVERYONE. These crises are man-made!!

#StopBitchingAbouttTheBoats

Thatcher stole public assets to use as bribes to buy votes.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/aug/03/right-to-buy-england-fuelled-housing-crisis-cost-taxpayers-common-weath-report

#SocialPolicy #SocialHousing #CouncilHousing #RightToBuy

“Absolutely Scandalous”: the thread about Wardie Playing Fields and the Lochinvar Camp

They aren’t in use any more, but on Granton and Netherby Roads in the north of Edinburgh there are impressive ornamental gates that lead to Wardie Playing Fields, where generations of local school children have loved or loathed playing cold and muddy games of football or rugby; have triumphed at their sports day or endured the dreaded “cross country” runs. The fields themselves are still in use, but there’s rather more their story than just 14 acres of windswept turf.

The story of these fields begins when nineteen and a half acres of feuing ground of the old Wardie estate were purchased in late 1920 by the Leith Education Authority for use as a recreation ground for its schools. Few if any of Leith’s urban schools had any playing or sports facilities of their own beyond confined, hard playgrounds and one of the last independent acts of this Authority was to purchase this ground, and that at Bangholm, for school use.

Within a year, the shotgun wedding that amalgamated Edinburgh with Leith saw the fields pass to the former Education Authority, which had a lucrative sideline in leasing it out as sheep grazing well into the 1940s. Edinburgh had also purchased at this time the rest of the undeveloped Wardie feuing grounds west of Granton Road for a public housing scheme (but that’s another story).

As it so often was, the city Corporation was slow to catch up with the population growth of its own housing schemes and the little old village school at Granton was soon at bursting point. But it was not until 10 years later, in September 1931, that a new “sunshine school” – constructed on open-air principles –was opened at Wardie for the district, taking up the southern portion of the playing fields in the process.

Our story so far has been an unremarkable one but all that was to change in 1943. That year the “stone frigate” (the Navy’s nickname for a shore base) of HMS Lochinvar – the Royal Navy’s principle school of minesweeping – found itself evicted from its base at Port Edgar along the coast and displaced to Granton Docks instead where there was already a shore training facility called HMS Claverhouse. Lochinvar had to move to make way for the pressing task of combined operations training in the run up to D-day, but it too had a vital role to play in that campaign; it trained the thousands of men to man the little ships that would keep the approach lanes and assault beaches free from sea mines.

There was plenty space in Granton Docks for the vessels of Lochinvar, but precious little for surface buildings. And that’s where the playing fields came in – an expanse of undeveloped ground just up the hill from the busy harbour and large wartime camp of Nissen Huts was quickly erected, providing everything from accommodation, catering and recreation facilities for personnel to offices, stores and workshops.

New minesweepers came up to Granton where they were allocated to a crew of largely green recruits who were then given an intensive but short period of training in the dangerous art of clearing the sea of mines and then after a few weeks they were then packed off to war. But Lochinvar wasn’t just a man’s world, there was a significant contingent of Wrens (WRNS – the Women’s Royal Naval Service) whose job it was to run the place and make sure everything from sweeps to guns were maintained in good order and would work first time, every time. In the below photo we see two Wrens in overalls – Beryl Lyster from Largs (left) and May Groosjohan of Glasow (right) – showing HRH Duchess of Kent – the WRNS Commandant of the inner workings of the Lewis and Browning Guns and Oerlikon Cannons that they are stripping and servicing for the minesweepers at Wardie. A rather pompous looking male officer looks on.

Lochinvar‘s spell at Wardie was relatively short and less than two years after it opened, at the end of the war, the complex found itself surplus to military requirements. The city’s Education Committee was raring to get the ground back, remove the huts and return the fields to school sports once more: but there was an outcry. You see it’s often forgotten that there was a critical housing crisis at the end of the war. There had been six long years of no new building and few repairs to existing stock, there was a flood of men (and women!) being demobbed and returning home and six years of pent up demand to settle down and start families. Edinburgh was no exception. Anything that could be lived in was being lived in, including properties condemned as slums pre-war. The city faced a homelessness and a squatting crisis and many families simply had nowhere to go. The Housing Committee turned its gaze to the surplus military camps to try and ease this immediate pressure. Its chairman, Councillor J. J. Robertson, said “there was no more pressing claim than the needs of the people for housing” under the headline “School Football or Housing?” in the Evening News on 18th Setpember 1945, just a month after the war’s end.

On 29th August 1946, fourteen homeless families in Edinburgh took matters into their own hands and made a night time “seizure” of the recently vacated Anti Aircraft Gunners’ camp at Craigentinny, which they took possession of as squatters. The group formalised themselves as the “Edinburgh Houseless Association” and began to take applications from other homeless families to join them. While the police investigated alleged vandalism due to stripping some huts of their interiors to improve those that were to be lived in, the residents got on with trying to better their lot and applied to the authorities to have the water and electricity supplies turned back on.

In November, the Corporation relented and the Housing Committee authorised the spending of £4,500 to put the camp in order and take over its administration – crucially, charging rents. They soon widened this action and a Prisoner of War and gunners’ camp at Craigentinny, the Cavalry Park camp in Duddingston and the Nissen Huts of HMS Lochinvar at Wardie were all taken over as housing labelled as both “emergency” and “temporary“. This was despite all of these sites all being totally inappropriate for family living – but there was nothing better and the post-war New Jerusalem would have to wait in the meantime.

Families at the optimistic renamed Lochinvar Camp at Wardie paid 12s a week for half a corrugated iron Nissen Hut, but life here was no holiday camp. Each hut had a thin internal partition dividing it up into two houses, with further thin partitions for bedrooms; this gave people only the idea of privacy. A small coal stove was provided to try and keep the place warm, but with no insulation the thin metal walls were always cold and ran constantly with condensation. You can see some photos of hut interiors here at the Edinphoto website of the late Peter Stubbs. Electricity was provided but only enough for basic lighting, residents found their wireless sets or any other electrical appliances being impounded by the Corporation’s electricians. Toilets and washing facilities were shared between six to nine families. Vermin were a constant problem and they, and the damp, ruined people’s furniture, clothing and posessions.

There was a wash house, but there were only three sinks per 50 families and no stoppers for the sinks. Cooking and cleaning facilities were communal too and centralised; mothers may have to walk hundreds of metres to and from them multiple times a day to feed their families. This would cause a heartbreaking tragedy barely a few months after opening. On October 21st 1946, Mrs Watson made one of her many daily trips to the kitchens and left 18 month old Ann and 3 year old John playing in the hut. This was not unusual and was a simple practicality of life. She was drying clothes on an airing horse by the stove which was somehow knocked over by the children and quickly caught fire. Almost everything within the hut was flammable, it had only a single door, the windows set too high for the children to reach and there was no running water. They were quickly trapped by the flames and there was nothing their mother or the neighbours could do. First the Police and then the Fire Brigade arrived, but all were beaten back by the red hot metal.

There was an outcry in the papers; the letter writers pointed the blame at the mother, the authorities, the fire brigade. The tragedy further stigmatised residents who already felt looked down upon by many. One hut dweller, Mrs Thompson, wrote in her defence to the Evening News on October 28th about the reality of life in the camp;

I am the mother of two young children and I have to go about 100 yards to cook, wash up, and clean in a communal kitchen. When I went to Castle Terrace and told them I was unable to do this, I was told the alternative was to find other accommodation.

The authorities were compelled to act and fire guards were provided for the stoves until gas and water could be laid to the huts to allow cooking and domestic tasks to be done in the home with children under supervision. The city Corporation formed a “special sub-committee to deal with the prevention of accidents in the home” and in recognition of the unsuitability of these sites for housing it cancelled plans to takeover similar camps at Muirhouse and Alnwickhill.

But although Edinburgh was one of the most enthusiastic local authorities when it came to building postwar prefab housing, it couldn’t keep up with demand for housing and the camp found itself in demand with a long waiting list. In July 1949 it was estimated that the temporary camps could be filled four times over, and one family had even taken up residence in the corridors of the city’s Social Services offices in Castle Terrace in protest. Many residents found themselves stuck in the “temporary” camps for far longer than they thought they would be – three years or more instead of six to nine months – and began to organise themselves. A Lochinvar tenants association had been set up in 1947, making an appeal in the classifieds for the donation of a typewriter to help with their secretarial burden. The Corporation set up nurseries to help watch the children while their mothers were busy or out working and social workers were sent in. Mrs Bell, one of the residents, organised sewing classes and Christmas parties for the 36 girls who called the camp home. But others had a more individualistic streak and prouder spirit and had a different response, a resident calling herself “Indignant Mother” wrote to the Evening News, outraged at the insult of being offered “public charity“.

Tensions were further stoked in the camp in 1948 when a group of German workers were installed in some huts. They were young women from the Allied Zones who had found themselves separated from families trapped in the Soviet Zone and had been brought to Edinburgh to work in mills at Musselburgh to help address a labour shortage. There were soon accusations that the Germans had gotten better huts with better heating; but this was not the case. They slept 10 or 12 to a room in dormitories and lived a regimented life of work, rations and few personal possessions. But despite the resentment, some reached out to the incomers; they found their new neighbours to be young and frightened, alone in a strange and foreign land where few spoke their language. There had little in the way of home comforts and many had no idea what had become of their parents in the Soviet Zone.

But one thing that all could agreed upon was that the camp was no fit place for housing. It was “a disgrace to the city of Edinburgh. The decent, hard-working people who have to live here surely deserve a better lot” wrote one resident to the papers in 1947. Another, calling themselves Grantonian said the site should be given instead to the newly formed National Coal Board for use as offices. In October 1949 there was a further fire at Lochinvar that left five families, eighteen people in all, homeless when a gas grill in a hut set fire to the wooden partitions. Fortunately on this occasion nobody was injured. The Evening News described the camp as “shanty town squalor” for 150 families and that conditions there were “not British“. By the 1951 the huts were well past their expected lifespans but the housing demand was such that even though the Education Committee wanted its playing fields back, it was told “no” and the camp was to remain as housing.

This was in spite of the fact the Corporation could barely keep up with the basic maintenance, never mind make improvements. In the preceding year the Lochinvar camp had an average of 176 families resident and was costing the city £4,997 for gas, £68 for coke fuel and £824 for electricity. In two years the city had run up a £19,289 deficit for fuel costs alone across its emergency camps. This was before they outlay of £55 per household (at Lochinvar) for maintenance, almost twice what each was paying in rent. Residents claimed the authorities were trying to force larger families living in huts laid out inside as one large apartment into the same sized space divided into more apartments, for which they would have to pay higher rents. Sickness rates amongst children were high and dysentery was becoming common. Vandalism was endemic and there were worrying cases of child neglect reported. Residents said that they had stopped giving out their address as being in the camps when applying for jobs as it usually saw them turned down and a case brought before the Burgh Police Court as a result of a fist-fight heard that it was brought on by the overcrowded conditions in the camp; it was “the kind of place that would make you fight with your own shadow” according to the witness.

Enough was enough. The secretary of the camp’s residents association said conditions were “absolutely scandalous” and protests were organised in conjunction with residents of the other camps and an organisation called Housing Crusade. Placards were carried with messages such as “We Want Houses, Not Promises“, “A Camp Is Not a House“, “Homes Before Festivals” and “Edinburgh – Build Your Allocation“. Residents at Duddingston Camp reported the police removed posters they had put up on perimeter fencing as a tourist bus route went past it.

At last it seemed that the city was listening and in December 1951 laid out a plan to deal with the problem of the camps. It would close down Craigentinny as soon as possible, huts in the worst repair in the other camps would be closed too and to deal with the fuel costs the huts would be fitted with coin-operated gas and electricity meters. But such was the drawn-out nature of the UK’s post-war economic malaise, in 1954 the camps at Duddingston, Sighthill and Lochinvar were still being used even though in theory each hut would be closed down when its residents left for permanent housing. It was agreed in March that year that Sighthill and Duddingston camps would be exited expeditiously by preferential allocation of new houses to tenants. But the long suffering residents at Wardie found they were overlooked, even though the place was ever more decrepit the city judged their camp to be in the best condition of the three and so they would have to stay put. Indeed, some huts that should have been permanently closed down were even brought back into use, even though it was normal practice for the resident children to commandeer the empty properties as gang huts and thoroughly trash the interiors. A similar fate befell the Wardie sports pavilion, leaving one local councillor to go on the record that it wanted a “good fire” to help improve it.

It was not until December 1955 that it was announced that they would get permanent homes and even then it took a further year for the last 71 families at Lochinvar to be moved from their “temporary” accommodation; a full ten years after it was taken over for “emergency” use. Within a year the hut bases were ploughed up and the Corporation’s groundskeepers were finally allowed back in to returf the pitches. There is nothing to be seen on the ground these days of what was – for over a decade – hundreds of houses with thousands of families passing through them.

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Rent hikes threaten the institution of council housing | Morning Star
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/rent-hikes-threaten-institution-council-housing

#CouncilHousing
#RentArrears
#Poverty
#Rent
#RentRises

https://thelabourcampaignforcouncilhousing.org/statement-on-ending-right-to-buy/

The Labour government needs to end the continual privatization of council housing in England.

#UKPolitics #Housing #RightToBuy #CouncilHousing

The Grenfell disaster was made in Downing Street — it cannot happen again | Morning Star
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/grenfell-disaster-was-made-downing-street-it-cannot-happen-again

#Grenfell
#DowningStreet
#UKGov
#Abbott
#BonfireOfRedTape
#Thatcherism
#UKPolitcs
#Accountability
#RBKC
#CouncilHousing
#LondonFireBrigade
#Cladding
#FlammableCladding
#JusticeForGrenfell
#NoMoreGrenfells

The real story of the “Penny Tenement”: the thread about slum landlordism in 1950s Edinburgh

The story of the “Penny Tenement” is a (relatively) well known one; a slum tenement whose owner couldn’t give it a way to the City Corporation . Its very dramatic and well publicised collapse on November 21st 1959 seared it into the public consciousness, something that (just about) lingers on locally to this day. But its very nature also held the public gaze in a certain direction and meant much of the story got simply overlooked, its full details obscured. This thread is a valiant attempt at a fuller re-telling of the tale of the Penny Tenement; or Landlordism in 1950s Edinburgh.

The short, accepted version of the Penny Tenement story was that it was a condemned slum in the St. Leonard’s district of the city, so called because its owner tried (and failed) to sell it to an MP for that amount after the Edinburgh Corporation refused to take it off his hands. Everyone knew it might fall down – and then it did. Fortunately no one was badly hurt. And none of that is untrue, but there’s more to it than that. Much more. And while it happened over 65 years ago, it’s still remarkably pertinent to the city’s housing situation and the state of some of its old tenement housing stalk. So gather round, let’s start at the beginning shall we and see how the long version of the story unfolds?

Number Six Beaumont Place, to give it its proper name, was part of a row of basic tenements built in 1812 and 1813, adjoining an existing 1780s tenement at 200-202 Pleasance. It is the four storey plus attic tenement to its right in the 1927 photo below. Post-WW1 slum clearances saw some demolition and rebuilding in the worst of the Southside. The demolition order for 200-202 Pleasance came in 1931, and it was for that reason it was part of a photo recording project at that time.

The removal of this end block on Beaumont Place required those massive and dramatic wooden buttresses to shore up the party wall with no. 6 (no. 4 was the ground floor shop beneath the flats). So to be clear, in 1959 when the photograph was taken, these were old buttresses, which had been there 25 or more years. Ironically, this part of the building did not collapse! But they make a great photo and draw stark attention to the neglected condition in partially-cleared districts where progress had stalled and which had been left like this for decades.

Number Six (and adjoining numbers) was bought by a local man, Donald Rosie, in 1952 for all of £50 (c. £1,190 in 2024). He owned similarly decrepit tenements in Leith on Bangor Road and had some in Union Place at Greenside too. One of the first facts that has been missing in this story is that Donald Rose bought Beaumont Place knowing full well his purchase was condemned “as unfit for human habitation” – he was a slum tenement landlord and speculator. In 1935, the gable end of a tenement in adjacent Carnegie Street had dramatically collapsed, but nobody was hurt and it was simply demolished. But many neighbouring houses, including those on Beaumont Place, were condemned at this time. But that didn’t really mean much; they could still be bought and sold and let out to tenants. There was still money to be made out of this sort of housing; rents to collect and repairs to ignore if you didn’t let the ethics of it get in your way. The photo below of the Carnegie Street collapse is sometimes mistaken for that of the Penny Tenement, but it was 100 metres to the north of it and 14 years earlier.

The valuation rolls for number 6 show that in 1940 it had 23 flats and brought in £222 a year in rents. By 1953 that was £266 (c. £5,700 in 2024( or just a little over five times what Rosie paid for it. In December 1952, the same year he bought it, Donald Rosie publicly tried to sell the tenement to the Labour MP for Camlachie, William Reid, for a penny. He told the Courier & Advertiser that the condition of the sale was “[William Reid] will maintain the property, as I am expected to do, on the clear rents only, execute all repairs, meet all owner’s obligations and prove to the public that this can be done on the rents“. This was a stunt; Rosie said he wanted to show MPs how hard it was for landlords to repair and maintain tenements on the rental income alone, with fairly strict rent controls still in place after World War 2. Reid naturally refused. The fact here is that Rosie wouldn’t put any of his own money into the property. Indeed, he is on the record multiple times in both print and in Court saying that the problem was the rents, after taxes and costs, wouldn’t not pay for any repairs. It must not have occurred to him to improve his building at his own expense. The position of the landlords was that they should be allowed to increase rents first, to allow for repairs and maintenance to be improved (rather than the other way around, as was the Government position).

Because of this stunt, the Penny Tenement name stuck in the press. Rosie now tried to simply give it away to the Edinburgh Corporation (a Progressive, i.e. Tory administration). But they too declined; taking the liability of decrepit properties on for themselves and repairing them or rehousing residents to allow demolition wasn’t part of their rather gradual slum clearance plans. Perhaps Rosie had overplayed his hand somewhat now with the city authorities as as in June 1953 the City Prosecutor took him to the Burgh Court for failing to comply with a repair order from the City Engineer that had been issued in February that year. Rosie didn’t trouble himself to appear before the Magistrate. He sent his lawyer, who said it was estimated the repairs would cost £600 to complete. The City Engineer told the court “Nothing has been done so far as the roof work is concerned and the position has greatly deteriorated… Within the last day or two the ceiling in one of the houses fallen down and children have been injured to a minor extent“. Rosie’s lawyer said his client would pay “every penny of free rent” into the repairs and asked for a 3 month extension, which was granted.

Three months passed. Nothing happened. The Court summoned Rosie again for failing to comply. Again, he sent his lawyer along. The City Prosecutor said he “could not allow more latitude” and so a trial was set for October 2nd 1953. At the trial, Rosie tried but failed in a bid to call the Town Clerk, City Engineer and Housing Executive Officer as witnesses. The Magistrate Bailie Mrs K. Cameron found him guilty of “failing to comply with a Corporation order” but gave him another 3 months to make the repairs. those three more months passed. Nothing happened and Six Beaumont Place remained neither wind nor water right.

In January 1954, the Burgh Court once again summoned Donald Rosie to appear for non-compliance. He sent them a letter instead and so in his absence a trial date was set for January 29th. At this he claimed to have made £74 of repairs but the City Engineer had made an inspection and told the Court no work had been done since 1953, and that residents had made two further complaints about the building to him while he was there. Rosie was found guilty (again) of failing to comply with the repair order. The Magistrate handed down a fine this time – of £2! Yes, that’s not a typo. Two Pounds. The landlord got a £2 fine for failure to carry out £600 of essential repairs. You can see now how landlords could and did act as they did with relative impunity.

Two months later, on 19th April 1954, Donald Rosie was in front of the Magistrates yet again. This time he was charged with failing to make repairs at a tenement he owned at 76 Bangor Road in Leith. At this time we now come upon another overlooked fact. One month after this, in May 1954, Rosie formed The Bangor Tenement Co. Ltd. with a capital of only £100, himself and mother as directors and himself as company secretary. Into this company the ownership of his tenements were placed. By doing this, he was cutting off his personal financial liability towards them. This was a smart financial move as he could probably see the Corporation and Courts were now intent on pursuing and making an example of him.

One assumes Rosie finally made enough repairs to keep the City Engineer off his back for a while, but not for long. Two years later, in April 1956, the Dean of Guild Court ordered repair work to be carried out by the Bangor Tenement Co. after a petition by the Procurator Fiscal. But yet again, no repairs were made. At this time, Rosie claimed to have asked the Corporation to take 6 Beaumont Place off his hands or demolish it again. But if he did try this, again they didn’t want it.

It was around this time that Rosie now adopted a new tactic. He started “selling” flats at Beaumont Place to their residents. This was a clever scheme, it diluted Rosie’s ownership and liability and made the Corporation’s legal paperwork a lot more complicated. Instead of dealing with 1 owner, the Corporation were now dealing with a multitude of owners; it was top-level obfuscation. Except these “owners” weren’t really owners, even if they were entered as such on the Valuation Rolls – Donald Rosie kept the deeds. He admitted so much himself later in Court. Local councillor Pat Rogan, who we will meet further on in our story, described these “sales” as being conveyed on “scraps of paper” with transactions recorded in plain notebooks. This sort of scheme again was fairly common amongst slum landlords. The tenants stumped up a sizeable amount of their cash (from £14 to £100 was noted at Beaumont Place) and in return they got to lived in a slum rent free. But they owned it only at the discretion of their landlord and had no real security. Many tenants knew what was going on and entered willingly into such transactions; there was an attraction to the prospect of rent free living and there was hope that progress would come along soon and sort things out for them. Others also hoped – naively or cynically – that voluntarily living in a condemned slum would get them a council house sooner.

Over the following 2 years, Rosie managed to “sell” at least 14 of his condemned flats on Beaumont Place to their residents. But the City Engineer eventually lost patience with the repairs and had some of the basic essentials carried out themselves. In January 1958 they sued Rosie for £12 14/- to recoup the cost of these. No surprise, Rosie didn’t pay this and went before the Sheriff Court (the next step up the Scottish legal system from the Burgh Court). He contended that as the City had declined his free offer of Number Six and as they had refused him a “closure order” on it, they were obliged to acquire it off of him instead. He lost this case and the City got its £12 14/-.

Two more years passed, in which time Rosie managed to “sell” at least 14 of his condemned flats on Beaumont Place. The City Engineer lost patience with the repairs though and had some basics carried out themselves. In January 1958 they sued Rosie for £12 14/- for these. But the wheels of progress in the St. Leonard’s district by now were now (slowly) beginning to turn, interminably. In February the following year, 1959, the city issued Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPOs) for the worst of the housing around Beaumont Place. This extended to 391 flats with 538 different owners, superiors, occupiers and holders of heritable security (in Scottish property law, mortgage lenders) to deal with. The Landlords had helped conspire to make the ownership of property in the Slums incredibly complex and it was now slowing everything down. All this legal paperwork was just for a few streets, with scores more like them in the neighbourhood. As a result, it took a full 9 months to sort the mountain of paperwork out for the “Carnegie Street areas A & B“. It was not until the 19th November 1959 that the CPO finally crossed the desk of the Secretary of State for Scotland, Rt. Hon. John Scott Maclay MP, and was approved.

The Penny Tenement would now be purchased by the Corporation for a lot more than a penny and demolished, and it would no longer be Donald Rosie’s problem. But there was a catch; CPOs did not become operative until 30 days after signing. So he had better hope nothing happened in the next 30 days. The tenement had stood for 145 years, surely it could manage one more month?

It started to rain.

It rained a lot in fact. It was mid-November in Scotland after all. It rained all the next day, November 20th. In the evening, local Councillor Pat Rogan was called to Number Six by concerned residents. He was well known and popular locally; “one of us“, a son of the district. Although he was a Labour councillor and the Progressives held power, Rogan was not content to just sit in opposition made and made slum clearance his personal priority. He was energetic about his duties and did what he could to help people in his ward. He was on good terms and first names with Corporation officials and workers and was able to swing many favours to not circumvent the usual channels and get things sorted for people. “Pat” was also a builder by trade and by his account had become something of an “out of hours” housing service for his constituents. On occasions where he couldn’t rouse a member of the City Engineer’s department to deal with an issue, he had been known to go to his own yard to get materials to make emergency repairs. So there wasn’t anything that unusual in the residents of Six Beaumont Place summoning a city councillor to their tenement one evening to look over something with his builder’s eye and to see if he could get anything done.

At Number Six, Rogan took one look at the way the back wall of the tenement had stated to bulge and did not like what he saw. As it was late, he advised its occupants to sleep as close to the centre of the building as they could that night and that he would arrange for the City Engineer to make a visit first thing the following morning. Rogan went home to bed, but at 4AM the following morning received a call from the Parish priest to say the back wall of the Penny Tenement had just collapsed…

It was around 3AM when John Kernachan, 27, was awoken by his wife’s screams to find himself watching the back wall of his flat disappearing before his eyes. As he got out of bed, the floor beneath him gave way too. He managed to grab on to something, anything, and pull himself up and out to safety with his wife and young child. The Brocks family, on the third floor, were not quite so lucky. Five year old Catherine fell through the floor and landed in the flat of William Cranston below her. He was able to bundle her up and out the door before his floor too disappeared down with the rest. Catherine’s little sister, two year old Margaret, fell clean out of the flat and onto the pile of rubble forming in the back green below. Her mother, Betty, jumped after her and pulled her to safety before more came crashing down. The pair were bashed, cut and bruised, but miraculously otherwise unhurt and the only casualties.

When the dawn broke it was clear quite what a catastrophe had been narrowly averted. Where once there had been a scrap of back green there was now a pile of four storeys of back wall, floors, windows, furniture and assorted possessions. There were 20 occupied flats (out of 23) at Six Beaumont Place and yet nobody had been seriously injured.

All the adjacent flats on that side of Beaumont Place were evacuated on the spot; residents were advised to go to friends or relations, or offered emergency accommodation in the City homeless centre in the former City Poorhouse at Greenbank. A police guard was put on the street to keep spectators at a safe distance. The City Engineer’s men moved in to clear the worst of the rubble and shore up the back wall with scaffolding. The Housing Committee and Lord Provost came on an inspection, with the City Engineer pointing out the huge crack in the end gable of Dalrymple Place facing the disaster site.

That crack was inspected closer. On November 27th, 22 families at the end of Dalrymple Place were given 2 hours to pack up and leave. Within days, 100 flats had been condemned in the surroundings streets and 250 people made homeless.

This was a huge headache for the city, but what is remarkable is that the day after the collapse of the Penny Tenement, 18 of the 20 families who had lived there found themselves in new council houses in Niddrie & Craigmillar, with the other 2 declining and making their own arrangements. A huge operation had swung into effect for the other displaced people. Vacant council properties were turned around in a fraction of the usual time.; the Housing Department’s key cabinet at City Chambers was literally emptied. “Let us have every key you can lay your hands on“, the City Architect’s department was told and new properties approaching completion were rushed to finish and made ready for occupation. The gas, water and electric board employees worked round the clock to make the necessary services connections. The Civil Defence sent a mobile HQ to St. Leonards to coordinate operations, communicating with the City Chambers by shortwave radio. The Women’s Voluntary Service sent their Meals on Wheels mobile too, to provide workers and residents tea, soup and sandwiches. The Cleansing Department provided lorries to move people’s possessions to their new houses. By 30th November, all 250 residents in the district who had been evacuated in the preceding 9 days were now in council homes where they wanted them, with 80% of them being kept in their preference of the south of the city.

On December 1st, the Housing Committee went on another walkabout tour of the slums. They got short shrift: “Why don’t you drop a bomb on this place?” yelled one resident in Leith’s Kirkgate at them. “Come inside instead of walking about” another demanded from her window in Arthur Street in Dumbiedykes. At the “Grand Committee on Scottish Affairs” at Westminster, Edinburgh Central Labour MP Tom Oswald asked if the Secretary of State would intervene to help speed up Compulsory Purchase Orders and provide compensation to the evicted. He declined on both points. At the City Chambers, Labour passed a motion to try speed up city centre rehousing and slum clearance. The Progressive majority on the Housing Committee defeated it 8-4. Pat Rogan condemned the “procrastination” and stated certain houses were “crumbling and insanitary prisons“. He later gave an extreme example; when they were evacuating the tenements around Beaumont place, in neighbouring Dalrymple Place they found a windowless basement flat with no bed, only a mattresses on a stone floor. Living here they found two young women caring for two babies. Both were working as prostitutes, in shifts, with one out on the streets while the other was in the cellar with the babies.

On the 4th of December, the Edinburgh Corporation served demolition orders at 4 to 8 Beaumont Place. The principal owner was Donald Rosie’s “Bangor Tenement Co.”, but thanks to his “sales”, there were now were 14 other quasi-owners in total. To his credit, Rosie fessed up at the Dean of Guild Court that the others weren’t actually legal owners (despite them already telling the Clerk of Court that they thought they were!). He alone held the title deeds and he alone should be appearing. The owners were given 2 weeks to start demolition, and 6 weeks to complete it – at their own expense. The Compulsory Purchase Order would not come into action for 17 more days, until then they were still liable.

It was as if the slums themselves were now trying to keep up the momentum that had finally driven the city authorities to action. On December 16th the same day (and in a scene oddly reminiscent of recent happenings in Edinburgh) 21 families were given hours to evacuate from 2 tenements in Greenside Row when cracks appeared in the building and the road was closed off by the police…

They needn’t have bothered; the tide had now thoroughly turned in Edinburgh against the slums and their landlords. The Scotsman’s editorial drew parallels to the “Fall of Heave Awa Land” back in 1861 and wondered aloud as to how this was happening in the “age of Dounreay and Chapelcross“. The wheels of civic machinery had been set in motion. On December 19th 1959, the Dean of Guild Court petitioned the owners at Beaumont and Dalrymple Place and also Bangor Road in Leith (where Rosie was an owner) for repairs that had not been made. Ten days later, more demolition orders were served for demolition around Beaumont Place where owners were refusing to make properties. A week later, January 6th 1960, Donald Rosie – true to form – appealed to the Court of Session against demolition orders served on him.

He wanted a delay of one month; this would allow the Compulsory Purchase Order on his properties to come into force before anything had to be demolished – he feared that once the bricks and mortar of his “assets” were gone, he’d have no bargaining position regards the price. Dragging his heels in the courts was the only thing he could do here. The Court have him 2 weeks instead. This seems to have sped things up and the CPO went through; the city bought up the slums of Dalrymple Place, Carnegie Street and Beaumont Place and demolished the lot. The owners didn’t get what they wanted, but they got shot of their demolition liability. A year later, the Evening News printed a stark photo (below) of these streets; Beaumont Place is in the foreground, the roadway of Dalrymple Place runs into the distance on the left. In the distance beyond the fence is Carnegie Street and further beyond that on the left is the Deaconess Hospital. On the right we can see numbert 1-23 St. Leonard’s Hill.

The end was nigh for most of St. Leonards and Dumbiedykes. In 1962, tenants were warned not to clean their windows in case the frames fell out of the walls onto the street. One woman narrowly avoided being killed by falling masonry as she stepped into a corner shop. Housewives reported hoarding boxes in case they had to flit in an emergency. Roofs leaked, walls gaped. “HERIOT MOUNT TENANTS ARE AFRAID HOMES MAY COLLAPSE” said the headline. But by now, Pat Rogan found himself chair of the Housing Committee due to local political deadlock and it being a difficult job nobody really wanted. He set about this immense responsibility with his usual single-minded determination and practical approach. His policy was simple (simplistic, even); demolish thoroughly, build quickly. Construction land for council housing was freed up quickly by prioritising the replacement of the low-density, postwar prefabricated bungalows and a crash-building programme of tower block construction was initiated. By 1964, 1,500 houses had been demolished in the St. Leonards and Dumbiedykes area after it was designated a Comprehensive Development Area.

On the site of the Penny Tenement, an award-winning new development by Ross-Smith & Jamieson of 63 houses for 200 people was erected from 1964-67 called Carnegie Court (after Carnegie Street). The rest of Beaumont Place wasn’t redeveloped until 1989. At this point, the District Council decided that the street name had been spelled wrong since 1815 and should actually be Bowmont after an ancient landowner here, Robert Ker, Duke of Roxburghe and Marquesses of Bowmont. And so they changed it.

You may well have got to the end of this thread and yet are still thinking “just where on earth actually was the Penny Tenement?” Well, this composite overlay image might just help answer that:

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

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The rise and fall of high rise Edinburgh: the thread about multi-storey, public housing in the city

Between 1950 and 1973, Edinburgh built a total of seventy-eight municipal, multi-storey1 housing blocks which contained 6,128 flats (give or take a few) across 977 storeys.

I’m interested in writing a few stories about some of these buildings, their histories, how and why they got built and attitudes to them at the time but wasn’t sure were to start. As a starting point I’ve made an inventory of them all; so let’s have a look at all of them in chronological order.

1. For this exercise I have only counted freestanding blocks of 7 storeys or more. Edinburgh traditionally had tenement buildings of this height and higher (up to 11 or even 13 stories in parts of the Old Town), however these were both built into a steep gradient and were not free-standing blocks, but supported by adjacent buildings. ↩︎

1950-51 saw the first such building that meets the above criteria in Edinburgh, the 8 storey Westfield Court with 88 flats (and a childrens’ nursery on the roof!) It was constructed by local builders Hepburn Bros., better known for construction of interwar bungalows, with a steel and concrete frame clad in pre-fabricated concrete panels and an inner skin of traditional brick. Its design and facilities were heavily inspired by London’s Kensal House by Maxwell Fry. Although it was a starting point for the block that followed, it remains something of a one-off and is a rather unique, evolutionary dead-end in the city. I have written up its fuller story on this thread.

Hepburns built their second and last multistorey block for the city from 1953-56. It is the 7 storey, 42 flat block of Maidencraig Court at Blackhall. It was constructed at a time of acute national materials shortages, and compared to Westfield it had to have its ceilings lowered and room dimensions reduced, and as much steel as possible removed. This led to the first use of cross-wall construction in the city’s public housing. This method uses load-bearing internal wall panels of reinforced concrete and offers economies of time and materials compared to traditional load-bearing external walls or the sort of internal steel and concrete framework employed at Westfield.

After Westfield and Maidencraig there followed a series of experimental mid-height multi-storey blocks, which were variations on a basic theme, as a rather conservative local administration (headed by the Progressive Party) tentatively tried to work out what it wanted to do regards high-rise housing post-war. While there was a post-war housing emergency in the city, the authorities had purchased large volumes of temporary and permanent prefabricated housing (they were the most enthusiastic adopter of the former in Scotland) to meet immediate demands and the chairman of the Housing Committee, Councillor Matt A. Murray, was keen not to expand the city further on the outskirts but to focus on central redevelopments.

The 10 storey, 60 flat Inchkeith Court followed in 1956-57, located on Spey Terrace, just off of Leith Walk. Billed by the local press as “Edinburgh’s First Skyscraper“, it was built adjacent to a slum clearance zone on Spey Street, atop 139 piles on an old sandpit; an experiment in building on a confined site. The contractor was the Scottish Construction Company – ScotCon. The city specified a pitched roof be added to the design and also settled on each flat having its own hot water and heating supply under the control of (and paid for by) the tenant. The experiments in communal supplies at Westfield and Maidencraig had stung the Corporation with unexpectedly dramatic fuel bills as residents made the full use of the provision.

A month later the identical pair of Inchcolm Court and Inchgarvie Court completed in West Pilton. These were by English contractors George Wimpey and were also of 10 storeys and 60 flats each and also had almost apologetic pitched roofs. They differed in having an offset H-plan with a central access and service core and were of a different construction method. As at Westfield and Maidencraig, each flat had its own private balcony, although these were removed in later refurbishments.

The following year, 1958, a further pair of 10 storey, 60 flat blocks were completed; Moat House and Hutchison House at Moat Drive in the Slateford area of the city. These were by local contractors James Miller and Partners (a firm headed by the City’s former Lord Provost) and adopted another variation of a Y-plan. They are of reinforced concrete construction with this frame in-filled with brickwork and rendered over and have external balconies for most (but not all) flats. The pitched roof however was abandoned; it was an anachronistic design throwback that added unnecessary additional demands for materials and labour on buildings that were meant to be ultra-modern and simpler to construct.

The last of the 1950s experiments were the pair of Holyrood Court and Lochview Court at Dumbiedykes, which were also built by Millers. Construction was rather protracted and did not finally complete until August 1963. These are 11 storeys tall, with 95 flats arranged on an H-plan; regular flats in the side wings of the “H” but maisonettes and top-floor artists studios (with enlarged windows and heightened ceilings to improve natural daylight) in the central arm. Each block had communal laundries, reducing the size demands of flat kitchens and requirements for hot water provision, with the the ground floor containing lock-up garages. Construction is of reinforced concrete, faced in brick and rendered-over but with an unusual original feature (now lost behind re-cladding) of traditional sandstone masonry the whole height of the building in the staircase areas. The roofs are of an ultra-modern, inverted pitch and clad in green copper; to conceal the rooftop services and clothes drying spaces from the view of those gazing down from Salisbury Crags or up from Holyroodhouse Palace.

The 1960s saw a step-change in the volume of building, and also in scale. After the experiments of the 1950s, a lot of “bells and whistles” were trimmed off the specifications, use of traditional techniques abandoned and there was a move to taller blocks with industrialised construction in the name of building more and faster. After 1962, the city’s energetic housing commissioner, Labour’s Pat Rogan, adopted a policy of replacing the post-war, low-density, low-rise prefabricated housing estates around the city’s periphery with new high-rise, high-density schemes, again to built more and build faster.

Between 1960-61, two different pairs of blocks were built at Muirhouse by Wimpey, in a scheme called Muirhouse Phase II. The first were the 9 storey slab blocks of Gunnet Court and May Court, with 48 flats apiece of reinforced concrete cross-wall construction with brick and pebble-dashed, pre-cast concrete panel infill. These blocks squeezed the build price down to c. £2,000 / flat from £2,800 of Westfield and all the flats were maisonettes; accessed from open “streets in the sky” decks to the rear. Such a layout, where the flats are all two storeys with their own internal staircases, did create initial engineering headaches, but meant that there only needed to be half the number of public passageways, lifts only had two stop at half the number of floors and sleeping and living areas of adjacent houses can be better spaced apart to reduce noise complaints.

The other pair by Wimpey, at 15 storeys, were the city’s first real point blocks (i.e. buildings proportionally taller than they are wide or deep). These are Fidra Court and Birnies Court and have 56 flats each – however these proved to be 10% more expensive than the 9 storey slabs on account of the construction and engineering complexity of the extra height.

The last multi-storey part of Muirhouse Phase II was a pair of 11 storey slab blocks by ScotCon; Inchmickery Court and Oxcars Court, with 76 flats apiece. The central part of the slab has deck-access maisonettes, with wings on each side of regular flats A flaw in the design of these blocks has the concrete load-bearing frames exposed, which forms cold bridges into the core of the building and resulted in endemic damp problems which are only now, 60 years later, due to be finally resolved in a renovation project.

Lastly in the 1960-61 construction programme were the point block trio of Allermuir Court, Caerketton Court and Capelaw Court at Oxgangs, a site known as the Comiston Scheme at the time. Their names reflected some of the nearby Pentland Hills, the preceding blocks in Leith and Muirhouse having used the names of islands in the Firth of Forth. These 15 storey blocks had 80 flats apiece, 20 of which were maisonettes (on floors 2, 5, 8, 11 and 14), and were constructed by London-based John Laing & Co. I have seen them referred to as the Comiston Luxury Flats but I suspect this may be because in the newspaper columns where their Dean of Guild Court approval was reported, the announcement was alongside approval for “luxury flats” at Ravelston, under the headline of “Permit for £3m Housing; Edinburgh to Clear More Prefabs; Luxury Flats“. The laundry rooms were on the ground floor, and there were novel outside drying greens arranged in a spoked wheel pattern from a single, large, central pole. The flats were initially very popular, but suffered from long-term lack of maintenance and run-down of facilities and were demolished between 2005-06 as an alternative to refurbishment after a community campaign.

Another trio of point blocks were started in 1960 but did not complete until 1962 – Fala Court, Garvald Court and Soutra Court in the Gracemount Housing Scheme, a post-war, greenfield site development. These were named after hills and parishes in the Moorfoots; Garvald was originally to be Windlestraw, but the name was changed at the suggestion of housing chairman Pat Rogan who felt it was ambiguous in its pronunciation. These were constructed by the local firm Crudens and each had 14 storeys and 82 flats. They were not built with sufficient ties between the inner and outer wall skins and this had to be remedied at a cost of £100,000 in 1986. All three were demolished in 2009 as part of the wider redevelopment in area.

Last of the 1960 starts did not complete until 1963 and marked a step change in scale and construction methods – the infamous pair of Cairngorm House and Grampian Houses in the Leith Fort Comprehensive Development Area (CDA). These 21 storey, 76 flat towers were built by Millers and designed by Shaw Stewart, Baikie & Perry (John Baikie was principal architect, and was assisted by Michael Shaw Stewart and Frank Perry, all were working for the firm of Rowand Anderson, Kininmonth & Paul). The whole building was made up of interlocking, three storey repeating units, with single-storey flats in the middle surrounded by maisonettes above and below. One assumes that the names were a double reference both to their heights (they were the tallest residential structures in Scotland when completed) and how far you could see from the top. The core of each building was poured, reinforced concrete cross-walls and floors, clad in a system of prefabricated concrete panel units. These storey-high panels, of three standard widths, had external ribs to improve their strength but this contributed to their spartan, blocky appearance with almost no redeeming features beyond the labour savings their construction offered; it was estimated by Millers that the fifty men and external scaffolding that they had needed for each storey at Dumbiedykes had been replaced by four men and a crane to lift the prefabricated concrete panels into place. They came down in 1997, having been largely empty of residents since 1991 after a long period of neglect and decline, with the local press referring to them as Terror Towers and Withering Heights.

The next phase of the Leith Fort CDA scheme was Fort House – a 7-storey deck access block of 157 mainly maisonette flats on a rambling, wonky X-plan built by J. Smart & Co to a design also by Shaw Stewart, Baikie & Perry. This block sat on 162 large diameter piles, 3 feet wide and 30 feet deep and its odd plan was to make the maximum use of the available space as it was confined within the historic but oppressively high walls of the old Leith Fort. It was a reinforced concrete frame infilled with brown bricks degenerated into some of the city’s most infamous housing in the 1980s. Despite a renovation which saw pitched roofs, awkward looking rooftop pediments and additional insulation added, it was demolished in 2012-13 and replaced by low rise Colonies-style housing, with those prison walls greatly reduced in height.

1962-64 saw another tall pair of point blocks erected by Millers in Leith as part of a redevelopment scheme variously known as Citadel Area Phase 1 or Couper Street Area. These are the 20 storey, 76 flat John Russell Court and Thomas Fraser Court were designed by Robert Forbes Hutchison. Now known as Persevere Court and Citadel Court, respectively, John Russell was an antiquarian and author who wrote some of the first, comprehensive histories of Leith, and Thomas Fraser was his schoolmaster. Each block is comprised entirely of maisonette flats (except for four, top floor penthouses), with two separate wings joined by a service and access core, although neatly packaged to appear as a single, point block. Originally finished in concrete panels dashed with Norwegian quartz chips, 1980s makeovers had them insulated and clad in colourful blue and yellow corrugation at the same times as the names were changed and tenancies were restricted to those over the age of 35 and without children under the age of 16.

The multi-storey flat peaked, literally, in Edinburgh in 1965 when Martello Court in Pennywell, Muirhouse completed. This 23 storey, 88 flat point block remains the tallest residential structure in Edinburgh and has unusual with wrap-around external balconies all the way up to the top. These served a dual purpose; as the building had only a single staircase, they were to assist escape in the event of a fire, however were unpopular with residents who wanted them gated off. Built by local contractor W. Arnott Mcleod to designs by Rowand Anderson, Kininmonth & Paul, it was intended to showcase local skills in the field of housing but was ultimately over-budget and delayed; the final project cost approximated £3,571/ flat, almost 60% more than neighbouring multis that had completed just 4 years before. Corporation Housing Architect Harry Corner branded the building “a disaster“. This was the first high-rise block to dispense with communal laundries since they had been introduced, with each flat having laundry facilities in the kitchen, and each floor having an external drying area. In a superstitious move, there is no thirteenth floor, the floors being number 1 to 12 and then 12A to 23.

There was no such qualms about the number thirteen with another block in the Muirhouse area, Thirteen Muirhouse Way was never formally named (and confusingly was actually 11 to 21 Muirhouse Way!) This nine-storey, 44-flat slab block was part of the Muirhouse Temporary Housing Area Phase II scheme to replace the post-war prefabs to the south of Pennywell. It was very similar to the earlier Gunnet and May Courts nearby. This block was part of a scheme completed 1963-1965. In 1982 the residents set up a Tenant’s Steering Committee to lobby for improvements to deal with the windows, dampness, heating and insecure entry. The council did eventually draw up plans for a refurbishment but in 1987 branded it “one of the worst in the city” and instead used new borrowing powers to have the block demolished and replaced by a low-rise scheme of accessible housing. Demolition came in 1988, just shy of its twenty-third birthday.

Also completing in 1965 was a large scheme on a greenfield plot at Sighthill, known as the Sighthill Neighbourhood Centre. This scheme was initially mooted in 1957 and in 1962 a scheme for two 23 storey point blocks and an 8 storey slab was approved, but was challenged successfully by the Civil Aviation Administration over the proximity to the flightpath of Edinburgh Airport. This resulted in a change to three lower 17 storey, 95 flat blocks – Glenalmond Court, Hermiston Court and Weir Court – and an increase in height of the slab block to 11 storeys; the 98 flat Broomview House. Construction was by Crudens. The entire scheme was demolished between 2008 and 2011, and replaced by a new estate of low and mid rise housing, which includes streets named after Glenalmond, Weir and Broomview (but not Hermiston; probably to avoid confusion with other nearby areas of that name.) These names were taken from the Robert Louis Stevenson novel Weir of Hermiston.

Yet another completion in 1965 was the well known “Banana Flats” of Cables Wynd House in Leith; officially Central Leith Phase 1 or Cables Wynd Redevelopment Scheme. The architect in charge was Robert Forbes Hutchison and the contractor was J. Smart & Co. This vast, 10 storey slab block of 212 largely maisonette flats has a distinctive curving plan to accommodate pre-existing roads and tenements and was designed to house up to 800 residents. The building has a concrete frame – a ground floor of columns and crosswalls above that – with a cladding of pre-cast concrete exterior panels covered in quartz chips. To reduce the number of lifts and stairwells, entry to the houses is deck access along three internal “streets in the sky“, which give access to the flats on floors above and below also. Bedrooms are arranged so that none are adjacent to the deck, to reduce noise disturbance. It was Category A listed in 2017.

Cables Wynd was joined nearby in December 1966 by Linksview House, an 11-storey, 96-flat block by the same architect and contractor as the former. It sits at the northern end of the Kirkgate and was officially the Central Leith Phase 2 or Tolbooth Wynd Redevelopment Scheme. Although it is a regular, straight slab and is significantly smaller than its bendy neighbour, its construction and internal layout is fundamentally similar. It has reinforced concrete columns on the ground floor and crosswalls above that, similar precast cladding panels and again three access decks to maisonette flats.

Between 1965-66, at the Greendykes Temporary Housing Area, a pair of 15-storey, 86-flat point blocks was constructed by Crudens – Greendykes House and Wauchope House. These were part of Pat Rogan’s policy of quickly increasing completion of new housing by replacing the life-expired, low-density, low-rise estates of post-war prefab bungalows with mixed mid- and high-rise schemes. Population density in these areas was more than doubled, from 60 to 140 people per acre, meaning the sitting prefab tenants could re-homed and there were more new houses too. This facilitated the clearance of slum housing in the inner city – still a huge problem at the time.

February 1966 saw the completion of high-rise buildings in the north of the city, with Northview Court at West Pilton – again a prefab replacement build, officially Muirhouse Area 3. It was something of an afterthought, replacing a smaller block on the plans at a late stage. Its 16 storeys contain 61 flats and the contractor was Wimpey.

The Moredun Temporary Housing Area was next, where a row of four 16 storey blocks was constructed on the only thin strip of solid bedrock in an area othewise riddled by mining and subsidence. The contractor was Wimpey and the 91 flat blocks are called Castleview House, Marytree House, Little France House and Moredun House.

The next phase here was two identical blocks to the previous four, which also completed in 1967. These are Moncrieffe House and Foreteviot House and are further up the hill and in a more exposed position than the first four. As a result of this exposure, and the way the wind swirls around and between the blocks, they have long suffered with windows blowing in (and out).

In 1967, to the west of Greendykes, a 15-storey pair of towers was completed at the site of the Craigmillar prefabs; the 57 flat Craigmillar Court and Peffermill Court. They were built by Concrete (Scotland) Ltd. on the prefabricated Bison large wall panel system – as a result they were 10% cheaper than Wimpey at Moredun

Between 1964-67, a pair of 13 storey blocks was completed at Restalrig Gardens; Lochend House and Restalrig House. Constructed by Millers, these 76 flat, T-plan point blocks are reinforced concrete construction with brick infill and external harling. They replaced the old Georgian villa of Restalrig House, which had been requisitioned during WW2 to act as a headquarters for the National Fire Service. It was acquired by the city in 1945 to act as a hostel for homeless families but was damaged by a fire in 1956 and evacuated, being used as a store for surplus council equipment thereafter.

1965-67 proved to be a busy period, with 21 high-rise blocks completed in total, the fruits of Pat Rogan’s efforts as housing chairman. His successor – G. Adolf Theurer – was a Progressive (Liberal / Unionist / Conservative political grouping), but something of an ally and continued his basic policies.

In 1968, the Kirkgate Redevelopment Scheme was completed by the 64 flat Kirkgate House, built by the Token Construction Co. This had been intended to be a 25 storey crowning monument, but ended up being behind schedule, overbudget and only 18 storeys tall.

A 1968 outlier, in geographical terms, is the 11 storey, 41 flat Coillesdene House at Joppa by Wimpey. It sits within the red brick walls of the villa of the same name. Like Restalrig House, this had been requisitioned during WW2 by the National Fire Service and acquired and ultimately demolished afterwards by the Corporation for housing, with some of its undeveloped garden land having been used for temporary prefabs.

Just along the road from Joppa, on Portobello High Street, Portobello Court completed in 1968. This 8 storey, 60 flat, T-plan block is the centrepiece of a mixed-rise housing scheme which replace the old tramway depot. It was built by J. Best.

A further phase of temporary housing replacement completed at Sighthill in 1968, a scheme known as The Calders. This was another mixed height development by Crudens. The high rise element was three 13 storey, 136 flat slab blocks built on the Skarne large panel system. These are named after locations in West Linton parish; Cobbinshaw House, Medwin House and Dunsyre House (like the Sighthill Neighbourhood Centre, there may be a Robert Louis Stevenson connection here). The Ronan Point Disaster of May 1968 occurred while they were completing. This fatal partial collapse of a brand new large panel system tower block prompted an immediate national review of such structures, and an immediate halt was called on moving new tenants in to Cobbinshaw House and final construction paused on the other pair. Structural surveys and improvements were made, and the domestic gas supply was removed from Cobbinshaw and replaced with electric, with the other pair completing as all electric before they could be occupied. The buildings were renovated and re-clad in the early 1990s.

In 1968-69, two 15 storey, 85 flat blocks were completed at Hawkhill on the site of an old tallow melting works – Hawkhill Court and Nisbet Court. These used the no-fines poured concrete method – where there is no fine sand component in the aggregate, and therefore the end product is porous and has air pockets – to try and deal with the condensation and damp problems that plagued earlier concrete builds. The contractor was local firm J. Smart & Co. Nisbet is the name of an old local landowning family (Nisbet of Craigentinny), although not one that was ever specifically associated with Hawkhill.

The last pair of the blocks in the prefab replacement scheme, and the last residential point blocks built in Edinburgh were built between 1969-71 at Niddrie Marischal; the pleasant sounding Teviotbank House and Tweedsmuir House, names from the Scottish Borders. These were built by Hart Bros. and were 15 storey, 57 flat blocks using the Bison large panel system. As well as the last, they were some of the worst such houses Edinburgh ever built and they were devoid of residents by 1989 after only 18 years and were unceremoniously demolished in 1991. The blocks had the last laugh though and refused to collapse under controlled explosion, having to be carefully tipped over later by a giant hydraulic ram known as Big Willie.

While Niddrie Marischal was still on the drawing board, Edinburgh’s public housing focus shifted away from the old Comprehensive Development Areas and Temporary Housing Sites to a grand new edge-of-the-city scheme at Wester Hailes. This was meant to be a “New Town within the town” for up to 20,000 people. However, despite the best of intentions, the Corporation was caught between price inflation and forced cost cutting by central government. As a result, it was forced to increase the housing density – putting multi-storey blocks back in favour again – and cut costs to balance the books. The cost cutting meant that construction quality was lacking, landscaping was bleak and that many of the facilities and public amenities that a growing community required were absent.

The overall Wester Hailes scheme is comprised of multiple, distinct neighbourhoods, within which there were multiple development contracts. These included three big groups of multis, all of which suffered from bad design, bad engineering and bad workmanship. Group one, by Hart Bros, was at Hailesland, and was comprised of six 10 storey slab blocks using the Bison large panel system. These blocks contained between 67 and 107 flats and were finished in stark, pebbledashed concrete panels. They were also shoddily built, to the point of compromising their very structural integrity. In 1990, after a life of only 18 years and a long period of uncertainty and partial vacancy, three of the blocks were demolished. The remaining three were repaired and renovated as there were not funds to write off and demolish structures on which the construction debt had yet to be paid off; these were renamed Kilncroft, Midcairn and Drovers Bank and were given colourful, corrugated cladding and pitched roofs.

The two remaining high rise groups at Wester Hailes were all built by Crudens on a proprietary system using a concrete frame and floors, in-filled with brick cladding and covered in harling. They were so badly built the render was falling off in huge chunks from the get go, and much of it had to be pre-emptively chipped off. Its application had been so lacking in control that the thickness varied between half and two and a half inches, as a result these nearly new flats were left looking decrepit and piebald. The Westburn Gardens group got no names, just the ominous sounding Blocks 1-7. They were built between 1970-72 and comprised seven slab blocks of 9 storeys with 55 flats each, except the last which got 112. They came down in 1993, aged just 22 years old.

The other Crudens Group was on the same system at Wester Hailes Drive and Wester Hailes Park. They at least got street numbers instead of block numbers, but were just as badly built as Westburn. Constructed from 1971-73, they came down in 1994 at the tender age of 21.

The year 1972 was both therefore both the peak and the swansong of multi-storey housing in Edinburgh; 12 blocks were finished at Wester Hailes, pipping the 11 of 1967, and the final 5 completed the following year. Such was the fallout from the multitude of scandals at Wester Hailes (and wider elsewhere, both in the city and nationwide) and also the rapid and terminal reputational damage they suffered in the 1980s that Edinburgh has never again built residential multis.

Of the seventy seven blocks in this inventory, some forty four are still standing and thirty three have been demolished. Twenty of the latter were 22 years old or younger and the average age at demolition has been 30.3 years. The oldest block to be demolished was Fort House, aged 50, and the youngest were the Hailesland Bison Blocks, at only 18.

If you’d like to look at all these housing blocks on the map instead, just follow this link or click on the thumbnail below. This map is colour-coded by the number of storeys.

I have made much use of the reference of the Tower Block Archive of Prof. Miles Glendinning and team, including facts and photos, and I recommend this resource to you if you have an interest in the subject. I can also recommend his publications “Rebuilding Scotland, The Postwar Vision 1945-1975” and “The Home Builders. Mactaggart & Mickel and the Scottish Housebuilding Industry” by Miles Glendinning and Diane M. Watters, amongst others, for further reading.I am also much obliged to Miles for letting me read his interview notes with key movers and shakers in local authority housing in Edinburgh in the 1950s and 60s, which are full of invaluable details and insights.

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about the other bits of Wester Hailes; how the dream of a suburban New Town went sour

Wester Hailes is a name often used (from outwith) to describe the whole area, but really it’s a set of discreet neighbourhoods, each with their own name with its own derivation. We covered Clovenstone in our last thread, so let’s look at some of the others in turn.

Wester Hailes

Let’s start with Wester Hailes itself. Hailes is a really ancient name, almost 1,000 years old, first recorded in the area in 1095 when Ethelred, son of Malcolm Canmore, gave land in this area called Halas to Dunfermline Abbey. It likely refers to land by, or between, river(s). The estate of Hailes was split into three main parts by the 15th century

1. Over or Easter Hailes – of which some was later incorporated into Redhall
2. Kirkland of Hailes – which refers to Colinton Kirk, in which parish it lay
3. Nether or Wester Hailes.

Blaeu’s map of 1654 shows the East and West Hales between the two watercourses which may give the area its name; the Murray Burn to the north and the Water of Leith to the south. Fast forward to an Ordnance Survey 6 inch map of 1852 and we see a farm of Wester Hailes (where Clovenstone housing scheme is now centred), a quarry village at Hailes, just south of Kingsknowe – where Hailes Quarry Park now is, and Hailes House, which is still hiding there off the Lanark Road surrounded by streets of its name, if you look for it.

It was Wester Hailes Farm and Hailes Quarry (which had been reclaimed by backfilling with landfill) that the Corporation would purchase in the 1960s for its new housing scheme and from where the overall name was taken. The Wester Hailes Road though was first built and so-named over 30 years before in 1931, to connect Lanark and Calder Road.

Dumbryden

But it was the name of Dumbryden which was applied to the first part of the scheme to be built, in the northeast corner on a mix of land formerly occupied by quarry cottages and also the Wester Hailes Smallholdings. Dumbeg and Dumbryden are old Gaelic-derived names in this area. Dumbryden itself (or Dumbredin, Dumbraiden , Dumbrydon etc.) probably means the same thing as Dumbarton – township or fort of Britons. A farm of this name is recorded in 18th century maps. As such, it’s an ancient name and a remarkable survivor in the streets of a 20th century council scheme.

That building that you know and love as Lothian Buses’ Longstone Depot? It was actually built in 1949 as the administrative block for the Dumbryden Works of John Wight & Co., building contractors. The Corporation didn’t acquire it for conversion to a bus garage until 1954.

Murrayburn

Next along from Dumbryden is Murrayburn, built from 1969-72. It takes its name from the Murray Burn, the stream that once flowed through this area and which, ironically, was buried in a conduit to make way for the housing scheme!

You can catch sight of the Murray Burn at Sighthill, where it passes under the Union Canal below you, before entering its culvert under the district which it lends its name to. The name is a corruption of the Scots Muiryburn, a burn that drains a muir (moor). Confusingly, much like Wester Hailes Primary School was actually in Sighthill, so is Murrayburn Primary School! It was built there in 1938, 30 years before the neighbourhood that shares its name.

Hailesland

Immediately adjacent to Murrayburn and Dumbryden sits Hailesland, with the union canal running through its centre. It was a name coined by the council planners back in 1967 on an area of Wester Hailes Farm that had been known as the Dryburn Park.

The northern part of Hailesland is a mix of low and mid-rise properties, the part south of the Canal was built as high rise, using the Bison Wall Frame System. These were condemned as structurally unsafe in 1983 and demolition was recommended then. Six such blocks were built at Hailesland and they were never fully occupied. They became the centre of a 20 year local (and occasionally national) housing scandal that was not resolved until 1989. After years of wrangling, the eventual outcome saw three of the blocks refurbished (and clad in distinctive, corrugated, coloured exteriors) and have their structural defects remedied and the remaining three blocks sold to the Wester Hailes Housing Association for a token £1 and demolished.

In 1989, the value of these three blocks, standing empty at the time, was assessed. It was found to be negative £500,000; such were the costs faced in disposing or repairing them, the council would have to pay the housing association to take them of fits hands. All six blocks would likely have been demolished if it wasn’t for the fact they were so new (less than 17 years since final completion) that they hadn’t yet been paid off and the council still owed £1.5 million of debt taken on to finance their construction. Writing that off would have resulted in the sum having been added to city-wide council housing rents. 

Demolition started on June 11th 1990; three blocks consisting of 339 flats, were brought down to be replaced by 98 low-rise housing association properties. The plunger was pressed by Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and Tommy Smith, a saxophonist and jazz composer who grew up in the area

Westburn

The westernmost area of Wester Hailes is appropriately enough known as Westburn . The name for this area was historically Baberton Mains, after a farm, with the old Baberton Quarry at its centre. But the name Baberton had been taken by a private housing estate built on neighbouring Fernieflat Farm, so a new name was conjured up by the council for their project. Westburn refers of course to land to the west of the Murray Burn. Again it was a mix of low, mid and seven blocks comprising of 400 high-rise flats. These multis weren’t Bison System, but had actually been built to an even worse quality than those at Hailesland. Not long after completion, the external roughcasting started to fall off, and huge sections had to be pre-emptively removed as a safety concern, leaving the relatively new flats “piebald“; looking like they had been abandoned for decades.

£300,000 was spent on render repairs at Westburn in 1987, but the end was nigh for them. Its seven blocks came down in March 1993, when they were just over 20 years old, to be replaced by the Westburn Village of the Wester Hailes Housing Association.

The Drive, Park and Barn Park

The last neighbourhood of Wester Hailes is the bit you might get away with calling just that – although it was built in three distinct parts; Wester Hailes Drive (tower blocks), Wester Hailes Park and Barn Park.

These multis were demolished in 1994 to make way for low-rise housing. At the same time the opportunity was taken to create new, pastoral-sounding streetnames to recall the vanished farm; Harvesters Way, Winterburn Place, Ashcroft Lane etc. Another of the rehabilitated areas was renamed Dumbeg Park, bringing back into use another of the ancient Gaelic placenames (one meaning a little fort or settlement – dun beag) The various demolition and replacement schemes were remarkably successful, and won various awards at the time including “most improved street” in the country for the part of Wester Hailes Drive renamed Walkers Rigg. . This was in no part due to the community involvement in planning.

The more you read about Wester Hailes, the more you realise just how badly people were let down by the authorities. In 1978, the area had a single GP “surgery” serving c. 20,000 people – in reality it was a few rooms in a converted tower block flat in Hailesland; the Health Secretary allowed it to be closed. Damp, condensation and mould as a result of design and construction flaws and poor workmanship was endemic from new. When residents protested at a meeting of the Housing Committee in the City Chambers in 1977, the Chairman, Councillor Cornelius Waugh (“Corny“), had officers eject them.

George Younger, Scottish Secretary, turned down demands for a public enquiry. Eventually in 1981 the Edinburgh District Council commissioned a report into construction problems in the scheme from Paisley College of Technology, known as the “MacData Report“, after the research unit which produced it. This was a technical report and went through the estate forensically examining construction and engineering standards. It found a litany of errors and clear evidence of shoddy workmanship and a lack of supervision. But locals felt it didn’t go far enough – it was authored by building surveyors and civil engineers and overlooked the people themselves. In response, the local tenants groups set up their own “People’s Survey” through the Wester Hailes Sentinel newspaper. The Sentinel’s surveys were sent to each of the 5,941 houses that comprised the entire scheme. 80% of the respondents complained of draughts; 54% complained of damp. Houses had cracks in floors, walls and ceilings, doors and windows jammed or were improperly sealed.

As a result, the wind and rain got in. Two thirds of respondents complained of the noise of the wind in their houses. Skimping on insulation to cut costs meant 3/4 struggled to keep houses heated in winter. Water vapour condensed on cold walls the walls and ran down it. The survey also found:

• 472 complaints of noise from up or downstairs neighbours due to inadequate soundproofing
• 412 complaints of noise from the common stairs and 342 of banging internal doors
• 466 cracks in floors or ceilings
• 307 leaks and plumbing defects

But what little was done didn’t touch the sides. You’ll find the same complaints in the newspapers in 1985 and 1986 and 1988 as you did in 1978. The application of fungicidal paint by Council workmen, the typical response to complaints, did nothing.

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.

These threads © 2017-2025, 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.

#1960s #1970s #Clovenstone #CouncilHousing #Dumbryden #hailesland #Housing #Multistorey #politics #prefabrication #PublicHealth #publicHousing #Scandal #Suburbs #TownPlanning #wesbutn #WesterHailes

How the dream of a suburban New Town went sour: the thread about Wester Hailes

Wester Hailes is a name often used (from outwith) to describe the whole area, but really it’s a set of discreet neighbourhoods, each with their own name with its own derivation. We covered Clovenstone in our last thread, so let’s look at some of the others in turn.

Wester Hailes

Let’s start with Wester Hailes itself. Hailes is a really ancient name, almost 1,000 years old, first recorded in the area in 1095 when Ethelred, son of Malcolm Canmore, gave land in this area called Halas to Dunfermline Abbey. It likely refers to land by, or between, river(s). The estate of Hailes was split into three main parts by the 15th century

1. Over or Easter Hailes – of which some was later incorporated into Redhall
2. Kirkland of Hailes – which refers to Colinton Kirk, in which parish it lay
3. Nether or Wester Hailes.

Blaeu’s map of 1654 shows the East and West Hales between the two watercourses which may give the area its name; the Murray Burn to the north and the Water of Leith to the south. Fast forward to an Ordnance Survey 6 inch map of 1852 and we see a farm of Wester Hailes (where Clovenstone housing scheme is now centred), a quarry village at Hailes, just south of Kingsknowe – where Hailes Quarry Park now is, and Hailes House, which is still hiding there off the Lanark Road surrounded by streets of its name, if you look for it.

It was Wester Hailes Farm and Hailes Quarry (which had been reclaimed by backfilling with landfill) that the Corporation would purchase in the 1960s for its new housing scheme and from where the overall name was taken. The Wester Hailes Road though was first built and so-named over 30 years before in 1931, to connect Lanark and Calder Road.

Dumbryden

But it was the name of Dumbryden which was applied to the first part of the scheme to be built, in the northeast corner on a mix of land formerly occupied by quarry cottages and also the Wester Hailes Smallholdings. Dumbeg and Dumbryden are old Gaelic-derived names in this area. Dumbryden itself (or Dumbredin, Dumbraiden , Dumbrydon etc.) probably means the same thing as Dumbarton – township or fort of Britons. A farm of this name is recorded in 18th century maps. As such, it’s an ancient name and a remarkable survivor in the streets of a 20th century council scheme.

That building that you know and love as Lothian Buses’ Longstone Depot? It was actually built in 1949 as the administrative block for the Dumbryden Works of John Wight & Co., building contractors. The Corporation didn’t acquire it for conversion to a bus garage until 1954.

Murrayburn

Next along from Dumbryden is Murrayburn, built from 1969-72. It takes its name from the Murray Burn, the stream that once flowed through this area and which, ironically, was buried in a conduit to make way for the housing scheme!

You can catch sight of the Murray Burn at Sighthill, where it passes under the Union Canal below you, before entering its culvert under the district which it lends its name to. The name is a corruption of the Scots Muiryburn, a burn that drains a muir (moor). Confusingly, much like Wester Hailes Primary School was actually in Sighthill, so is Murrayburn Primary School! It was built there in 1938, 30 years before the neighbourhood that shares its name.

Hailesland

Immediately adjacent to Murrayburn and Dumbryden sits Hailesland, with the union canal running through its centre. It was a name coined by the council planners back in 1967 on an area of Wester Hailes Farm that had been known as the Dryburn Park.

The northern part of Hailesland is a mix of low and mid-rise properties, the part south of the Canal was built as high rise, using the Bison Wall Frame System. These were condemned as structurally unsafe in 1983 and demolition was recommended then. Six such blocks were built at Hailesland and they were never fully occupied. They became the centre of a 20 year local (and occasionally national) housing scandal that was not resolved until 1989. After years of wrangling, the eventual outcome saw three of the blocks refurbished (and clad in distinctive, corrugated, coloured exteriors) and have their structural defects remedied and the remaining three blocks sold to the Wester Hailes Housing Association for a token £1 and demolished.

In 1989, the value of these three blocks, standing empty at the time, was assessed. It was found to be negative £500,000; such were the costs faced in disposing or repairing them, the council would have to pay the housing association to take them of fits hands. All six blocks would likely have been demolished if it wasn’t for the fact they were so new (less than 17 years since final completion) that they hadn’t yet been paid off and the council still owed £1.5 million of debt taken on to finance their construction. Writing that off would have resulted in the sum having been added to city-wide council housing rents. 

Demolition started on June 11th 1990; three blocks consisting of 339 flats, were brought down to be replaced by 98 low-rise housing association properties. The plunger was pressed by Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and Tommy Smith, a saxophonist and jazz composer who grew up in the area

Westburn

The westernmost area of Wester Hailes is appropriately enough known as Westburn . The name for this area was historically Baberton Mains, after a farm, with the old Baberton Quarry at its centre. But the name Baberton had been taken by a private housing estate built on neighbouring Fernieflat Farm, so a new name was conjured up by the council for their project. Westburn refers of course to land to the west of the Murray Burn. Again it was a mix of low, mid and seven blocks comprising of 400 high-rise flats. These multis weren’t Bison System, but had actually been built to an even worse quality than those at Hailesland. Not long after completion, the external roughcasting started to fall off, and huge sections had to be pre-emptively removed as a safety concern, leaving the relatively new flats “piebald“; looking like they had been abandoned for decades.

£300,000 was spent on render repairs at Westburn in 1987, but the end was nigh for them. Its seven blocks came down in March 1993, when they were just over 20 years old, to be replaced by the Westburn Village of the Wester Hailes Housing Association.

The Drive, Park and Barn Park

The last neighbourhood of Wester Hailes is the bit you might get away with calling just that – although it was built in three distinct parts; Wester Hailes Drive (tower blocks), Wester Hailes Park and Barn Park.

These multis were demolished in 1994 to make way for low-rise housing. At the same time the opportunity was taken to create new, pastoral-sounding streetnames to recall the vanished farm; Harvesters Way, Winterburn Place, Ashcroft Lane etc. Another of the rehabilitated areas was renamed Dumbeg Park, bringing back into use another of the ancient Gaelic placenames (one meaning a little fort or settlement – dun beag) The various demolition and replacement schemes were remarkably successful, and won various awards at the time including “most improved street” in the country for the part of Wester Hailes Drive renamed Walkers Rigg. . This was in no part due to the community involvement in planning.

The more you read about Wester Hailes, the more you realise just how badly people were let down by the authorities. The shopping centre that had originally been planned as a high street in the centre of the scheme did not open until the last houses were being complete din 1973, more than five years after people started moving into the scheme. In the meantime it had been meant long walks or awkward bus rides to go shopping.

This “get people in first, worry about everything else later” approach also applied to education. It took nearly a decade for the promised secondary school for the area, Wester Hailes Education Centre (WHEC), to materialise, it did not open until 1977 by which time students were well settled into other schools and parents had to fight the authorities to keep them there.

In 1978 the area had a single GP “surgery” serving c. 20,000 people – in reality it was a few rooms in a converted tower block flat in Hailesland; the Health Secretary allowed it to be closed. Damp, condensation and mould as a result of design and construction flaws and poor workmanship was endemic from new. When residents protested at a meeting of the Housing Committee in the City Chambers in 1977 the Chairman, Councillor Cornelius Waugh (“Corny“), had officers eject them.

George Younger, Scottish Secretary, turned down demands for a public enquiry. Eventually in 1981 the Edinburgh District Council commissioned a report into construction problems in the scheme from Paisley College of Technology, known as the “MacData Report“, after the research unit which produced it. This was a technical report and went through the estate forensically examining construction and engineering standards. It found a litany of errors and clear evidence of shoddy workmanship and a lack of supervision. But locals felt it didn’t go far enough – it was authored by building surveyors and civil engineers and overlooked the people themselves. In response, the local tenants groups set up their own “People’s Survey” through the Wester Hailes Sentinel newspaper. The Sentinel’s surveys were sent to each of the 5,941 houses that comprised the entire scheme. 80% of the respondents complained of draughts; 54% complained of damp. Houses had cracks in floors, walls and ceilings, doors and windows jammed or were improperly sealed.

As a result, the wind and rain got in. Two thirds of respondents complained of the noise of the wind in their houses. Skimping on insulation to cut costs meant 3/4 struggled to keep houses heated in winter. Water vapour condensed on cold walls the walls and ran down it. The survey also found:

• 472 complaints of noise from up or downstairs neighbours due to inadequate soundproofing
• 412 complaints of noise from the common stairs and 342 of banging internal doors
• 466 cracks in floors or ceilings
• 307 leaks and plumbing defects

But what little was done didn’t touch the sides. You’ll find the same complaints in the newspapers in 1985 and 1986 and 1988 as you did in 1978. The application of fungicidal paint by Council workmen, the typical response to complaints, did nothing.

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about the other bits of Wester Hailes; how the dream of a suburban New Town went sour

Wester Hailes is a name often used (from outwith) to describe the whole area, but really it’s a set of discreet neighbourhoods, each with their own name with its own derivation. We covered Clovenstone in our last thread, so let’s look at some of the others in turn.

Wester Hailes

Let’s start with Wester Hailes itself. Hailes is a really ancient name, almost 1,000 years old, first recorded in the area in 1095 when Ethelred, son of Malcolm Canmore, gave land in this area called Halas to Dunfermline Abbey. It likely refers to land by, or between, river(s). The estate of Hailes was split into three main parts by the 15th century

1. Over or Easter Hailes – of which some was later incorporated into Redhall
2. Kirkland of Hailes – which refers to Colinton Kirk, in which parish it lay
3. Nether or Wester Hailes.

Blaeu’s map of 1654 shows the East and West Hales between the two watercourses which may give the area its name; the Murray Burn to the north and the Water of Leith to the south. Fast forward to an Ordnance Survey 6 inch map of 1852 and we see a farm of Wester Hailes (where Clovenstone housing scheme is now centred), a quarry village at Hailes, just south of Kingsknowe – where Hailes Quarry Park now is, and Hailes House, which is still hiding there off the Lanark Road surrounded by streets of its name, if you look for it.

It was Wester Hailes Farm and Hailes Quarry (which had been reclaimed by backfilling with landfill) that the Corporation would purchase in the 1960s for its new housing scheme and from where the overall name was taken. The Wester Hailes Road though was first built and so-named over 30 years before in 1931, to connect Lanark and Calder Road.

Dumbryden

But it was the name of Dumbryden which was applied to the first part of the scheme to be built, in the northeast corner on a mix of land formerly occupied by quarry cottages and also the Wester Hailes Smallholdings. Dumbeg and Dumbryden are old Gaelic-derived names in this area. Dumbryden itself (or Dumbredin, Dumbraiden , Dumbrydon etc.) probably means the same thing as Dumbarton – township or fort of Britons. A farm of this name is recorded in 18th century maps. As such, it’s an ancient name and a remarkable survivor in the streets of a 20th century council scheme.

That building that you know and love as Lothian Buses’ Longstone Depot? It was actually built in 1949 as the administrative block for the Dumbryden Works of John Wight & Co., building contractors. The Corporation didn’t acquire it for conversion to a bus garage until 1954.

Murrayburn

Next along from Dumbryden is Murrayburn, built from 1969-72. It takes its name from the Murray Burn, the stream that once flowed through this area and which, ironically, was buried in a conduit to make way for the housing scheme!

You can catch sight of the Murray Burn at Sighthill, where it passes under the Union Canal below you, before entering its culvert under the district which it lends its name to. The name is a corruption of the Scots Muiryburn, a burn that drains a muir (moor). Confusingly, much like Wester Hailes Primary School was actually in Sighthill, so is Murrayburn Primary School! It was built there in 1938, 30 years before the neighbourhood that shares its name.

Hailesland

Immediately adjacent to Murrayburn and Dumbryden sits Hailesland, with the union canal running through its centre. It was a name coined by the council planners back in 1967 on an area of Wester Hailes Farm that had been known as the Dryburn Park.

The northern part of Hailesland is a mix of low and mid-rise properties, the part south of the Canal was built as high rise, using the Bison Wall Frame System. These were condemned as structurally unsafe in 1983 and demolition was recommended then. Six such blocks were built at Hailesland and they were never fully occupied. They became the centre of a 20 year local (and occasionally national) housing scandal that was not resolved until 1989. After years of wrangling, the eventual outcome saw three of the blocks refurbished (and clad in distinctive, corrugated, coloured exteriors) and have their structural defects remedied and the remaining three blocks sold to the Wester Hailes Housing Association for a token £1 and demolished.

In 1989, the value of these three blocks, standing empty at the time, was assessed. It was found to be negative £500,000; such were the costs faced in disposing or repairing them, the council would have to pay the housing association to take them of fits hands. All six blocks would likely have been demolished if it wasn’t for the fact they were so new (less than 17 years since final completion) that they hadn’t yet been paid off and the council still owed £1.5 million of debt taken on to finance their construction. Writing that off would have resulted in the sum having been added to city-wide council housing rents. 

Demolition started on June 11th 1990; three blocks consisting of 339 flats, were brought down to be replaced by 98 low-rise housing association properties. The plunger was pressed by Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and Tommy Smith, a saxophonist and jazz composer who grew up in the area

Westburn

The westernmost area of Wester Hailes is appropriately enough known as Westburn . The name for this area was historically Baberton Mains, after a farm, with the old Baberton Quarry at its centre. But the name Baberton had been taken by a private housing estate built on neighbouring Fernieflat Farm, so a new name was conjured up by the council for their project. Westburn refers of course to land to the west of the Murray Burn. Again it was a mix of low, mid and seven blocks comprising of 400 high-rise flats. These multis weren’t Bison System, but had actually been built to an even worse quality than those at Hailesland. Not long after completion, the external roughcasting started to fall off, and huge sections had to be pre-emptively removed as a safety concern, leaving the relatively new flats “piebald“; looking like they had been abandoned for decades.

£300,000 was spent on render repairs at Westburn in 1987, but the end was nigh for them. Its seven blocks came down in March 1993, when they were just over 20 years old, to be replaced by the Westburn Village of the Wester Hailes Housing Association.

The Drive, Park and Barn Park

The last neighbourhood of Wester Hailes is the bit you might get away with calling just that – although it was built in three distinct parts; Wester Hailes Drive (tower blocks), Wester Hailes Park and Barn Park.

These multis were demolished in 1994 to make way for low-rise housing. At the same time the opportunity was taken to create new, pastoral-sounding streetnames to recall the vanished farm; Harvesters Way, Winterburn Place, Ashcroft Lane etc. Another of the rehabilitated areas was renamed Dumbeg Park, bringing back into use another of the ancient Gaelic placenames (one meaning a little fort or settlement – dun beag) The various demolition and replacement schemes were remarkably successful, and won various awards at the time including “most improved street” in the country for the part of Wester Hailes Drive renamed Walkers Rigg. . This was in no part due to the community involvement in planning.

The more you read about Wester Hailes, the more you realise just how badly people were let down by the authorities. In 1978, the area had a single GP “surgery” serving c. 20,000 people – in reality it was a few rooms in a converted tower block flat in Hailesland; the Health Secretary allowed it to be closed. Damp, condensation and mould as a result of design and construction flaws and poor workmanship was endemic from new. When residents protested at a meeting of the Housing Committee in the City Chambers in 1977, the Chairman, Councillor Cornelius Waugh (“Corny“), had officers eject them.

George Younger, Scottish Secretary, turned down demands for a public enquiry. Eventually in 1981 the Edinburgh District Council commissioned a report into construction problems in the scheme from Paisley College of Technology, known as the “MacData Report“, after the research unit which produced it. This was a technical report and went through the estate forensically examining construction and engineering standards. It found a litany of errors and clear evidence of shoddy workmanship and a lack of supervision. But locals felt it didn’t go far enough – it was authored by building surveyors and civil engineers and overlooked the people themselves. In response, the local tenants groups set up their own “People’s Survey” through the Wester Hailes Sentinel newspaper. The Sentinel’s surveys were sent to each of the 5,941 houses that comprised the entire scheme. 80% of the respondents complained of draughts; 54% complained of damp. Houses had cracks in floors, walls and ceilings, doors and windows jammed or were improperly sealed.

As a result, the wind and rain got in. Two thirds of respondents complained of the noise of the wind in their houses. Skimping on insulation to cut costs meant 3/4 struggled to keep houses heated in winter. Water vapour condensed on cold walls the walls and ran down it. The survey also found:

• 472 complaints of noise from up or downstairs neighbours due to inadequate soundproofing
• 412 complaints of noise from the common stairs and 342 of banging internal doors
• 466 cracks in floors or ceilings
• 307 leaks and plumbing defects

But what little was done didn’t touch the sides. You’ll find the same complaints in the newspapers in 1985 and 1986 and 1988 as you did in 1978. The application of fungicidal paint by Council workmen, the typical response to complaints, did nothing.

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.

These threads © 2017-2025, 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.

#1960s #1970s #Clovenstone #CouncilHousing #Dumbryden #hailesland #Housing #Multistorey #politics #prefabrication #PublicHealth #publicHousing #Scandal #Suburbs #TownPlanning #wesbutn #WesterHailes

The thread about the other bits of Wester Hailes; how the dream of a suburban New Town went sour

Wester Hailes is a name often used (from outwith) to describe the whole area, but really it’s a set of discreet neighbourhoods, each with their own name with its own derivation. We covered Clovenstone in our last thread, so let’s look at some of the others in turn.

Wester Hailes

Let’s start with Wester Hailes itself. Hailes is a really ancient name, almost 1,000 years old, first recorded in the area in 1095 when Ethelred, son of Malcolm Canmore, gave land in this area called Halas to Dunfermline Abbey. It likely refers to land by, or between, river(s). The estate of Hailes was split into three main parts by the 15th century

1. Over or Easter Hailes – of which some was later incorporated into Redhall
2. Kirkland of Hailes – which refers to Colinton Kirk, in which parish it lay
3. Nether or Wester Hailes.

Blaeu’s map of 1654 shows the East and West Hales between the two watercourses which may give the area its name; the Murray Burn to the north and the Water of Leith to the south. Fast forward to an Ordnance Survey 6 inch map of 1852 and we see a farm of Wester Hailes (where Clovenstone housing scheme is now centred), a quarry village at Hailes, just south of Kingsknowe – where Hailes Quarry Park now is, and Hailes House, which is still hiding there off the Lanark Road surrounded by streets of its name, if you look for it.

It was Wester Hailes Farm and Hailes Quarry (which had been reclaimed by backfilling with landfill) that the Corporation would purchase in the 1960s for its new housing scheme and from where the overall name was taken. The Wester Hailes Road though was first built and so-named over 30 years before in 1931, to connect Lanark and Calder Road.

Dumbryden

But it was the name of Dumbryden which was applied to the first part of the scheme to be built, in the northeast corner on a mix of land formerly occupied by quarry cottages and also the Wester Hailes Smallholdings. Dumbeg and Dumbryden are old Gaelic-derived names in this area. Dumbryden itself (or Dumbredin, Dumbraiden , Dumbrydon etc.) probably means the same thing as Dumbarton – township or fort of Britons. A farm of this name is recorded in 18th century maps. As such, it’s an ancient name and a remarkable survivor in the streets of a 20th century council scheme.

That building that you know and love as Lothian Buses’ Longstone Depot? It was actually built in 1949 as the administrative block for the Dumbryden Works of John Wight & Co., building contractors. The Corporation didn’t acquire it for conversion to a bus garage until 1954.

Murrayburn

Next along from Dumbryden is Murrayburn, built from 1969-72. It takes its name from the Murray Burn, the stream that once flowed through this area and which, ironically, was buried in a conduit to make way for the housing scheme!

You can catch sight of the Murray Burn at Sighthill, where it passes under the Union Canal below you, before entering its culvert under the district which it lends its name to. The name is a corruption of the Scots Muiryburn, a burn that drains a muir (moor). Confusingly, much like Wester Hailes Primary School was actually in Sighthill, so is Murrayburn Primary School! It was built there in 1938, 30 years before the neighbourhood that shares its name.

Hailesland

Immediately adjacent to Murrayburn and Dumbryden sits Hailesland, with the union canal running through its centre. It was a name coined by the council planners back in 1967 on an area of Wester Hailes Farm that had been known as the Dryburn Park.

The northern part of Hailesland is a mix of low and mid-rise properties, the part south of the Canal was built as high rise, using the Bison Wall Frame System. These were condemned as structurally unsafe in 1983 and demolition was recommended then. Six such blocks were built at Hailesland and they were never fully occupied. They became the centre of a 20 year local (and occasionally national) housing scandal that was not resolved until 1989. After years of wrangling, the eventual outcome saw three of the blocks refurbished (and clad in distinctive, corrugated, coloured exteriors) and have their structural defects remedied and the remaining three blocks sold to the Wester Hailes Housing Association for a token £1 and demolished.

In 1989, the value of these three blocks, standing empty at the time, was assessed. It was found to be negative £500,000; such were the costs faced in disposing or repairing them, the council would have to pay the housing association to take them of fits hands. All six blocks would likely have been demolished if it wasn’t for the fact they were so new (less than 17 years since final completion) that they hadn’t yet been paid off and the council still owed £1.5 million of debt taken on to finance their construction. Writing that off would have resulted in the sum having been added to city-wide council housing rents. 

Demolition started on June 11th 1990; three blocks consisting of 339 flats, were brought down to be replaced by 98 low-rise housing association properties. The plunger was pressed by Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and Tommy Smith, a saxophonist and jazz composer who grew up in the area

Westburn

The westernmost area of Wester Hailes is appropriately enough known as Westburn . The name for this area was historically Baberton Mains, after a farm, with the old Baberton Quarry at its centre. But the name Baberton had been taken by a private housing estate built on neighbouring Fernieflat Farm, so a new name was conjured up by the council for their project. Westburn refers of course to land to the west of the Murray Burn. Again it was a mix of low, mid and seven blocks comprising of 400 high-rise flats. These multis weren’t Bison System, but had actually been built to an even worse quality than those at Hailesland. Not long after completion, the external roughcasting started to fall off, and huge sections had to be pre-emptively removed as a safety concern, leaving the relatively new flats “piebald“; looking like they had been abandoned for decades.

£300,000 was spent on render repairs at Westburn in 1987, but the end was nigh for them. Its seven blocks came down in March 1993, when they were just over 20 years old, to be replaced by the Westburn Village of the Wester Hailes Housing Association.

The Drive, Park and Barn Park

The last neighbourhood of Wester Hailes is the bit you might get away with calling just that – although it was built in three distinct parts; Wester Hailes Drive (tower blocks), Wester Hailes Park and Barn Park.

These multis were demolished in 1994 to make way for low-rise housing. At the same time the opportunity was taken to create new, pastoral-sounding streetnames to recall the vanished farm; Harvesters Way, Winterburn Place, Ashcroft Lane etc. Another of the rehabilitated areas was renamed Dumbeg Park, bringing back into use another of the ancient Gaelic placenames (one meaning a little fort or settlement – dun beag) The various demolition and replacement schemes were remarkably successful, and won various awards at the time including “most improved street” in the country for the part of Wester Hailes Drive renamed Walkers Rigg. . This was in no part due to the community involvement in planning.

The more you read about Wester Hailes, the more you realise just how badly people were let down by the authorities. In 1978, the area had a single GP “surgery” serving c. 20,000 people – in reality it was a few rooms in a converted tower block flat in Hailesland; the Health Secretary allowed it to be closed. Damp, condensation and mould as a result of design and construction flaws and poor workmanship was endemic from new. When residents protested at a meeting of the Housing Committee in the City Chambers in 1977, the Chairman, Councillor Cornelius Waugh (“Corny“), had officers eject them.

George Younger, Scottish Secretary, turned down demands for a public enquiry. Eventually in 1981 the Edinburgh District Council commissioned a report into construction problems in the scheme from Paisley College of Technology, known as the “MacData Report“, after the research unit which produced it. This was a technical report and went through the estate forensically examining construction and engineering standards. It found a litany of errors and clear evidence of shoddy workmanship and a lack of supervision. But locals felt it didn’t go far enough – it was authored by building surveyors and civil engineers and overlooked the people themselves. In response, the local tenants groups set up their own “People’s Survey” through the Wester Hailes Sentinel newspaper. The Sentinel’s surveys were sent to each of the 5,941 houses that comprised the entire scheme. 80% of the respondents complained of draughts; 54% complained of damp. Houses had cracks in floors, walls and ceilings, doors and windows jammed or were improperly sealed.

As a result, the wind and rain got in. Two thirds of respondents complained of the noise of the wind in their houses. Skimping on insulation to cut costs meant 3/4 struggled to keep houses heated in winter. Water vapour condensed on cold walls the walls and ran down it. The survey also found:

• 472 complaints of noise from up or downstairs neighbours due to inadequate soundproofing
• 412 complaints of noise from the common stairs and 342 of banging internal doors
• 466 cracks in floors or ceilings
• 307 leaks and plumbing defects

But what little was done didn’t touch the sides. You’ll find the same complaints in the newspapers in 1985 and 1986 and 1988 as you did in 1978. The application of fungicidal paint by Council workmen, the typical response to complaints, did nothing.

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.

These threads © 2017-2025, 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.

#1960s #1970s #Clovenstone #CouncilHousing #Dumbryden #hailesland #Housing #Multistorey #politics #prefabrication #PublicHealth #publicHousing #Scandal #Suburbs #TownPlanning #wesbutn #WesterHailes

The thread about the other bits of Wester Hailes; how the dream of a suburban New Town went sour

Wester Hailes is a name often used (from outwith) to describe the whole area, but really it’s a set of discreet neighbourhoods, each with their own name with its own derivation. We covered Clovenstone in our last thread, so let’s look at some of the others in turn.

Wester Hailes

Let’s start with Wester Hailes itself. Hailes is a really ancient name, almost 1,000 years old, first recorded in the area in 1095 when Ethelred, son of Malcolm Canmore, gave land in this area called Halas to Dunfermline Abbey. It likely refers to land by, or between, river(s). The estate of Hailes was split into three main parts by the 15th century

1. Over or Easter Hailes – of which some was later incorporated into Redhall
2. Kirkland of Hailes – which refers to Colinton Kirk, in which parish it lay
3. Nether or Wester Hailes.

Blaeu’s map of 1654 shows the East and West Hales between the two watercourses which may give the area its name; the Murray Burn to the north and the Water of Leith to the south. Fast forward to an Ordnance Survey 6 inch map of 1852 and we see a farm of Wester Hailes (where Clovenstone housing scheme is now centred), a quarry village at Hailes, just south of Kingsknowe – where Hailes Quarry Park now is, and Hailes House, which is still hiding there off the Lanark Road surrounded by streets of its name, if you look for it.

It was Wester Hailes Farm and Hailes Quarry (which had been reclaimed by backfilling with landfill) that the Corporation would purchase in the 1960s for its new housing scheme and from where the overall name was taken. The Wester Hailes Road though was first built and so-named over 30 years before in 1931, to connect Lanark and Calder Road.

Dumbryden

But it was the name of Dumbryden which was applied to the first part of the scheme to be built, in the northeast corner on a mix of land formerly occupied by quarry cottages and also the Wester Hailes Smallholdings. Dumbeg and Dumbryden are old Gaelic-derived names in this area. Dumbryden itself (or Dumbredin, Dumbraiden , Dumbrydon etc.) probably means the same thing as Dumbarton – township or fort of Britons. A farm of this name is recorded in 18th century maps. As such, it’s an ancient name and a remarkable survivor in the streets of a 20th century council scheme.

That building that you know and love as Lothian Buses’ Longstone Depot? It was actually built in 1949 as the administrative block for the Dumbryden Works of John Wight & Co., building contractors. The Corporation didn’t acquire it for conversion to a bus garage until 1954.

Murrayburn

Next along from Dumbryden is Murrayburn, built from 1969-72. It takes its name from the Murray Burn, the stream that once flowed through this area and which, ironically, was buried in a conduit to make way for the housing scheme!

You can catch sight of the Murray Burn at Sighthill, where it passes under the Union Canal below you, before entering its culvert under the district which it lends its name to. The name is a corruption of the Scots Muiryburn, a burn that drains a muir (moor). Confusingly, much like Wester Hailes Primary School was actually in Sighthill, so is Murrayburn Primary School! It was built there in 1938, 30 years before the neighbourhood that shares its name.

Hailesland

Immediately adjacent to Murrayburn and Dumbryden sits Hailesland, with the union canal running through its centre. It was a name coined by the council planners back in 1967 on an area of Wester Hailes Farm that had been known as the Dryburn Park.

The northern part of Hailesland is a mix of low and mid-rise properties, the part south of the Canal was built as high rise, using the Bison Wall Frame System. These were condemned as structurally unsafe in 1983 and demolition was recommended then. Six such blocks were built at Hailesland and they were never fully occupied. They became the centre of a 20 year local (and occasionally national) housing scandal that was not resolved until 1989. After years of wrangling, the eventual outcome saw three of the blocks refurbished (and clad in distinctive, corrugated, coloured exteriors) and have their structural defects remedied and the remaining three blocks sold to the Wester Hailes Housing Association for a token £1 and demolished.

In 1989, the value of these three blocks, standing empty at the time, was assessed. It was found to be negative £500,000; such were the costs faced in disposing or repairing them, the council would have to pay the housing association to take them of fits hands. All six blocks would likely have been demolished if it wasn’t for the fact they were so new (less than 17 years since final completion) that they hadn’t yet been paid off and the council still owed £1.5 million of debt taken on to finance their construction. Writing that off would have resulted in the sum having been added to city-wide council housing rents. 

Demolition started on June 11th 1990; three blocks consisting of 339 flats, were brought down to be replaced by 98 low-rise housing association properties. The plunger was pressed by Scottish Secretary Malcolm Rifkind and Tommy Smith, a saxophonist and jazz composer who grew up in the area

Westburn

The westernmost area of Wester Hailes is appropriately enough known as Westburn . The name for this area was historically Baberton Mains, after a farm, with the old Baberton Quarry at its centre. But the name Baberton had been taken by a private housing estate built on neighbouring Fernieflat Farm, so a new name was conjured up by the council for their project. Westburn refers of course to land to the west of the Murray Burn. Again it was a mix of low, mid and seven blocks comprising of 400 high-rise flats. These multis weren’t Bison System, but had actually been built to an even worse quality than those at Hailesland. Not long after completion, the external roughcasting started to fall off, and huge sections had to be pre-emptively removed as a safety concern, leaving the relatively new flats “piebald“; looking like they had been abandoned for decades.

£300,000 was spent on render repairs at Westburn in 1987, but the end was nigh for them. Its seven blocks came down in March 1993, when they were just over 20 years old, to be replaced by the Westburn Village of the Wester Hailes Housing Association.

The Drive, Park and Barn Park

The last neighbourhood of Wester Hailes is the bit you might get away with calling just that – although it was built in three distinct parts; Wester Hailes Drive (tower blocks), Wester Hailes Park and Barn Park.

These multis were demolished in 1994 to make way for low-rise housing. At the same time the opportunity was taken to create new, pastoral-sounding streetnames to recall the vanished farm; Harvesters Way, Winterburn Place, Ashcroft Lane etc. Another of the rehabilitated areas was renamed Dumbeg Park, bringing back into use another of the ancient Gaelic placenames (one meaning a little fort or settlement – dun beag) The various demolition and replacement schemes were remarkably successful, and won various awards at the time including “most improved street” in the country for the part of Wester Hailes Drive renamed Walkers Rigg. . This was in no part due to the community involvement in planning.

The more you read about Wester Hailes, the more you realise just how badly people were let down by the authorities. In 1978, the area had a single GP “surgery” serving c. 20,000 people – in reality it was a few rooms in a converted tower block flat in Hailesland; the Health Secretary allowed it to be closed. Damp, condensation and mould as a result of design and construction flaws and poor workmanship was endemic from new. When residents protested at a meeting of the Housing Committee in the City Chambers in 1977, the Chairman, Councillor Cornelius Waugh (“Corny“), had officers eject them.

George Younger, Scottish Secretary, turned down demands for a public enquiry. Eventually in 1981 the Edinburgh District Council commissioned a report into construction problems in the scheme from Paisley College of Technology, known as the “MacData Report“, after the research unit which produced it. This was a technical report and went through the estate forensically examining construction and engineering standards. It found a litany of errors and clear evidence of shoddy workmanship and a lack of supervision. But locals felt it didn’t go far enough – it was authored by building surveyors and civil engineers and overlooked the people themselves. In response, the local tenants groups set up their own “People’s Survey” through the Wester Hailes Sentinel newspaper. The Sentinel’s surveys were sent to each of the 5,941 houses that comprised the entire scheme. 80% of the respondents complained of draughts; 54% complained of damp. Houses had cracks in floors, walls and ceilings, doors and windows jammed or were improperly sealed.

As a result, the wind and rain got in. Two thirds of respondents complained of the noise of the wind in their houses. Skimping on insulation to cut costs meant 3/4 struggled to keep houses heated in winter. Water vapour condensed on cold walls the walls and ran down it. The survey also found:

• 472 complaints of noise from up or downstairs neighbours due to inadequate soundproofing
• 412 complaints of noise from the common stairs and 342 of banging internal doors
• 466 cracks in floors or ceilings
• 307 leaks and plumbing defects

But what little was done didn’t touch the sides. You’ll find the same complaints in the newspapers in 1985 and 1986 and 1988 as you did in 1978. The application of fungicidal paint by Council workmen, the typical response to complaints, did nothing.

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.

These threads © 2017-2025, 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.

#1960s #1970s #Clovenstone #CouncilHousing #Dumbryden #hailesland #Housing #Multistorey #politics #prefabrication #PublicHealth #publicHousing #Scandal #Suburbs #TownPlanning #wesbutn #WesterHailes

So much more than just a bus destination: the thread about Clovenstone and the Wester Hailes housing scheme

This thread was originally written and published in December 2023.

I’ve previously jested that Clovenstone is a placename that only exists on bus timetables. This is of course silly. But is there anything more to say about Clovenstone than its where more than one bus route starts and finishes? Of course there is. Let’s go find out

First up – if Clovenstone actually exists, where is it and what is it? Well, it’s the southeast most neighbourhood of the vast Wester Hailes housing scheme that was built on the outskirts of west Edinburgh between 1968-75 and it was the last part of the overall scheme to be built.

The Clovenstone neighbourhood is a mix of low and mid-rise housing, centred around Clovenstone
Primary School. When built, each of the neighbourhood districts of Wester Hailes had a primary school at their centre, although some were intentionally temporary, planned to cope with the initial population boom as new families moved to the area and had children, growth which would taper off as the population aged and require fewer schools. Somewhat confusingly, the temporary wooden prefab school that had been built in 1957 in The Calders scheme (part of Sighthill) had been called Wester Hailes, so there was no Wester Hailes Primary School in Wester Hailes itself!

The scheme name – Clovenstone – is a fanciful one and is actually a bit of a misnomer. The Clovenstone, as its name suggests, was a split stone that formed a landmark. However it was over 1km away from the housing scheme, and was lost by quarrying at Redhall in the 1860s. The stone stood in what is now Dovecot Park off the Lanark Road. This was greatly quarried out for the prized Redhall stone (proprietor one James Gowans of Rockville fame), before being worked out by the 1890s. The hole that was left behind was backfilled with the city’s refuse in the 1930s-50s and later landscaped as a park.

Quite how the name of a distant, long-gone and probably forgotten standing stone came to be applied to a 1970s council housing scheme is anyone’s guess. It is never mentioned in any of the usual sources for Edinburgh local history; newspapers, antiquarian books, the Books of the Old Edinburgh Club, etc. One wonders if it was the diligent work of Charles Boog Watson, semi-official custodian of the city’s place name heritage from 1908-47, that had anything to do with the name still being remembered in some City Chambers filing cabinet when it came to naming the housing in the 1970s. Edinburgh Corporation Transport, as it was, launched the Number 30 bus to Clovenstone in January 1972, and for the last 51 years that bus (and the number 3) have shown this intriguing name on their westbound destination blinds.

The Clovenstone neighbourhood actually sits almost slap bang on top of the old Wester Hailes Farm, 287 acres of which were acquired by the Edinburgh Corporation way back in 1963 for the purposes of building a new housing scheme. This was controversial at the time as it was already designated as green belt land. But Edinburgh was desperate for new housing at the time (sound familiar?). The city was trying to cope with an energetic new wave of slum clearance in the wake of the collapse of the Penny Tenement, coupled with the life-expiry of thousands of the temporary post-war prefabs which had been rapidly built in a short period of time and so all needed replaced in short order. But it would take years of political wrangling within the council and with the Scottish Development Department to get the project going. The Wester Hailes scheme was controversial enough that Midlothian County Council opposed it – they did not want development on green belt land, they felt it was too close to the proposed outer ring road (what would become the City Bypass) and they worried it would swamp nearby villages like Juniper Green, which at that time were not within the jurisdiction of the City of Edinburgh. The residents of Juniper Green agitated against it, as did the Wester Hailes Smallholders – there were many smallholdings in the area as part of a post-WW1 scheme set up in the 1930s under the terms of the Agricultural Smallholdings (Scotland) Act, 1923.

The scheme got going in 1968 finally at Dumbryden but its scope had grown by this time. It was initially intended to be of 3,500 houses but was expanded after the Corporation lost a long and bitter local and national political fight – which culminated in a public enquiry – to build 4,000 houses at Alnwickhill. As a result, it had to get more out of the Wester Hailes scheme and increase the density to try and provide dwellings for 17,000 persons. As such it was one of the biggest schemes in all of Scotland.

It was said by its opponents, before it was even built, that nobody would want to live in Wester Hailes; the peripheral housing schemes built by the council in the 1920s, 30s and postwar had proved unpopular on account of their distance from the city centre and employment and on account of the lack of facilities provided in them. But the scheme’s problems did not end with its difficult gestation and it faced a swathe of planning and construction issues from the offset. Costs vastly increased due to inflation – by 31% in a few years. At the same time, the Scottish Development Department (the same department that specified the housing standards) refused to increase its yardsticks for calculating funding – the local authority found itself squeezed financially by having to meet a specification that the specifier would not pay for, and so cost-cutting was needed everywhere. Oversight, workmanship and construction quality suffered as a result.

Other classic mistakes of peripheral council housing schemes were repeated. Neighbourhoods were carved up and cut off by dual carriageways in an area with low car ownership, with many of the few crossing points being unwelcoming underpasses. The shopping facilities were concentrated almost entirely in a central mall – this wasn’t completed until 1973, after most of the housing was built and a whole 5 years after houses started completing. A railway line ran through the middle of the scheme, which would provide quick transport to employment centres in Edinburgh, West Lothian and Glasgow, but no station was opened until 19 years after the first houses went up. Although primary schooling had been well provided for, high schooling had not. Wester Hailes Education Centre did not open until 1978, by which time neighbouring Forrester High was overcapacity, with almost twice as many students as it was designed to cope with and was bursting at the seams. To compound matters WHEC (as it is universally called) was built too small. As early as 1974, before the scheme was even complete, it was highlighted as “an area of potential deprivation” on account of the lack of public and commercial facilities and services and public transport

To increase the housing density of the scheme, many multi-storey flats were planned at Westburn, Wester Hailes Drive and Hailesland. These were criticised as unlettable – something which proved to be partially true. The Ronan Point Disaster disaster of 1968 highlighted the structural flaws of the Large Panel System multi-storey flats and well and truly put the public off them. Many of the multi-storey flats planned for Wester Hailes were to be built on the Bison System and the Corporation had just completed new Skarne System flats nearby at Sighthill. Build quality in these flats was so poor that they were plagued with damp, walls ran with condensation and mould was endemic. An unskilled workforce, under pressure to deliver, was found to have simply cut off the fixing points of the poorly-fabricated wall modules when they couldn’t get them to fit; many were being held up simply by gravity and their own weight! Obsolete before they were even built, they were literally falling apart and fundamentally condemned within 10 years, when repairs were estimated at over £10 million. Nearly all were demolished within 20 years of construction.

As a result of the failures of the multis, Clovenstone was respecified while under construction and was built entirely of mid and low rise stock, from 2 to 5 storeys. Reducing the density pushed up construction costs further and also the rents, but the housing was at least more attractive to tenants and so it slowly filled up.

But I don’t want to make this thread all too negative though – the faults and problems of the scheme in construction and design are not a reflection on its residents, who have found themselves fighting against the failure of the authorities since the get go. They have amply demonstrated a resilient ability for local organisation and self-improvement in the face of official indifference. Much of the estate has been rebuilt or renovated in the last 20 years, through no small part of local activism. It is testament to that, that when the multis started coming down at Westburn in 1993, they were replaced by low rise, lower density housing provided by the Wester Hailes Community Housing Association, a local organisation set up as an alternative to the Council as a housing provider, and which now controls nearly 900 homes in the area.

It might seem like the unlikely setting for a movie, but Wester Hailes is the backdrop to the excellent 1985 coming-of-age adventure film “Restless Natives“, where Ronnie and Will break free from their monotonous lives on a housing scheme by becoming modern-day highwaymen. Many of the scenes are shot around the wider estate, including in Clovenstone. I recommend you watch it, if you haven’t already

You can read more about the other bits of the Wester Hailes housing schemes, where they got their names and just how bad much of the building quality was over at this thread.

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

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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.

Essex council tenants living in RAAC homes speak out | openDemocracy
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/raac-housing-estate-concrete-basildon-knights-essex/

#RAAC
#ReinforcedAutoclavedAeratedConcret
#Housing
#CouncilHousing
#Basildon
#Siporex
#PrivateHousing
#SocialHousing
#RegulatorForSocialHousing

Essex council tenants living in RAAC homes speak out | openDemocracy
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/raac-housing-estate-concrete-basildon-knights-essex/

#RAAC
#ReinforcedAutoclavedAeratedConcret
#Housing
#CouncilHousing
#Basildon
#Siporex
#PrivateHousing
#SocialHousing
#RegulatorForSocialHousing

Essex council tenants living in RAAC homes speak out | openDemocracy
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/raac-housing-estate-concrete-basildon-knights-essex/

#RAAC
#ReinforcedAutoclavedAeratedConcret
#Housing
#CouncilHousing
#Basildon
#Siporex
#PrivateHousing
#SocialHousing
#RegulatorForSocialHousing

Essex council tenants living in RAAC homes speak out | openDemocracy
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/raac-housing-estate-concrete-basildon-knights-essex/

#RAAC
#ReinforcedAutoclavedAeratedConcret
#Housing
#CouncilHousing
#Basildon
#Siporex
#PrivateHousing
#SocialHousing
#RegulatorForSocialHousing

Mum 'at breaking point' as family-of-eight forced to live in ONE-BED council flat - Mirror Online
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mums-torment-family-eight-trapped-30798229

#Housing
#CouncilHousing
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#SocialHousingShortage

UK’s rental shame: tenants paying four times as much of income as homeowners on housing | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/rent-rise-income-mortgages-living-costs-b2387213.html

#Rent
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Revealed: Britain’s council housing shame as majority of councils fail to build a single home | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/council-house-building-affordable-rent-b2344844.html

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#Tories
#Nandy
#Mould
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#AffordableRentNotAffordable
#RightToBuy

Revealed: Britain’s council housing shame as majority of councils fail to build a single home | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/council-house-building-affordable-rent-b2344844.html

#CouncilHousing
#SocialHousing
#Poverty
#DLUHC
#AffordableHomes
#BuildingSafety
#MoneyNotSpent
#UKGov
#HousingDept
#Housing
#Rents
#RentRises
#Overcrowding
#Tories
#Nandy
#Mould
#HouseBuilding
#AffordableRentNotAffordable
#RightToBuy

Revealed: Britain’s council housing shame as majority of councils fail to build a single home | The Independent
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/council-house-building-affordable-rent-b2344844.html

#CouncilHousing
#SocialHousing
#Poverty
#DLUHC
#AffordableHomes
#BuildingSafety
#MoneyNotSpent
#UKGov
#HousingDept
#Housing
#Rents
#RentRises
#Overcrowding
#Tories
#Nandy
#Mould
#HouseBuilding
#AffordableRentNotAffordable
#RightToBuy

The thread about Smokey Brae; how it got its name and how it made a showpiece public housing scheme “unfit for human occupation”

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

Smokey Brae. An evocative name which conjures up all sorts of nostalgia, commemorating a time gone by when Auld Reekie lived up to her nickname – but also a major public health saga that took 30 years to resolve. So why was Smokey Brae so smoky? And how did it come to be such an issue at a time when the smoke and soot from a hundred thousand open fires was an accepted part of everyday life?

The answer to that first question is simple. Smokey Brae is immediately adjacent to and downwind of what was Scotland’s largest railway motive power depot – St. Margarets (64A for a certain type of anorak!) – where over 220 steam locomotives were based for over 100 years on a very cramped site.

But it wasn’t always known as Smokey Brae, formally it was – and remains – Restalrig Road South – and it wasn’t always such an issue. It wasn’t until the Corporation built its showpiece Piershill Housing Scheme next door from 1936-38 that the problems began to be noticed.

Before the City purchased this site in 1935, it was the site of Piershill Cavalry Barracks, and the relatively low buildings and open site seemed not to suffer from its railway neighbour, St. Margaret’s Depot. The 1893 OS Town Plan shows just how close the two were.

On this site the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae, was balancing a client brief that desired the latest, modern, European, urban planning ideas with his own penchant for the best traditions and concepts of Scottish tenement buildings.

As such, the site plan was heavily influenced by contemporary European design, but the form and finish was unmistakably Scottish vernacular in style. Macrae successfully lobbied to use traditional 3 and 4 storey tenements against a reluctant Department for Health (who oversaw such schemes). This allowed 342 modern flats to be incorporated onto the plot of the barracks, but retain a lot of open space and not be overly packed together. But it also meant that the tall, U-shaped blocks of Piershill Square East and West form something of a wall and obstacle to the prevailing winds. Somewhat ironically, despite being the last word in municipal housing in Scotland at the time, heating and hot water still came from coal fires and back boilers, the forest of chimney stacks required further adding to the traditional appearance of such modern houses.

As early as 1937, the Musselburgh News reported the Lord Dean of Guild (the head of what was akin to a council planning committee in those days) as saying “the houses at Piershill had only been up a year, but one could imagine that they had been erected for the last 50 years“. The development was not even complete then, and already the pollution from St. Margaret’s Depot was posing a problem requiring official remark.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097886334/

In May 1938, as the scheme was barely completed, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council discussed the question of the smoke emitted from St. Margaret’s with respect to Piershill. The committee heard from the Town Clerk that 40 of the houses at Piershill closest to the depot had been “rendered unfit for human occupation” on account of the soot and smoke plaguing them. A deputation was therefore sent to the London & North Eastern Railway. It was found that at the cramped, overpopulated and antiquated depot there were sheds sufficient for barely 50% of the 220+ engines stabled there: as such there was no way to contain much of the smoke and soot while the boilers were lit and it blew straight across the road to the adjacent new houses.

The Town Clerk told the committee, “I think your hands will be forced in this matter. You will have to do something“. Answering a question from the committee, he told them that the Smoke Abatement Act could force the railway to “take the best practical means” to curtail emissions. If the means weren’t practical, the railway didn’t have to take them. So nothing was done and less than a year later the Evening News and Scotsman both reported – in May 1939 – that the Public Health Committee would once again ask the railway to provide sheds for all engines. The Committee was now being directly lobbied by residents; mothers from Piershill had joined the Women’s Section of the East Edinburgh Labour Party to complain about the issue.

The problem rumbled on in 1939. The Public Health Committee again discussed it in July, and the outbreak of war saw the metaphor of a the blackout being used by the housewives lobby group. They claimed that their health was being “seriously affected” by the smoke and soot. They wrote: “We do not know what it is to have fresh air because as soon as the windows are opened, they have to be closed again to keep out the smoke and soot. Clothing hung out to dry is black when taken in.” A reporter was shown the houses closest to the depot, barely 18 months old, which were stained black, in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the scheme.

Another resident showed the reporter her house. She drew her finger over the window sill. “Look at that!” as she demonstrated a filthy finger tip. She showed the kitchen walls, the paint scrubbed back to the plaster from trying to keep the walls clean. “The soot is actually into the walls” she said: the Council had told her not to paper the walls for this reason. The smoke “ruins everything, even the blankets on the bed. You can wash them as often as you like but you cannot get the smell off them“. The reporter took a picture from her window, showing the depot breakdown crane barely yards away across Smokey Brae.

Another neighbour – who suffered from asthma – complained she was tired of scrubbing the woodwork clean and that her curtains were washed barely days before and already soot stained. Referring to the back green, “If the shrubs were to be green, they would have to be painted“. Another neighbour complained that her little girl was having trouble with her chest, causing doctors bills. The doctor had said they would have to move away but they could not get another house. This was October 1939 however, and when the realities of the war hit, people were expected to keep calm, carry on, to make do and just grin and bear it. “There’s a war on, don’t you know.”

So what were the specific problems that made St. Margaret’s so bad for smoke and soot? The obvious ones – alluded to already – were its cramped size, its huge allocation of engines, the topography and prevailing winds and also the lack of cover for engines.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097877667/

But there were other issues. A kiln used for drying the sand for the locomotive’s adhesion sand boxes was coal fired. The travelling crane? Coal fired. Steam around the site was provided by condemned locos, with the fires left running as static boilers, burning anything that was handy and perpetually belching out thick black smoke.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkearley/51880896786/

In winter, the water columns, water tanks and boiler injectors of locomotives were prone to icing up, so endless braziers of coal were lit in the sidings to prevent this happening. Every shift, some 50-60 locomotives would come in to have their fireboxes and smokeboxes cleared. This was a filthy task, where the hot ash and clinker was dropped or scraped and shovelled out the firebox into a pit between the tracks, where it cooled and smouldered. At St. Margaret’s, the ash pit sidings were as close to the Piershill houses as it was possible to get. The wind whipped up the dropped soot and ash, blowing it across the road to the houses. Firebox cleaning scraped tarry “char” out the front end. It was black and abrasive.

With the fireboxes and smokeboxes scraped clean, the fires were re-stoked and left smouldering to keep the boilers simmering, burning inefficiently and producing a lot of smoke (a steam engine running at speed and burning efficiently produces relatively little visible smoke). Worse still was that St. Margarets was the parent shed to a myriad network of 14 stabling points and 20 shunting yards and sidings around the district. At the end of the week, all these locos came back to the shed in a filthy condition to have their innards emptied and cleaned. Worst of all was Sundays, when the “firing up” process took place for the week. 40 engines at a time would have their fireboxes lit, using the hot embers from that smoky sand kiln. These fires too burned inefficiently, until the locos left in groups of five to wait for shifts at Craigentinny sidings. This cycle of clearing and re-firing the 220+ locos, not to mention the countless visiting engines coming up from the north east of England went on week in, week out, all of it in the open, and most of it as close to the Piershill Houses as possible.

It was the Great Smog of 1952 that kindled a widespread public awareness and alarm at the health hazards of the smoke that had hitherto just been accepted by most as a part of city life.

Government Committees now sat up and began to take action, and in April 1954 they arrived in Edinburgh on their fact-finding mission, and the City’s Public Health Committee marched them straight down to Piershill to see for themselves.

The Evening News report of this visit is the first written reference to “Smoky Brae“. The residents had spotted the committee – headed by Sir Hugh Beaver (no sniggering at the back) – arriving and had sought out the following reporters to make their voices heard. The residents told the reporters the same stories they had done 15 years ago, they showed them the same soot and smoke stained walls, furniture, curtains and windows, and heard the same complaints of perpetually smelling of smoke, difficulty washing clothes and health worries. Mrs Jane Gray, who resided on the ground floor at no. 2, said:

I see that they’re going to take a mobile mass X-ray machine round Pilton. They want to bring it here and X-ray every man, woman and child. What bairn can be healthy living down here? And we can’t open our windows at night

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

The Public Health Committee once again agreed to lobby the railway authorities. But by this time of course, the railway was nationalised, so it was the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive to whom they went. The BTC was quick to point the blame at another nationalised industry – the National Coal Board. It was the low quality of post-war coal that was the problem they said, not the depot itself or its practices. There is a grain of truth that the crisis that the coal industry found itself in – and tried to dig itself out of before long term projects could start producing – caused the quality of coal to drop, but to suggest that was the problem at St. Margaret’s was pure buck passing and Mr George Hardie of New Restalrig Church was quick to denounce the BTC’s reply.

It was accepted that the solution Smokey Brae needed was long term, to totally phase out steam on the railways altogether. Diesel or electric were the future – and indeed the Railway’s own Modernisation Plan intended this. Mr Jamieson, of the Scottish National Congress (a socialist splinter party of the SNP) wrote to the papers to say the problem was that Scotland was getting an unfair allocation of the diesel locomotives which had already been produced by British Railways. He had calculated a Goschen Ratio (a government formula for allocating spending in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK) himself, he said, and Scotland could claim 37 diesel locomotives already, and Edinburgh at least 10 of those, and that this would improve the atmosphere at St. Margarets.

The modernisation plan actually made things at St. Margaret’s worse – not better. This is because the depot was so antiquated and run down, it could not seriously handle any new diesel locomotives or multiple units, so all steam in the district was concentrated there. Haymarket would become the primary diesel depot, and Leith Central would become the depot for diesel multiple units, and the former’s steam allocation and those from other smaller sheds began to concentrate at St. Margarets. The latter’s workload concentrated on the remaining local steam services: large numbers of 0-6-0 J-type tank engines to work the docks, still plentiful traffic of the Lothians coalfields, and the steam for Waverley Route goods services.

The writing was on the wall for the depot: as its engines were replaced with diesels they would go to either Haymarket, Leith Central or the new yard at Millerhill. But the residents of Piershill had to suffer a further 13 years of smoke, soot, ash and grime. By 1965 only a handful of steam locos remained, but it was not until May 1st 1967, some 30 years after Piershill residents first started experiencing the effects of living on “Smoky Brae” that St. Margarets finally drew out the last firebox and shut its doors for good.

And in all that time, despite all the representations to the City authorities, and by them to the Railway authorities, what had actually been done about it? Nothing. It was purely the inevitability of modernisation that posed a solution.

The houses of Smokey Brae had the carbonation sandblasted off of them in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and at some point around this time, somebody thought it would be good to informally rename the road in a manner reminiscent of an Oor Wullie cartoon. Nostalgic, yes, but also a reminder that the residents of this street probably had years shaved off their lives as a result of their proximity to unrestricted emissions of coal smoke, soot and ash.

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.

These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur.

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The thread about Smokey Brae; how a showpiece public housing scheme became “unfit for human occupation”

Smokey Brae. An evocative name which conjures up all sorts of nostalgia, commemorating a time gone by when Auld Reekie lived up to her nickname – but also a major public health saga that took 30 years to resolve. So why was Smokey Brae so smoky? And how did it come to be such an issue at a time when the smoke and soot from a hundred thousand open fires was an accepted part of everyday life?

The answer to that first question is simple. Smokey Brae is immediately adjacent to and downwind of what was Scotland’s largest railway motive power depot – St. Margarets (64A for a certain type of anorak!) – where over 220 steam locomotives were based for over 100 years on a very cramped site.

But it wasn’t always known as Smokey Brae, formally it was – and remains – Restalrig Road South. And it hadn’t always suffered from such an issue, indeed it wasn’t until the Corporation built its show-piece Piershill Housing Scheme next door from 1936-38 that the problems began to be noticed.

Before the City purchased this site in 1935, it was the site of Piershill Cavalry Barracks and the relatively low and well-separated buildings on a wide open site seemed not to suffer from its railway neighbour. The 1893 OS Town Plan shows just how close the two actually were.

On this site the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae, was balancing a client brief that desired the latest, modern, European, urban planning ideas with his own penchant for the best traditions and concepts of Scottish tenement buildings. As such, the site plan was heavily influenced by contemporary European design, but the form and finish was unmistakably Scottish vernacular in style.

Macrae successfully lobbied to use traditional 3 and 4 storey tenements against a reluctant Department for Health (who oversaw such schemes). This allowed 342 modern flats to be incorporated onto the plot of the barracks, but retain a lot of open space and not be overly packed together. But it also meant that the tall, U-shaped blocks of Piershill Square East and West form something of a wall and obstacle to the prevailing winds. Somewhat ironically, despite being the last word in municipal housing in Scotland at the time, heating and hot water still came from coal fires and back boilers, the forest of chimney stacks required further adding to the traditional appearance of such modern houses.

As early as 1937, the Musselburgh News reported the Lord Dean of Guild (the head of what was akin to a council planning committee in those days) as saying “the houses at Piershill had only been up a year, but one could imagine that they had been erected for the last 50 years“. The development was not even complete then, and already the pollution from St. Margaret’s Depot was posing a problem requiring official remark.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097886334/

In May 1938, as the scheme was barely completed, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council discussed the question of the smoke emitted from St. Margaret’s with respect to Piershill. The committee heard from the Town Clerk that 40 of the houses at Piershill closest to the depot had been “rendered unfit for human occupation” on account of the soot and smoke plaguing them. A deputation was therefore sent to the London & North Eastern Railway. It was found that at the cramped, overpopulated and antiquated depot there were sheds sufficient for barely 50% of the 220+ engines stabled there: as such there was no way to contain much of the smoke and soot while the boilers were lit and it blew straight across the road to the adjacent new houses.

The Town Clerk told the committee, “I think your hands will be forced in this matter. You will have to do something“. Answering a question from the committee, he told them that the Smoke Abatement Act could force the railway to “take the best practical means” to curtail emissions. If the means weren’t practical, the railway didn’t have to take them. So nothing was done and less than a year later the Evening News and Scotsman both reported – in May 1939 – that the Public Health Committee would once again ask the railway to provide sheds for all engines. The Committee was now being directly lobbied by residents; mothers from Piershill had joined the Women’s Section of the East Edinburgh Labour Party to complain about the issue.

The problem rumbled on in 1939. The Public Health Committee again discussed it in July, and the outbreak of war saw the metaphor of a the blackout being used by the housewives lobby group. They claimed that their health was being “seriously affected” by the smoke and soot. They wrote: “We do not know what it is to have fresh air because as soon as the windows are opened, they have to be closed again to keep out the smoke and soot. Clothing hung out to dry is black when taken in.” A reporter was shown the houses closest to the depot, barely 18 months old, which were stained black, in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the scheme.

Another resident showed the reporter her house. She drew her finger over the window sill. “Look at that!” as she demonstrated a filthy finger tip. She showed the kitchen walls, the paint scrubbed back to the plaster from trying to keep the walls clean. “The soot is actually into the walls” she said: the Council had told her not to paper the walls for this reason. The smoke “ruins everything, even the blankets on the bed. You can wash them as often as you like but you cannot get the smell off them“. The reporter took a picture from her window, showing the depot breakdown crane barely yards away across Smokey Brae.

Another neighbour – who suffered from asthma – complained she was tired of scrubbing the woodwork clean and that her curtains were washed barely days before and already soot stained. Referring to the back green, “If the shrubs were to be green, they would have to be painted“. Another neighbour complained that her little girl was having trouble with her chest, causing doctors bills. The doctor had said they would have to move away but they could not get another house. This was October 1939 however, and when the realities of the war hit, people were expected to keep calm, carry on, to make do and just grin and bear it. “There’s a war on, don’t you know.” So what were the specific problems that made St. Margaret’s so bad for smoke and soot? The obvious ones – alluded to already – were its cramped size, its huge allocation of engines, the topography and prevailing winds and also the lack of cover for engines.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097877667/

But there were other issues. A kiln used for drying the sand for the locomotive’s adhesion sand boxes was coal fired. The travelling crane? Coal fired. Steam around the site was provided by condemned locos, with the fires left running as static boilers, burning anything that was handy and perpetually belching out thick black smoke.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkearley/51880896786/

In winter, the water columns, water tanks and boiler injectors of locomotives were prone to icing up, so endless braziers of coal were lit in the sidings to prevent this happening. Every shift, some 50-60 locomotives would come in to have their fireboxes and smokeboxes cleared. This was a filthy task, where the hot ash and clinker was dropped or scraped and shovelled out the firebox into a pit between the tracks, where it cooled and smouldered. At St. Margaret’s, the ash pit sidings were as close to the Piershill houses as it was possible to get. The wind whipped up the dropped soot and ash, blowing it across the road to the houses. Firebox cleaning scraped tarry “char” out the front end. It was black and abrasive.

With the fireboxes and smokeboxes scraped clean, the fires were re-stoked and left smouldering to keep the boilers simmering, burning inefficiently and producing a lot of smoke (a steam engine running at speed and burning efficiently produces relatively little visible smoke). Worse still was that St. Margaret’s was the parent shed to a myriad network of 14 stabling points and 20 shunting yards and sidings around the district. At the end of the week, all these locos came back to the shed in a filthy condition to have their innards emptied and cleaned. Worst of all was Sundays, when the “firing up” process took place for the week. 40 engines at a time would have their fireboxes lit, using the hot embers from that smoky sand kiln. These fires too burned inefficiently, until the locos left in groups of five to wait for shifts at Craigentinny sidings. This cycle of clearing and re-firing the 220+ locos, not to mention the countless visiting engines coming up from the north east of England went on week in, week out, all of it in the open, and most of it as close to the Piershill Houses as possible.

It was the Great Smog of 1952 that kindled a widespread public awareness and alarm at the health hazards of the smoke that had hitherto just been accepted by most as a part of city life.

Government Committees now sat up and began to take action, and in April 1954 they arrived in Edinburgh on their fact-finding mission, and the City’s Public Health Committee marched them straight down to Piershill to see for themselves.

The Evening News report of this visit is the first written reference to “Smoky Brae“. The residents had spotted the committee – headed by Sir Hugh Beaver (no sniggering at the back) – arriving and had sought out the following reporters to make their voices heard. The residents told the reporters the same stories they had done 15 years ago, they showed them the same soot and smoke stained walls, furniture, curtains and windows, and heard the same complaints of perpetually smelling of smoke, difficulty washing clothes and health worries. Mrs Jane Gray, who resided on the ground floor at no. 2, said:

I see that they’re going to take a mobile mass X-ray machine round Pilton. They want to bring it here and X-ray every man, woman and child. What bairn can be healthy living down here? And we can’t open our windows at night

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

The Public Health Committee once again agreed to lobby the railway authorities. But by this time of course, the railway was nationalised, so it was the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive to whom they went. The BTC was quick to point the blame at another nationalised industry – the National Coal Board. It was the low quality of post-war coal that was the problem they said, not the depot itself or its practices. There is a grain of truth that the crisis that the coal industry found itself in – and tried to dig itself out of before long term projects could start producing – caused the quality of coal to drop, but to suggest that was the problem at St. Margaret’s was pure buck passing and Mr George Hardie of New Restalrig Church was quick to denounce the BTC’s reply.

It was accepted that the solution Smokey Brae needed was long term, to totally phase out steam on the railways altogether. Diesel or electric were the future – and indeed the Railway’s own Modernisation Plan intended this. Mr Jamieson, of the Scottish National Congress (a socialist splinter party of the SNP) wrote to the papers to say the problem was that Scotland was getting an unfair allocation of the diesel locomotives which had already been produced by British Railways. He had calculated a Goschen Ratio (a government formula for allocating spending in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK) himself, he said, and Scotland could claim 37 diesel locomotives already, and Edinburgh at least 10 of those, and that this would improve the atmosphere at St. Margarets.

The modernisation plan actually made things at St. Margaret’s worse – not better. This is because the depot was so antiquated and run down, it could not seriously handle any new diesel locomotives or multiple units, so all steam in the district was concentrated there. Haymarket would become the primary diesel depot, and Leith Central would become the depot for diesel multiple units, and the former’s steam allocation and those from other smaller sheds began to concentrate at St. Margarets. The latter’s workload concentrated on the remaining local steam services: large numbers of 0-6-0 J-type tank engines to work the docks, still plentiful traffic of the Lothians coalfields, and the steam for Waverley Route goods services.

The writing was on the wall for the depot: as its engines were replaced with diesels they would go to either Haymarket, Leith Central or the new yard at Millerhill. But the residents of Piershill had to suffer a further 13 years of smoke, soot, ash and grime. By 1965 only a handful of steam locos remained, but it was not until May 1st 1967, some 30 years after Piershill residents first started experiencing the effects of living on “Smoky Brae” that St. Margarets finally drew out the last firebox and shut its doors for good.

And in all that time, despite all the representations to the City authorities, and by them to the Railway authorities, what had actually been done about it? Nothing. It was purely the inevitability of modernisation that posed a solution.

The houses of Smokey Brae had the carbonation sandblasted off of them in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and at some point around this time, somebody thought it would be good to informally rename the road in a manner reminiscent of an Oor Wullie cartoon. Nostalgic, yes, but also a reminder that the residents of this street probably had years shaved off their lives as a result of their proximity to unrestricted emissions of coal smoke, soot and ash.

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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 thread about Smokey Brae; how it got its name and how it made a showpiece public housing scheme “unfit for human occupation”

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

Smokey Brae. An evocative name which conjures up all sorts of nostalgia, commemorating a time gone by when Auld Reekie lived up to her nickname – but also a major public health saga that took 30 years to resolve. So why was Smokey Brae so smoky? And how did it come to be such an issue at a time when the smoke and soot from a hundred thousand open fires was an accepted part of everyday life?

The answer to that first question is simple. Smokey Brae is immediately adjacent to and downwind of what was Scotland’s largest railway motive power depot – St. Margarets (64A for a certain type of anorak!) – where over 220 steam locomotives were based for over 100 years on a very cramped site.

But it wasn’t always known as Smokey Brae, formally it was – and remains – Restalrig Road South – and it wasn’t always such an issue. It wasn’t until the Corporation built its showpiece Piershill Housing Scheme next door from 1936-38 that the problems began to be noticed.

Before the City purchased this site in 1935, it was the site of Piershill Cavalry Barracks, and the relatively low buildings and open site seemed not to suffer from its railway neighbour, St. Margaret’s Depot. The 1893 OS Town Plan shows just how close the two were.

On this site the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae, was balancing a client brief that desired the latest, modern, European, urban planning ideas with his own penchant for the best traditions and concepts of Scottish tenement buildings.

As such, the site plan was heavily influenced by contemporary European design, but the form and finish was unmistakably Scottish vernacular in style. Macrae successfully lobbied to use traditional 3 and 4 storey tenements against a reluctant Department for Health (who oversaw such schemes). This allowed 342 modern flats to be incorporated onto the plot of the barracks, but retain a lot of open space and not be overly packed together. But it also meant that the tall, U-shaped blocks of Piershill Square East and West form something of a wall and obstacle to the prevailing winds. Somewhat ironically, despite being the last word in municipal housing in Scotland at the time, heating and hot water still came from coal fires and back boilers, the forest of chimney stacks required further adding to the traditional appearance of such modern houses.

As early as 1937, the Musselburgh News reported the Lord Dean of Guild (the head of what was akin to a council planning committee in those days) as saying “the houses at Piershill had only been up a year, but one could imagine that they had been erected for the last 50 years“. The development was not even complete then, and already the pollution from St. Margaret’s Depot was posing a problem requiring official remark.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097886334/

In May 1938, as the scheme was barely completed, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council discussed the question of the smoke emitted from St. Margaret’s with respect to Piershill. The committee heard from the Town Clerk that 40 of the houses at Piershill closest to the depot had been “rendered unfit for human occupation” on account of the soot and smoke plaguing them. A deputation was therefore sent to the London & North Eastern Railway. It was found that at the cramped, overpopulated and antiquated depot there were sheds sufficient for barely 50% of the 220+ engines stabled there: as such there was no way to contain much of the smoke and soot while the boilers were lit and it blew straight across the road to the adjacent new houses.

The Town Clerk told the committee, “I think your hands will be forced in this matter. You will have to do something“. Answering a question from the committee, he told them that the Smoke Abatement Act could force the railway to “take the best practical means” to curtail emissions. If the means weren’t practical, the railway didn’t have to take them. So nothing was done and less than a year later the Evening News and Scotsman both reported – in May 1939 – that the Public Health Committee would once again ask the railway to provide sheds for all engines. The Committee was now being directly lobbied by residents; mothers from Piershill had joined the Women’s Section of the East Edinburgh Labour Party to complain about the issue.

The problem rumbled on in 1939. The Public Health Committee again discussed it in July, and the outbreak of war saw the metaphor of a the blackout being used by the housewives lobby group. They claimed that their health was being “seriously affected” by the smoke and soot. They wrote: “We do not know what it is to have fresh air because as soon as the windows are opened, they have to be closed again to keep out the smoke and soot. Clothing hung out to dry is black when taken in.” A reporter was shown the houses closest to the depot, barely 18 months old, which were stained black, in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the scheme.

Another resident showed the reporter her house. She drew her finger over the window sill. “Look at that!” as she demonstrated a filthy finger tip. She showed the kitchen walls, the paint scrubbed back to the plaster from trying to keep the walls clean. “The soot is actually into the walls” she said: the Council had told her not to paper the walls for this reason. The smoke “ruins everything, even the blankets on the bed. You can wash them as often as you like but you cannot get the smell off them“. The reporter took a picture from her window, showing the depot breakdown crane barely yards away across Smokey Brae.

Another neighbour – who suffered from asthma – complained she was tired of scrubbing the woodwork clean and that her curtains were washed barely days before and already soot stained. Referring to the back green, “If the shrubs were to be green, they would have to be painted“. Another neighbour complained that her little girl was having trouble with her chest, causing doctors bills. The doctor had said they would have to move away but they could not get another house. This was October 1939 however, and when the realities of the war hit, people were expected to keep calm, carry on, to make do and just grin and bear it. “There’s a war on, don’t you know.”

So what were the specific problems that made St. Margaret’s so bad for smoke and soot? The obvious ones – alluded to already – were its cramped size, its huge allocation of engines, the topography and prevailing winds and also the lack of cover for engines.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097877667/

But there were other issues. A kiln used for drying the sand for the locomotive’s adhesion sand boxes was coal fired. The travelling crane? Coal fired. Steam around the site was provided by condemned locos, with the fires left running as static boilers, burning anything that was handy and perpetually belching out thick black smoke.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkearley/51880896786/

In winter, the water columns, water tanks and boiler injectors of locomotives were prone to icing up, so endless braziers of coal were lit in the sidings to prevent this happening. Every shift, some 50-60 locomotives would come in to have their fireboxes and smokeboxes cleared. This was a filthy task, where the hot ash and clinker was dropped or scraped and shovelled out the firebox into a pit between the tracks, where it cooled and smouldered. At St. Margaret’s, the ash pit sidings were as close to the Piershill houses as it was possible to get. The wind whipped up the dropped soot and ash, blowing it across the road to the houses. Firebox cleaning scraped tarry “char” out the front end. It was black and abrasive.

With the fireboxes and smokeboxes scraped clean, the fires were re-stoked and left smouldering to keep the boilers simmering, burning inefficiently and producing a lot of smoke (a steam engine running at speed and burning efficiently produces relatively little visible smoke). Worse still was that St. Margarets was the parent shed to a myriad network of 14 stabling points and 20 shunting yards and sidings around the district. At the end of the week, all these locos came back to the shed in a filthy condition to have their innards emptied and cleaned. Worst of all was Sundays, when the “firing up” process took place for the week. 40 engines at a time would have their fireboxes lit, using the hot embers from that smoky sand kiln. These fires too burned inefficiently, until the locos left in groups of five to wait for shifts at Craigentinny sidings. This cycle of clearing and re-firing the 220+ locos, not to mention the countless visiting engines coming up from the north east of England went on week in, week out, all of it in the open, and most of it as close to the Piershill Houses as possible.

It was the Great Smog of 1952 that kindled a widespread public awareness and alarm at the health hazards of the smoke that had hitherto just been accepted by most as a part of city life.

Government Committees now sat up and began to take action, and in April 1954 they arrived in Edinburgh on their fact-finding mission, and the City’s Public Health Committee marched them straight down to Piershill to see for themselves.

The Evening News report of this visit is the first written reference to “Smoky Brae“. The residents had spotted the committee – headed by Sir Hugh Beaver (no sniggering at the back) – arriving and had sought out the following reporters to make their voices heard. The residents told the reporters the same stories they had done 15 years ago, they showed them the same soot and smoke stained walls, furniture, curtains and windows, and heard the same complaints of perpetually smelling of smoke, difficulty washing clothes and health worries. Mrs Jane Gray, who resided on the ground floor at no. 2, said:

I see that they’re going to take a mobile mass X-ray machine round Pilton. They want to bring it here and X-ray every man, woman and child. What bairn can be healthy living down here? And we can’t open our windows at night

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

The Public Health Committee once again agreed to lobby the railway authorities. But by this time of course, the railway was nationalised, so it was the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive to whom they went. The BTC was quick to point the blame at another nationalised industry – the National Coal Board. It was the low quality of post-war coal that was the problem they said, not the depot itself or its practices. There is a grain of truth that the crisis that the coal industry found itself in – and tried to dig itself out of before long term projects could start producing – caused the quality of coal to drop, but to suggest that was the problem at St. Margaret’s was pure buck passing and Mr George Hardie of New Restalrig Church was quick to denounce the BTC’s reply.

It was accepted that the solution Smokey Brae needed was long term, to totally phase out steam on the railways altogether. Diesel or electric were the future – and indeed the Railway’s own Modernisation Plan intended this. Mr Jamieson, of the Scottish National Congress (a socialist splinter party of the SNP) wrote to the papers to say the problem was that Scotland was getting an unfair allocation of the diesel locomotives which had already been produced by British Railways. He had calculated a Goschen Ratio (a government formula for allocating spending in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK) himself, he said, and Scotland could claim 37 diesel locomotives already, and Edinburgh at least 10 of those, and that this would improve the atmosphere at St. Margarets.

The modernisation plan actually made things at St. Margaret’s worse – not better. This is because the depot was so antiquated and run down, it could not seriously handle any new diesel locomotives or multiple units, so all steam in the district was concentrated there. Haymarket would become the primary diesel depot, and Leith Central would become the depot for diesel multiple units, and the former’s steam allocation and those from other smaller sheds began to concentrate at St. Margarets. The latter’s workload concentrated on the remaining local steam services: large numbers of 0-6-0 J-type tank engines to work the docks, still plentiful traffic of the Lothians coalfields, and the steam for Waverley Route goods services.

The writing was on the wall for the depot: as its engines were replaced with diesels they would go to either Haymarket, Leith Central or the new yard at Millerhill. But the residents of Piershill had to suffer a further 13 years of smoke, soot, ash and grime. By 1965 only a handful of steam locos remained, but it was not until May 1st 1967, some 30 years after Piershill residents first started experiencing the effects of living on “Smoky Brae” that St. Margarets finally drew out the last firebox and shut its doors for good.

And in all that time, despite all the representations to the City authorities, and by them to the Railway authorities, what had actually been done about it? Nothing. It was purely the inevitability of modernisation that posed a solution.

The houses of Smokey Brae had the carbonation sandblasted off of them in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and at some point around this time, somebody thought it would be good to informally rename the road in a manner reminiscent of an Oor Wullie cartoon. Nostalgic, yes, but also a reminder that the residents of this street probably had years shaved off their lives as a result of their proximity to unrestricted emissions of coal smoke, soot and ash.

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.

These threads © 2017-2025, 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 thread about Smokey Brae; how it got its name and how it made a showpiece public housing scheme “unfit for human occupation”

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

Smokey Brae. An evocative name which conjures up all sorts of nostalgia, commemorating a time gone by when Auld Reekie lived up to her nickname – but also a major public health saga that took 30 years to resolve. So why was Smokey Brae so smoky? And how did it come to be such an issue at a time when the smoke and soot from a hundred thousand open fires was an accepted part of everyday life?

The answer to that first question is simple. Smokey Brae is immediately adjacent to and downwind of what was Scotland’s largest railway motive power depot – St. Margarets (64A for a certain type of anorak!) – where over 220 steam locomotives were based for over 100 years on a very cramped site.

But it wasn’t always known as Smokey Brae, formally it was – and remains – Restalrig Road South – and it wasn’t always such an issue. It wasn’t until the Corporation built its showpiece Piershill Housing Scheme next door from 1936-38 that the problems began to be noticed.

Before the City purchased this site in 1935, it was the site of Piershill Cavalry Barracks, and the relatively low buildings and open site seemed not to suffer from its railway neighbour, St. Margaret’s Depot. The 1893 OS Town Plan shows just how close the two were.

On this site the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae, was balancing a client brief that desired the latest, modern, European, urban planning ideas with his own penchant for the best traditions and concepts of Scottish tenement buildings.

As such, the site plan was heavily influenced by contemporary European design, but the form and finish was unmistakably Scottish vernacular in style. Macrae successfully lobbied to use traditional 3 and 4 storey tenements against a reluctant Department for Health (who oversaw such schemes). This allowed 342 modern flats to be incorporated onto the plot of the barracks, but retain a lot of open space and not be overly packed together. But it also meant that the tall, U-shaped blocks of Piershill Square East and West form something of a wall and obstacle to the prevailing winds. Somewhat ironically, despite being the last word in municipal housing in Scotland at the time, heating and hot water still came from coal fires and back boilers, the forest of chimney stacks required further adding to the traditional appearance of such modern houses.

As early as 1937, the Musselburgh News reported the Lord Dean of Guild (the head of what was akin to a council planning committee in those days) as saying “the houses at Piershill had only been up a year, but one could imagine that they had been erected for the last 50 years“. The development was not even complete then, and already the pollution from St. Margaret’s Depot was posing a problem requiring official remark.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097886334/

In May 1938, as the scheme was barely completed, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council discussed the question of the smoke emitted from St. Margaret’s with respect to Piershill. The committee heard from the Town Clerk that 40 of the houses at Piershill closest to the depot had been “rendered unfit for human occupation” on account of the soot and smoke plaguing them. A deputation was therefore sent to the London & North Eastern Railway. It was found that at the cramped, overpopulated and antiquated depot there were sheds sufficient for barely 50% of the 220+ engines stabled there: as such there was no way to contain much of the smoke and soot while the boilers were lit and it blew straight across the road to the adjacent new houses.

The Town Clerk told the committee, “I think your hands will be forced in this matter. You will have to do something“. Answering a question from the committee, he told them that the Smoke Abatement Act could force the railway to “take the best practical means” to curtail emissions. If the means weren’t practical, the railway didn’t have to take them. So nothing was done and less than a year later the Evening News and Scotsman both reported – in May 1939 – that the Public Health Committee would once again ask the railway to provide sheds for all engines. The Committee was now being directly lobbied by residents; mothers from Piershill had joined the Women’s Section of the East Edinburgh Labour Party to complain about the issue.

The problem rumbled on in 1939. The Public Health Committee again discussed it in July, and the outbreak of war saw the metaphor of a the blackout being used by the housewives lobby group. They claimed that their health was being “seriously affected” by the smoke and soot. They wrote: “We do not know what it is to have fresh air because as soon as the windows are opened, they have to be closed again to keep out the smoke and soot. Clothing hung out to dry is black when taken in.” A reporter was shown the houses closest to the depot, barely 18 months old, which were stained black, in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the scheme.

Another resident showed the reporter her house. She drew her finger over the window sill. “Look at that!” as she demonstrated a filthy finger tip. She showed the kitchen walls, the paint scrubbed back to the plaster from trying to keep the walls clean. “The soot is actually into the walls” she said: the Council had told her not to paper the walls for this reason. The smoke “ruins everything, even the blankets on the bed. You can wash them as often as you like but you cannot get the smell off them“. The reporter took a picture from her window, showing the depot breakdown crane barely yards away across Smokey Brae.

Another neighbour – who suffered from asthma – complained she was tired of scrubbing the woodwork clean and that her curtains were washed barely days before and already soot stained. Referring to the back green, “If the shrubs were to be green, they would have to be painted“. Another neighbour complained that her little girl was having trouble with her chest, causing doctors bills. The doctor had said they would have to move away but they could not get another house. This was October 1939 however, and when the realities of the war hit, people were expected to keep calm, carry on, to make do and just grin and bear it. “There’s a war on, don’t you know.”

So what were the specific problems that made St. Margaret’s so bad for smoke and soot? The obvious ones – alluded to already – were its cramped size, its huge allocation of engines, the topography and prevailing winds and also the lack of cover for engines.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097877667/

But there were other issues. A kiln used for drying the sand for the locomotive’s adhesion sand boxes was coal fired. The travelling crane? Coal fired. Steam around the site was provided by condemned locos, with the fires left running as static boilers, burning anything that was handy and perpetually belching out thick black smoke.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkearley/51880896786/

In winter, the water columns, water tanks and boiler injectors of locomotives were prone to icing up, so endless braziers of coal were lit in the sidings to prevent this happening. Every shift, some 50-60 locomotives would come in to have their fireboxes and smokeboxes cleared. This was a filthy task, where the hot ash and clinker was dropped or scraped and shovelled out the firebox into a pit between the tracks, where it cooled and smouldered. At St. Margaret’s, the ash pit sidings were as close to the Piershill houses as it was possible to get. The wind whipped up the dropped soot and ash, blowing it across the road to the houses. Firebox cleaning scraped tarry “char” out the front end. It was black and abrasive.

With the fireboxes and smokeboxes scraped clean, the fires were re-stoked and left smouldering to keep the boilers simmering, burning inefficiently and producing a lot of smoke (a steam engine running at speed and burning efficiently produces relatively little visible smoke). Worse still was that St. Margarets was the parent shed to a myriad network of 14 stabling points and 20 shunting yards and sidings around the district. At the end of the week, all these locos came back to the shed in a filthy condition to have their innards emptied and cleaned. Worst of all was Sundays, when the “firing up” process took place for the week. 40 engines at a time would have their fireboxes lit, using the hot embers from that smoky sand kiln. These fires too burned inefficiently, until the locos left in groups of five to wait for shifts at Craigentinny sidings. This cycle of clearing and re-firing the 220+ locos, not to mention the countless visiting engines coming up from the north east of England went on week in, week out, all of it in the open, and most of it as close to the Piershill Houses as possible.

It was the Great Smog of 1952 that kindled a widespread public awareness and alarm at the health hazards of the smoke that had hitherto just been accepted by most as a part of city life.

Government Committees now sat up and began to take action, and in April 1954 they arrived in Edinburgh on their fact-finding mission, and the City’s Public Health Committee marched them straight down to Piershill to see for themselves.

The Evening News report of this visit is the first written reference to “Smoky Brae“. The residents had spotted the committee – headed by Sir Hugh Beaver (no sniggering at the back) – arriving and had sought out the following reporters to make their voices heard. The residents told the reporters the same stories they had done 15 years ago, they showed them the same soot and smoke stained walls, furniture, curtains and windows, and heard the same complaints of perpetually smelling of smoke, difficulty washing clothes and health worries. Mrs Jane Gray, who resided on the ground floor at no. 2, said:

I see that they’re going to take a mobile mass X-ray machine round Pilton. They want to bring it here and X-ray every man, woman and child. What bairn can be healthy living down here? And we can’t open our windows at night

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

The Public Health Committee once again agreed to lobby the railway authorities. But by this time of course, the railway was nationalised, so it was the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive to whom they went. The BTC was quick to point the blame at another nationalised industry – the National Coal Board. It was the low quality of post-war coal that was the problem they said, not the depot itself or its practices. There is a grain of truth that the crisis that the coal industry found itself in – and tried to dig itself out of before long term projects could start producing – caused the quality of coal to drop, but to suggest that was the problem at St. Margaret’s was pure buck passing and Mr George Hardie of New Restalrig Church was quick to denounce the BTC’s reply.

It was accepted that the solution Smokey Brae needed was long term, to totally phase out steam on the railways altogether. Diesel or electric were the future – and indeed the Railway’s own Modernisation Plan intended this. Mr Jamieson, of the Scottish National Congress (a socialist splinter party of the SNP) wrote to the papers to say the problem was that Scotland was getting an unfair allocation of the diesel locomotives which had already been produced by British Railways. He had calculated a Goschen Ratio (a government formula for allocating spending in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK) himself, he said, and Scotland could claim 37 diesel locomotives already, and Edinburgh at least 10 of those, and that this would improve the atmosphere at St. Margarets.

The modernisation plan actually made things at St. Margaret’s worse – not better. This is because the depot was so antiquated and run down, it could not seriously handle any new diesel locomotives or multiple units, so all steam in the district was concentrated there. Haymarket would become the primary diesel depot, and Leith Central would become the depot for diesel multiple units, and the former’s steam allocation and those from other smaller sheds began to concentrate at St. Margarets. The latter’s workload concentrated on the remaining local steam services: large numbers of 0-6-0 J-type tank engines to work the docks, still plentiful traffic of the Lothians coalfields, and the steam for Waverley Route goods services.

The writing was on the wall for the depot: as its engines were replaced with diesels they would go to either Haymarket, Leith Central or the new yard at Millerhill. But the residents of Piershill had to suffer a further 13 years of smoke, soot, ash and grime. By 1965 only a handful of steam locos remained, but it was not until May 1st 1967, some 30 years after Piershill residents first started experiencing the effects of living on “Smoky Brae” that St. Margarets finally drew out the last firebox and shut its doors for good.

And in all that time, despite all the representations to the City authorities, and by them to the Railway authorities, what had actually been done about it? Nothing. It was purely the inevitability of modernisation that posed a solution.

The houses of Smokey Brae had the carbonation sandblasted off of them in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and at some point around this time, somebody thought it would be good to informally rename the road in a manner reminiscent of an Oor Wullie cartoon. Nostalgic, yes, but also a reminder that the residents of this street probably had years shaved off their lives as a result of their proximity to unrestricted emissions of coal smoke, soot and ash.

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.

These threads © 2017-2025, 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 thread about Smokey Brae; how it got its name and how it made a showpiece public housing scheme “unfit for human occupation”

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

Smokey Brae. An evocative name which conjures up all sorts of nostalgia, commemorating a time gone by when Auld Reekie lived up to her nickname – but also a major public health saga that took 30 years to resolve. So why was Smokey Brae so smoky? And how did it come to be such an issue at a time when the smoke and soot from a hundred thousand open fires was an accepted part of everyday life?

The answer to that first question is simple. Smokey Brae is immediately adjacent to and downwind of what was Scotland’s largest railway motive power depot – St. Margarets (64A for a certain type of anorak!) – where over 220 steam locomotives were based for over 100 years on a very cramped site.

But it wasn’t always known as Smokey Brae, formally it was – and remains – Restalrig Road South – and it wasn’t always such an issue. It wasn’t until the Corporation built its showpiece Piershill Housing Scheme next door from 1936-38 that the problems began to be noticed.

Before the City purchased this site in 1935, it was the site of Piershill Cavalry Barracks, and the relatively low buildings and open site seemed not to suffer from its railway neighbour, St. Margaret’s Depot. The 1893 OS Town Plan shows just how close the two were.

On this site the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae, was balancing a client brief that desired the latest, modern, European, urban planning ideas with his own penchant for the best traditions and concepts of Scottish tenement buildings.

As such, the site plan was heavily influenced by contemporary European design, but the form and finish was unmistakably Scottish vernacular in style. Macrae successfully lobbied to use traditional 3 and 4 storey tenements against a reluctant Department for Health (who oversaw such schemes). This allowed 342 modern flats to be incorporated onto the plot of the barracks, but retain a lot of open space and not be overly packed together. But it also meant that the tall, U-shaped blocks of Piershill Square East and West form something of a wall and obstacle to the prevailing winds. Somewhat ironically, despite being the last word in municipal housing in Scotland at the time, heating and hot water still came from coal fires and back boilers, the forest of chimney stacks required further adding to the traditional appearance of such modern houses.

As early as 1937, the Musselburgh News reported the Lord Dean of Guild (the head of what was akin to a council planning committee in those days) as saying “the houses at Piershill had only been up a year, but one could imagine that they had been erected for the last 50 years“. The development was not even complete then, and already the pollution from St. Margaret’s Depot was posing a problem requiring official remark.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097886334/

In May 1938, as the scheme was barely completed, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council discussed the question of the smoke emitted from St. Margaret’s with respect to Piershill. The committee heard from the Town Clerk that 40 of the houses at Piershill closest to the depot had been “rendered unfit for human occupation” on account of the soot and smoke plaguing them. A deputation was therefore sent to the London & North Eastern Railway. It was found that at the cramped, overpopulated and antiquated depot there were sheds sufficient for barely 50% of the 220+ engines stabled there: as such there was no way to contain much of the smoke and soot while the boilers were lit and it blew straight across the road to the adjacent new houses.

The Town Clerk told the committee, “I think your hands will be forced in this matter. You will have to do something“. Answering a question from the committee, he told them that the Smoke Abatement Act could force the railway to “take the best practical means” to curtail emissions. If the means weren’t practical, the railway didn’t have to take them. So nothing was done and less than a year later the Evening News and Scotsman both reported – in May 1939 – that the Public Health Committee would once again ask the railway to provide sheds for all engines. The Committee was now being directly lobbied by residents; mothers from Piershill had joined the Women’s Section of the East Edinburgh Labour Party to complain about the issue.

The problem rumbled on in 1939. The Public Health Committee again discussed it in July, and the outbreak of war saw the metaphor of a the blackout being used by the housewives lobby group. They claimed that their health was being “seriously affected” by the smoke and soot. They wrote: “We do not know what it is to have fresh air because as soon as the windows are opened, they have to be closed again to keep out the smoke and soot. Clothing hung out to dry is black when taken in.” A reporter was shown the houses closest to the depot, barely 18 months old, which were stained black, in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the scheme.

Another resident showed the reporter her house. She drew her finger over the window sill. “Look at that!” as she demonstrated a filthy finger tip. She showed the kitchen walls, the paint scrubbed back to the plaster from trying to keep the walls clean. “The soot is actually into the walls” she said: the Council had told her not to paper the walls for this reason. The smoke “ruins everything, even the blankets on the bed. You can wash them as often as you like but you cannot get the smell off them“. The reporter took a picture from her window, showing the depot breakdown crane barely yards away across Smokey Brae.

Another neighbour – who suffered from asthma – complained she was tired of scrubbing the woodwork clean and that her curtains were washed barely days before and already soot stained. Referring to the back green, “If the shrubs were to be green, they would have to be painted“. Another neighbour complained that her little girl was having trouble with her chest, causing doctors bills. The doctor had said they would have to move away but they could not get another house. This was October 1939 however, and when the realities of the war hit, people were expected to keep calm, carry on, to make do and just grin and bear it. “There’s a war on, don’t you know.”

So what were the specific problems that made St. Margaret’s so bad for smoke and soot? The obvious ones – alluded to already – were its cramped size, its huge allocation of engines, the topography and prevailing winds and also the lack of cover for engines.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097877667/

But there were other issues. A kiln used for drying the sand for the locomotive’s adhesion sand boxes was coal fired. The travelling crane? Coal fired. Steam around the site was provided by condemned locos, with the fires left running as static boilers, burning anything that was handy and perpetually belching out thick black smoke.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkearley/51880896786/

In winter, the water columns, water tanks and boiler injectors of locomotives were prone to icing up, so endless braziers of coal were lit in the sidings to prevent this happening. Every shift, some 50-60 locomotives would come in to have their fireboxes and smokeboxes cleared. This was a filthy task, where the hot ash and clinker was dropped or scraped and shovelled out the firebox into a pit between the tracks, where it cooled and smouldered. At St. Margaret’s, the ash pit sidings were as close to the Piershill houses as it was possible to get. The wind whipped up the dropped soot and ash, blowing it across the road to the houses. Firebox cleaning scraped tarry “char” out the front end. It was black and abrasive.

With the fireboxes and smokeboxes scraped clean, the fires were re-stoked and left smouldering to keep the boilers simmering, burning inefficiently and producing a lot of smoke (a steam engine running at speed and burning efficiently produces relatively little visible smoke). Worse still was that St. Margarets was the parent shed to a myriad network of 14 stabling points and 20 shunting yards and sidings around the district. At the end of the week, all these locos came back to the shed in a filthy condition to have their innards emptied and cleaned. Worst of all was Sundays, when the “firing up” process took place for the week. 40 engines at a time would have their fireboxes lit, using the hot embers from that smoky sand kiln. These fires too burned inefficiently, until the locos left in groups of five to wait for shifts at Craigentinny sidings. This cycle of clearing and re-firing the 220+ locos, not to mention the countless visiting engines coming up from the north east of England went on week in, week out, all of it in the open, and most of it as close to the Piershill Houses as possible.

It was the Great Smog of 1952 that kindled a widespread public awareness and alarm at the health hazards of the smoke that had hitherto just been accepted by most as a part of city life.

Government Committees now sat up and began to take action, and in April 1954 they arrived in Edinburgh on their fact-finding mission, and the City’s Public Health Committee marched them straight down to Piershill to see for themselves.

The Evening News report of this visit is the first written reference to “Smoky Brae“. The residents had spotted the committee – headed by Sir Hugh Beaver (no sniggering at the back) – arriving and had sought out the following reporters to make their voices heard. The residents told the reporters the same stories they had done 15 years ago, they showed them the same soot and smoke stained walls, furniture, curtains and windows, and heard the same complaints of perpetually smelling of smoke, difficulty washing clothes and health worries. Mrs Jane Gray, who resided on the ground floor at no. 2, said:

I see that they’re going to take a mobile mass X-ray machine round Pilton. They want to bring it here and X-ray every man, woman and child. What bairn can be healthy living down here? And we can’t open our windows at night

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

The Public Health Committee once again agreed to lobby the railway authorities. But by this time of course, the railway was nationalised, so it was the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive to whom they went. The BTC was quick to point the blame at another nationalised industry – the National Coal Board. It was the low quality of post-war coal that was the problem they said, not the depot itself or its practices. There is a grain of truth that the crisis that the coal industry found itself in – and tried to dig itself out of before long term projects could start producing – caused the quality of coal to drop, but to suggest that was the problem at St. Margaret’s was pure buck passing and Mr George Hardie of New Restalrig Church was quick to denounce the BTC’s reply.

It was accepted that the solution Smokey Brae needed was long term, to totally phase out steam on the railways altogether. Diesel or electric were the future – and indeed the Railway’s own Modernisation Plan intended this. Mr Jamieson, of the Scottish National Congress (a socialist splinter party of the SNP) wrote to the papers to say the problem was that Scotland was getting an unfair allocation of the diesel locomotives which had already been produced by British Railways. He had calculated a Goschen Ratio (a government formula for allocating spending in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK) himself, he said, and Scotland could claim 37 diesel locomotives already, and Edinburgh at least 10 of those, and that this would improve the atmosphere at St. Margarets.

The modernisation plan actually made things at St. Margaret’s worse – not better. This is because the depot was so antiquated and run down, it could not seriously handle any new diesel locomotives or multiple units, so all steam in the district was concentrated there. Haymarket would become the primary diesel depot, and Leith Central would become the depot for diesel multiple units, and the former’s steam allocation and those from other smaller sheds began to concentrate at St. Margarets. The latter’s workload concentrated on the remaining local steam services: large numbers of 0-6-0 J-type tank engines to work the docks, still plentiful traffic of the Lothians coalfields, and the steam for Waverley Route goods services.

The writing was on the wall for the depot: as its engines were replaced with diesels they would go to either Haymarket, Leith Central or the new yard at Millerhill. But the residents of Piershill had to suffer a further 13 years of smoke, soot, ash and grime. By 1965 only a handful of steam locos remained, but it was not until May 1st 1967, some 30 years after Piershill residents first started experiencing the effects of living on “Smoky Brae” that St. Margarets finally drew out the last firebox and shut its doors for good.

And in all that time, despite all the representations to the City authorities, and by them to the Railway authorities, what had actually been done about it? Nothing. It was purely the inevitability of modernisation that posed a solution.

The houses of Smokey Brae had the carbonation sandblasted off of them in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and at some point around this time, somebody thought it would be good to informally rename the road in a manner reminiscent of an Oor Wullie cartoon. Nostalgic, yes, but also a reminder that the residents of this street probably had years shaved off their lives as a result of their proximity to unrestricted emissions of coal smoke, soot and ash.

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The other Banana Flats: the thread about a pioneering modernist council housing block in Gorgie

The Category-A listed Cables Wynd House. Leith’s answer to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. Unmistakably the “Banana Flats” on account of their bendy plan form: but did you know they are neither the only nor the original Banana Flats in Edinburgh?

Because there’s another in town and it precedes Cables Wynd by over a decade, and (controversially for Banana Flats purists) they are in Gorgie. I’m talking of course about the equally bendy (but rather less iconic) Westfield Court. So why is this block also interesting and why is it important? Let’s make the case.

Westfield Court started life before WW2, the brainchild of local property developer Alexander Glass who had acquired a substantial plot of land around the old village of Gorgie Mills. It is for Glass that the street Alexander Drive, on which Westfield Court sits, is named and it was Glass who had recently changed the face of – and modernised and expanded – Gorgie by building expansive new flats and shops along the western length of Gorgie Road. He had sold a plot to the Poole family who built the Roxy cinema.

His next venture was to be an even more modern structure, a concrete and steel high rise that mixed modernist living and community facilities, directly inspired by Maxwell Fry’s equally bendy Kensal House in Ladbroke Grove. This was the first modernist municipal housing block in the UK and as well as thoroughly cutting edge flats, included a community centre, laundry, canteen and nursery.

Inspired by London (as his shopping parades along Gorgie Road and also St. John’s Road in Corstorphine obviously were), Glass’s new flats at Westfield would have been his working class answer to Edinburgh’s first modernist flats, those of Ravelston Garden (the “Jenners Flats”).

But this of course never happened because the war intervened. Glass’s modernist dream remained just that. Post-war, the economic and strict regulatory environment prohibited private speculative building. But permits to build – and financial compensation – could be gained by private developers if they handed their plans and land over to the municipal authorities to progress. And that’s exactly what Glass did; the land and plans for Westfield Court were offered to the Edinburgh Corporation, who jumped at the chance to kick-start their post-war reconstruction of the city with ready-made plans for ultra modern housing.

As early as 1946, the housing committee approved the idea. There was some resistance to the idea, as the “Civic Survey and Plan for Edinburgh” (aka the Abercrombie Report) made it known that the land between Haymarket and Dalry was intended for industry. The idea eventually won through against the report however, and final plans were approved in May 1949 to the designs of architects Henry Hubbard and William Williamson.

There had been big changes from the original design however, to befit its new use as municipal housing. The basic building was a steel and concrete frame and floors, the exterior walls being pre-cast panels by the notorious Orlit company, with the inner face of the walls in brick and internal partitions of newly-patented “Eecon” blocks. At 8 storeys tall, it was the tallest (for its time) 20th century housing block not just in Edinburgh, but in Scotland. Rather than later “streets in the sky” ideas, with lateral access corridors along certain floors, it was a single 445 feet long block with 6 traditional “tenement” access stairs, each with the modern convenience of a lift.

The total accommodation was 88 flats, with every flat above the ground floor had its own south-facing balcony for the “airing of children“, and on the ground floors there were 14 “special” bedsit flats and two smaller flats for “spinsters and ageing persons“. All the other 72 flats had 4 rooms. The entire building had had no fireplaces or coal fuel. There was a central domestic boiler for hot water and heating, which also circulated around a drying cupboard in each flat. Each kitchenette had gas cookers and its own “gas incinerator cupboard” where rubbish could be burned, before being disposed of down ash chutes on the north face of the building.

Each flat had its own bathroom and toilet, and wooden floors overlaid the concrete (except on the ground floors, where they were laid with mastic). Sound deadening around the lift shafts was with wood wool. But Westfield Court’s most unusual feature (and possibly unique in Scotland) was on its 8th storey, where the entire floor was given over to a 3-class nursery school for 80 children, complete with a penned-in rooftop playground.

There’s a wonderful picture on Scran, which I cannot share here but can only link to, showing a forlorn looking child rattling the bars of the playground, looking down on the world below from 8 storeys up. Sound insulation around the nursery was a constant problem in its years of operation; the builders had given attention to the noise from the lift shafts but seemingly not from the noise of the feet of 80 children on the ceilings of 7th storey flats. Staff and children reputedly went around the place in their slippers.

The builders of Westfield Court were Hepburn Brothers of Dunfermline and Edinburgh, and this was a big departure for a company who were one of the primary constructors of the city’s sprawling interwar Bungalow Belt. The consulting engineers were Kinnear & Gordon and they had their work cut out for them: construction wasn’t simple as Westfield is a flood plain of the Water of Leith and was cut through by old mill lades, with the water table just 7 feet below the surface. Extensive piling work had to be undertaken to provide secure foundations.

The completed structure was not the distinctive orange, cream and brown paint of today (that is from a later modernisation) but bright white concrete

The first phase of work completed in June 1951, and Lord Provost James “Miller Homes” Miller proudly unveiled the new flats to an assembled audience of workers.

Little over a month later, on July 27th 1951, the first residents – the Mcaslan family – were handed over the keys to their new house by Councillors P. J. Robson and D. Wilkie.

The “Super Flats” as the press called them had cost the city around quarter of a million pounds, about 10 million in 2023 money, and rents for the 4-room flats were set at 38s 7d per week, including 21s rent, 5s 7d for rates and 12s for the heating and water. The communal heating system was very effective – too effective – and the houses gained an envious reputation as the warmest in the city. The daily consumption of hot water was found to be 60 gallons /house, and the charges covered only 5% of the council’s bills for the system. For that reason alone, all the subsequent multi-storey flats built at this time had individual gas fires or electric heaters / immersion systems as the city was unwilling to take on such a financial burden again. Communal heating in Edinburgh was finished before it ever got going.

Over the door of the main pend is a carving by Hew Lorimer ARSA, with the city’s motto (Nisi Dominus Frustra) and a diorama of Scottish workers and industry around a mother and children, perhaps symbolising the optimism of post-war rebirth and reconstruction.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/43675100@N08/7851761886

By the 1980s, the once bright banana block was now a rather grim soot and pollution stained one, so Edinburgh District Council took the fateful decision in 1991 to bring the block “up to date” with a coating of multicoloured carbonation-resistant “Mulsicoat” acrylic.

The council chose a palette of “caramel, chocolate, beige and white”, and a pattern on the rear elevation reputedly based on the Baths of Carcalla, and covered the whole block in it

The rooftop nursery remained until 2010, specialising in helping children with additional needs, when the council took the decision to close it, ostensibly over health and safety fears for fire evacuation of children down 8 storeys of stairs, but it was part of a wider cuts programme.

Former Lord Provost Eric Milligan, who had been one of the nursery’s pupils back in the 1950s, spoke up in its defence (in a letter to Michael MacLeod at the Guardian), saying it was “distinctive and quirky” and “one of the most imaginative uses of space in Europe.” The nursery was converted into 5 flats, and appropriately for the story of modern Edinburgh, one is now being run as a Short Term Let, the council having been unable to take action against it as it found it had already given it permission to operate as a Bed and Breakfast…

So now you know that Westfield Court is much more important than it looks. It has a formative position in the story of post-war Scottish council housing, was for a short time the tallest “multi” in the land, pioneered the idea of mixing housing with other social facilities* and pre-dates the “other” banana flats by some 12 years.

* = One feature that had originally been proposed for Westfield Court – but was not included in the final designs – was a mortuary and chapel of rest. There was a genuine concern over lack of such facilities for the working classes, and some Labour councillors hoped to include them

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

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Corolite: the thread about a Lochend experiment in Dutch construction

Another day. Following on from the thread about the Riversdale Demonstration Houses, here’s another bunch of inconspicuous-looking municipal houses in Edinburgh which once again pose the question of “well, what makes these so special then?”. This post will endeavour to answer that.

This is just one little corner of the large Lochend housing scheme, which was developed in the mid-1920s as a big showpiece by the Edinburgh Corporation. The Corporation purchased the 170 acre Lochend estate from Morton Gray Stuart, 17th Earl of Moray, in 1923 for £37,500 (£2.9M today). Central government subsidies in place at the time encouraged the use of “non traditional construction” techniques, to try and deal with post-war shortages of skilled trades labour and an economic downturn that put many men employed on labouring out of work. Edinburgh Corporation was quick to embrace both the money and the new techniques required to access it.

The first houses that went up at Lochend were of the Airey Duo-Slab type, a mix of pre-cast concrete slabs (which apparently made use of waste rubble from the construction of Portobello Power Station) and poured concrete.

At a ceremony officiated over by Lord Provost Sleigh, Labour MP for South Ayrshire and Lord High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland, James Brown MP, laid a foundation stone at a Duo-Slab house on May 27th 1924 (although construction had actually started in January).

Edinburgh Corporation ended up being very pleased with these houses and they would go on to become the prevalent type at Lochend, with something like 1,000 built (I haven’t counted them all!) There are Duo-Slab cottage flats at Restalrig Square, but those aren’t what this thread is about, there’s something else too. So if these other houses aren’t Duo-slabs then what are they? Well, one of them is a slight give-away as it’s different from the rest; strikingly so. This house is strikingly modern, with a flat roof, overhanging eaves, no ornamentation and chimney flues running up the façade.

This house is very conspicuous – Edinburgh’s City Architects were rarely radical when it came to style and even the thoroughly modern (in construction terms) Duo-slab houses were conservatively traditional in style; they had a mock-classical porch (pre-cast concrete of course), 4-over-2 sash windows, tiled hipped roofs and traditional placement of the chimneys. No, what we are looking at here is a different, radical new construction technique, one imported from the continent. This is a Corolite House and is basically a copy of the Dutch Korrelbeton houses of the early 1920s.

Korrelbeton translates from Dutch as – approximately – “granular concrete”. It was a “no-fines” technique (i.e. no fine sand or ash to fill in the gaps between the aggregate) but instead of gravel as an aggregate it used crushed waste brick, clinker or slag. This made it lightweight – it was 25-50% air pockets. It was also cheap, as it was mixed in the very lean ration of 1 part Portland Cement to 9 parts aggregate (which was recycled waste materials). The end result was both well insulated and breathable, so it didn’t suffer from two of poured concrete’s biggest drawbacks when it came to house building.

The Dutch developed Korrelbeton around 1919 and had been using it for 5 years when a visit was made by the British Housing Commission. Suitably impressed and interested, a British company was set up – the Corolite Construction Co. – in London to import this technique for housebuilding. Edinburgh’s City Architect, Adam Horsburgh Campbell, took a particular interest in what was going on in the continent regards housing and was either part of that delegation, or made a follow up visit of his own. In Jan. 1925, the Corporation accepted an offer from the Corolite Co. to built 52 experimental houses at Lochend to demonstrate the technique.

Thirteen blocks of 4-house cottage flats (mid-density, 4-in-a-block houses, with 2 flats upstairs and 2 downstairs, all with their own external entrance doors) were to be built. Six were of the “Dutch” style, with poured Corolite flat roofs, at £420 per house. Seven were of a more traditional style with a pitched, tiled roof, costing £440 each. These houses were eligible for £9/house rent subsidy, so saved the Corporation money.

The flat-roof type have overhanging eaves and the distinctive external chimney flues running up the facade. All except one of the 6 were re-roofed and reclad during the 1990s or 2000s, when rather odd-looking porticos were added. I’m not sure how one survived in its original form.

The other seven blocks were built with pitched roofs that had a reduced overhang and did not have the external flues or the central 3 windows recessed. They also got those same porticos during modernisation, so are visually quite similar – but not identical to – the refurbished flat roof houses.

These were amongst the first Corolite houses completed in Britain (they may be the first completed scheme) and were certainly the first in Scotland. On a visit to Scotland in June 1926, Prime Minister Baldwin said he thought them “quite agreeable to the eye“, “quite reasonable” and “wished [we] had more of them“. Baldwin’s government had announced a £40 per-house (about 10% construction costs) subsidy for the use of Non-Traditional construction, for the first 4,000 such houses built by local authorities in Scotland. While many authorities resisted this temptation as they did not like the terms, or care for non-traditional construction, others such as Edinburgh raced to try and build such council housing under subsidy.

In December 1925, the Edinburgh Town Council’s Housing and Town Planning Committee made a recommendation to the council that 500 further Corolite houses should be built at Lochend to capitalise on the subsidy. The Council however voted to turn down the recommendation by 35 votes to 20, after deputations from the building trade associations made representations. The £40 subsidy meant that only 10% of labour employed could be from skilled trades and the trades said it had been almost impossible to erect the Corolite houses with this workforce and keep to timescales. They also said that official figures for the number of men in the building trade that were out of work were wrong; they contended that they had better information as men out of work from one job to the next would sign on with their Union when in need of work, rather than with the Labour Exchange. Rather than being fully employed, the trades said that many men were unemployed; Edinburgh bricklayers were off working in England on public housing schemes due to the lack of work for them at home. Councillors asked about the shortage of plasterers; the plasterers’ trade representative pointed the finger at the building contractors. The trades said that building to more traditional construction practices would employ more men in the short term and the investment and would pay for itself in the long run by providing a better quality of house.

Dundee’s Housing Committee had also been unimpressed with the progress of Corolite houses, and had made that known in the papers. The Corolite Construciton Company were aggrieved at this and made their defence known in the papers too. L. J. Pond, their general manager in Edinburgh, defended the use of wallpaper on bare concrete (rather than plaster) as being the result of the 10% skilled labour cap and having to use an unskilled wall finish. He said that it was a “sanitary, durable and pleasing finish” and should not reflect on the house itself. Corolite also said that they could build good houses faster, and cheaper, and that if Edinburgh didn’t take them up on it then someone else would get the £40 per house subsidy instead and unemployed general labourers lost the chance of steady work.

In the end, neither Lochend nor Edinburgh (nor I believe, anywhere in Scotland) got any more Corolite houses. Airey won the contract to build lots more of their Duo-slabs at Lochend and the Second Scottish National Housing Company would build 350 steel houses for Edinburgh on Corporation land, before a return to more traditional construction for later phases. The Corolite Construction Company tried to flog their system to various other local authorities – Willesden Council in London built some at Brentfield and Manchester Corporation built a number that may total a few hundred – but overall they seem to have never found favour. The company moved on to other things and were last heard of in “Metroland”, advertising an estate of traditionally-built bungalows outside Berkhamstead in 1938.

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

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Steel Suburb: the thread about Lochend’s controvertial Steel Houses

There’s a quiet and well-kept little corner of the Lochend Housing Scheme that is a bit different from the rest. Its houses look distinctly municipal (although they were never “council”), but they are at a lower density than other parts of the scheme; there are bungalows and there are no tenements. You wouldn’t know it to look at it, but underneath the modern external insulation and pebbledash, all of these houses are steel houses. Lets find out how these houses came to be and what sort of houses they are.

In February 1926 the Scottish National Housing Company Ltd. (SNHC) formed a new subsidiary to provide 2,000 steel houses for Scotland; the imaginatively named Second Scottish National Housing Company (Housing Trust) Ltd., (SSNHCHT). The objective of this was to quickly build new housing in areas that needed it, without either making demands on the skilled labour market or the material supply of the traditional building trade; bricks, stone, plaster and cement. By producing the houses out of prefabricated steel components, idle engineering workers could be employed; unskilled workers could quickly erect the houses on prepared sites and there would not be a significant drain on building materials. A further consideration was that there was a deep recession in the Scottish shipbuilding industry, which was projected to last for some years further. By extension, this impacted the wider engineering, steel and coal industries, and Scotland’s industrialists and a number of politicians saw steel houses as a stimulus for these sectors.

The SNHC had been set up in September 1914 to built housing on land owned by the Admiralty adjacent to the new Rosyth Dockyard. Its stated objective was “to carry on the business of housing, town-planning and garden city making” i.e. to develop the Rosyth Garden City for let to dockyard workers. It was arranged along the lines of a public utility company, with dividend limited to 5% and a board stuffed with the worthies of local government of Scotland, including the Lord Provosts of Glasgow and Edinburgh. During the war, they would go on to build some 1,872 houses at Rosyth.

The capital for the SSNHCHT steel house programme of the was provided by the government – 50% from the Public Works Loan Board and 50% from the Scottish Board of Health (at a rate of 5% interest, this scheme had to pay itself back!). Its time-scales were ambitious, with only 2 years were allowed to complete and there a £40 penalty for each house that failed to meet its scheduled delivery date. To keep labour demands down, only 10% of the workforce could be from the skilled trades, with penalties for exceeding this proportion. Houses were allocated to the main centres of population, including 750 for Glasgow, 350 for Edinburgh and 300 for Dundee. Five approved types were ordered; 1,000 Weir Houses (in 3 variants), 500 Atholl Houses and 500 Cowieson Houses. The SSNHCHT had to abide by local building regulations and have their proposals approved by the Dean of Guild Courts (the equivalent then of a planning committee). Rents were set to local equivalents and factoring was handled by local agents – in Edinburgh this was Gumley & Davidson. All of the steel houses had coal fires as the only source of heating and hot water and were lit by gas; electricity was ruled out as an economy.

Steel houses were not without controversy – indeed the government’s initial offer had been a £40 per house subsidy to local authorities that ordered and constructed their own such houses; none had taken it up, which was why they turned to the SNHC. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had to intervene due to the controversy and made the provision of steel houses something of a campaign promise. Mrs Baldwin offered to personally live in one for a month to demonstrate how satisfactory they were.

The socialist movement faced the question of whether to resist them on account of their perceived lack of quality and the labour practices involved in their manufacture versus accepting them as a cheap way to quickly provide modern new houses for slum clearance. This caused a substantial rift at the time; John Wheatley MP (who as Minister of Health had been behind the “Homes for Heroes” council houses of the 1919 programme) spoke unfavourably of them: “the people [do] not want steel houses. [I have] yet to learn that a single one of the thousands who had bought their own houses had ordered a steel house“. The building trades were unhappy that workers employed in fabrication at the factories undercut their rates and that only 10% of the labour could come from their members. Mr Hicks of the Building Trades Union condemned them as “shoddy and insanitary“. His union was in turn accused of protectionism and of trying to prevent underemployed engineering workers and casual labourers from getting steady work on fabricating the houses.

There was also official prejudice against steel houses within Edinburgh; Baillie Mancor of the Town Council said the council wanted “real houses” and not steel houses; Councillor Mrs Eltringham Miller said that these houses were “a gift, and they were not looking forward to what they would cost after they had them.” Councillor Hardie went further and said that these were “shoddy building substitutes” and that the state was adopting a “Mussolini attitude” in forcing steel houses upon local authorities. Nevertheless, the Housing and Planning Committee approved sites in Edinburgh for the scheme on land they had already laid out for municipal housing. 250 were to go to Lochend, where 23 acres were transferred to the SSNHCHT and 100 to the Wardie district; additional land was reserved at Saughton as the Corporation desired 500 steel houses in total and was keen to encourage the SSNHCHT in any way it could.

Work progressed quickly; in July 1926 it was reported that “satisfactory progress” was being made and that the new houses were proving popular with applicants. By August, groundworks were complete and houses were beginning to rise from the ground; many more applications for let were being received every day. Rents were set at £22 per annum for cottage flats, £28/10 for the bungalows and £34 for semi detached houses. In November 1926, The Scotsman reported that the Lochend steel houses were nearing completion, with “quite a batch of Weir houses ready now, and men at work on the gardens, shovelling a rich, dark soil, which augurs well for the gardens of the future.” The paper observed that the houses were “more than empty: they have never been inhabited” and that it was with the “coming of the people and the gardens that they will acquire a personality.”

Lochend was allocated all 5 available types under the scheme, laid out in typical garden city style, the streets taking the name “Findlay” from John R. Findlay, Bt., chairman of the SSNHCHT (the steel houses at Wardie were given the streetnames “Fraser” from Provost Fraser of Dunfermline, who was on the board of directors).

Atholl Cottage Flat

These houses were produced by the Atholl Steel House Company and named after one of its founding partners, the Duke of Atholl, who had envisaged building a steel house in 1919 after touring the idle shipyards of the Clyde. He partnered with the industrialist William Beardmore, whose shipyard and locomotive works were desperate for work, with his steel foundry at Mossend in Lanarkshire ready to provide the plates. Also known as “4 in a block” houses, this style was very popular with the 1920s public housing schemes, offering a good balance between reducing building and population density, construction costs and giving each household its own entry door and garden.

Atholl’s original house was to be a lodge for his own estate, and as such was designed and built to be permanent. The construction of the Atholl House was therefore more substantial than its competitors, requiring 3 to 4 times as much steel. These heavyweight steel walls were load bearing, providing rigidity to the steel framework to which they were attached and therefore no internal cross-bracing was required. The steel was coated on its inner face with granulated cork to prevent condensation and then lined with composite boards, which were painted or wallpapered, eliminating the need for plasterers. Atholl estimated the lifespan of his house to be 60 to 90 years, with that of the Weir and Cowieson being 40 years.

The Weir Houses were produced by G. & J. Weir, engineers to the shipbuilding industry at the Holm Foundry in Cathcart in Glasgow. Weir’s chairman, Viscount Weir, had a particular interest in the idea of prefabricated houses and they would be something the company returned to on numerous occasions. Those of the 1926 scheme were of three distinct types, but all used the same basic structure, of a load bearing timber frame and floors to which a relatively thin skin of steel plates was attached as an external cladding. Their lighter construction and lower labour costs than other steel houses meant that they were the cheapest, and Weirs therefore got 50% of the total order for the scheme. A feature of all Weir houses was exposed internal copper plumbing; it could not easily be buried within the walls or their thin insulation layer, and Lord Weir felt it was better to make it accessible for repairs, so was simply clipped along the inner partitions. The Weir Paragon House of 1944 inherited this design feature.

In 1925, Weirs built a demonstration steel bungalow in Grosvenor Square in just 10 days:

The Weir Houses were the most controversial of the steel houses as Weirs paid their workers at the rates of the engineering trades from which they were drawn, which were lower than those of the building trades. Weirs were accused of building “steel houses of a very inferior kind by paying low wages under sweated conditions“. In an editorial, The Scotsman called them “a pig in a poke” (an unknown entity) but that people would want to live in them anyway and prevailed upon Weirs to improve their wages. Atholl avoided this scandal by paying building trades rates to their prefabrication workers in the factories.

Weir Eastwood Bungalow

The correspondent from The Scotsman who was sent to review the house noted that “the Living room is a good size, and the kitchenette or scullery is larger than that of many a modern brick house. The two bedrooms are a sensible shape“. The Eastwood, like its siblings, featured lots of built-in storage cupboards and a built-in coal bunker in the kitchen. The price, excluding groundworks, was set at £365 per house.

Weir Douglas Semi-Detached House

The Douglas was the largest of the Weir Houses and was a semi-detached, two-storey cottage house. The ground floor contained a sitting room with “handsome fireplace”, kitchen, larder, bathroom and – something of a novelty for the time – a large under-stairs cupboard. Upstairs were the three bedrooms, with the master bedroom running the full width of the house and having an unusually wide casement window to the front. This was the only house of the programme that had 3 bedrooms; all the other having 2. The price, excluding groundworks, was £390 per house.

Weir Blanefield Cottage Flat

This was the cottage flat in the in the Weir range. It was basically a 2-storeyed version of the Eastwood Bungalow with the upper flats accessed by internal staircases accessed from the side. The upstairs kitchens had floors strengthened with timber laid on a damp-proof layer to protect the steel beneath from “the vigorous scrubbings” of the housewife. The price, excluding ground works, was set at £357 per house.

Cowieson Terraced House

F. D. Cowieson had trained as an architect, but found success in prefabricated wood and iron buildings, with the company based in St. Rollox in Glasgow. Initially these were simple agricultural structures such as barns and sheds, but soon the company was offering halls and huts, pavilions and even cinemas. During WW1 the company turned to building bus and lorry bodies – particularly ambulances – and they would later become much better known for this side of the business. They also experimented with “brieze block” houses, a single pair of which were trialled in Edinburgh at the Riversdale Demonstration Site.

The Cowieson Houses built in the programme were of a four-in-a-block terrace and like the Weir Houses, used a load bearing wooden structure to which a steel cladding was applied. The roof was originally asbestos tiles.

In July 1927, Lochend was proudly exhibited to King George V and Queen Mary, who made a royal visit on 11th of that month. Before proceeding to Lochend, the visitors stopped at the Corporation’s newest housing scheme at Prestonfield, where the King and Queen each planted a tree to inaugurate the development. They then headed to Lochend through the Holyrood Park, with 35,000 school children turned out to line the route. Further crowds greeted them at Lochend and they made a slow drive through the new neighbourhood, guided by Lord Provost Stevenson and two councillors.

Their majesties expressed pleasure at the fine layout of this garden city and were greatly interested in the many types of construction in evidence as well as the openness of the place and tasteful arrangement of the gardens.

Edinburgh Evening News, 11th July 1927

A halt was made at 49 Findlay Gardens, a Weir bungalow, where an inspection was made of the house occupied by the Hill family and their two young children. Mr Hill’s occupation was given as the manager of an egg merchant, T. Howden & Co., in Leith, which gives an idea of the sort of persons who were living in the houses. The residents were asked if the house had been cold in winter; yes it had been, but it was not now (it was July!). The next house to be inspected was the Atholl House of Mrs Wilson at 7 Findlay Medway, where they remarked on the sensible layout of the interior and were intrigued by a bed settee in the living room, the Queen sat on it and plumped up the cushions.

The householders were apparently not informed in advance that they were about to receive their guests and the first thing they knew was the knock on the door from the police. One of the housewives was reputedly peeling potatoes when they arrived and said of the Queen: “She’s a verra hamely lady” and that “Ye hav’na much crack for folk o’ that kind, and ye’re a bit tongue-tacket, but she was that kind and natural, and said everything was very nice“.

On leaving the steel houses, the royal party then proceeded to some of the Airey Duo-slab houses; Mr & Mrs Galloway at 58 Lochend Avenue and Mrs Dickson at 34 Lochend Drive.

In the end, an additional 500 steel houses were erected by the SSNHCHT above and beyond its original target, taking the total to 2,252. All were completed by the end of 1928 and the stock, along with those at Lochend, was passed to the ownership and management of the Scottish Special Housing Agency in 1963 when it took over the assets of the Scottish National Housing companies. Although they were only given a 40-60 year lifespan by their builders, most were first refurbished between 1978 and 1983 and in 3 years time they will have their centenary. Nearly all are still standing and most have been substantially upgraded with external insulation and rendering, double glazing, central heating, new roofs etc. A handful remain in an earlier state, usually those that had been bought very early under “right to buy” legislation. The tenants of those that were not bought early campaigned to have them upgraded rather than demolished, and most of those were subsequently bought (it was not possible to buy a defective house).

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A street with a ridiculous name: the thread about the Riversdale demonstration housing

Riversdale Road is, on the face of it, another sleepy little inter-war suburban Edinburgh street, of neat little bungalows and well-trimmed hedges. You can see streets like these all over Edinburgh. I’ve cycled down it hundreds of times, probably over a thousand, and never paid it much attention. If I had, I might have found out that this is no ordinary street.

You may recall the other week I wrote about the “Sighthill Demonstration Site”, the post-war living laboratory for municipal housing experiments in Scotland. Well, nobody was more surprised than me to find out that Riversdale Road is its inter-war equivalent!

Edinburgh Corporation had acquired the Saughton Hall Estate in 1905, to provide a new public park and land for suburban expansion. Riversdale Road, at the eastern end of the estate where the Water of Leith approaches Roseburn was so-named at a meeting of the Streets and Buildings Committee in 1913, to some consternation from one member who felt it sounded too English:

Judge Macfarlane took exception to the name as ridiculous for a Scottish town. It seemed to him to come from Putney. (Laughter.) A title in keeping with the City of Edinburgh should be found. (A Member: “Macfarlane Avenue!” and laughter.) Mr Fraser defended the name on the ground that the road ran alongside that beautiful river the Water of Leith – (Laughter) – and along a dell.

Edinburgh Evening News, 28th October 1913

Nothing further progressed along this road at that time due to the onset of World War I, however afterwards it was earmarked for Council Housing under the “Addison Act” (The Housing, Town Planning etc. Act) of 1919. Again this came to nothing as the scale of that act was drastically cut back and only around two out of every five homes planned were built. The Housing Act of 1924 once again made public money available to councils to construct houses and things finally began to move. Some of Riversdale Road would be built with the sorts of private-built bungalows for the burgeoning middle class that came to dominate much of suburban Edinburgh at this time, but the Corporation used some of the 1924 funding to create a “demonstration scheme” here to experiment with the latest non-standard construction techniques. And most of these houses are still there!

This scheme attracted a variety of novel construction methods and materials – what we would call “non-standard construction”. The government was willing to pay a futher £40 subsidy (about 10% of the cost of building a house) on top of other finance for approved houses built using “non standard” methods, so there was financial incentive to explore these options. This meant that none of the houses at Riversdale were (entirely) built from the traditional materials of brick, stone, wood, slate and tile. The scheme also spilled into adjacent streets in the next few years, with further examples of the most popular or successful houses being built. The others remained as one-or-two-off curios.

I have identified 8 definite types of houses at the Riversdale Demonstration Scheme, with references in passing to 3 or 4 more types, which were either never built or have been subsequently demolished (as is frequently the case of non-standard construction, it is not mortgageable, so will often be demolished and rebuilt, that house can then be re-mortgaged). The below map is in no particular order.

1. Reith Steel Houses. Leith shipbuilders John Cran & Somerville were a traditional heavy industry looking to diversify in the post-WW1 economic downturn. They erected four Reith Steel Houses here in early 1926, which were all-steel houses walled and roofed from the same sort of steel sheet as used in shipbuilding. They were to the design of Robert Buchanan Reith, who took his inspiration from ships deckhouses. Reith claimed his was the first all-steel house design in the country (it predates the Lochend Steel Houses by a few months) and it was first demonstrated at The Edinburgh Housing and Building Exhibition in February that year, when Cran & Somerville exhibited a quarter of a house, open to the sides to be seen by the public. That same year the Clyde shipbuilders, Alexander Stephen & Sons of Govan, also demonstrated a model of it at The Building Exhibition. The designer’s brother – John Charles Walsham Reith – is probably familiar to you as Lord Reith, the “father” of the BBC and. put in a good word for his brother, declaring these houses were “the finest… for wireless reception [I have] come across“.

Two pairs of semi-detached houses were built at Riversdale, one of which remained until last year (2022), when half of it was demolished to be replaced by a new-build (the demolished houses are hatched out on the map). A contemporary journalist described them: “there is the most perfectly equipped kitchenette I have yet seen and it is that house which goes one better in the matter of hot water, with an ingenious portable boiler which heats the water for the bath in summer“. This new market was not enough to save Cran & Somerville however and they went out of business the next year. Fifty Reith houses were apparently built by Stephens at Harthill the following year at a cost of £425 per house.

I am obliged to the present householder of the remaining Reith Steel House for taking the time to have an enthusiastic chat about her unique property and the time to show us a very heavy section of 3/16″ shipyard steel that was cut from the house during renovations. She informed us that the house is hot-riveted together in typical shipyard manner and that these can be seen inside the garage.

2. Glasgow Steel Roofing Co. Duracrete Houses. These houses look really like your standard, inter-war, suburban, Edinburgh bungalows. You would never tell that all is not quite what it seems with them.

But if you were to look really closely, and I mean really closely at one house and its neighbour, you will realise that the “masonry” texture on each house is exactly the same. Because it isn’t masonry at all, it’s pre-cast panels of a material called “Duracrete”, hung off of a steel frame. These houses were built by the Glasgow Steel Roofing Co. and cost £425 each.

3. Allied Builders Montrose Bungalows. These handsome bungalows were built by Allied Builders Ltd. of Montrose, and named after that town. Allied were a subsidiary of the Coaster Construction Company shipyard in Montrose, who had been formed by W. D. Mclaren and his business partner in 1919 to build ships to Mclaren’s designs that incorporated prefabrication and simple, standardised lines and components. The company found itself in the same post-war slump as the rest of the shipbuilding industry, which was suffering from significant overcapacity, and like Cran & Somerville and Alex Stephens, they diversified.

The regular panel lines, distinctive channel markings and curious rounded corners arouse curiosity that these aren’t particularly traditional despite appearances. Mclaren applied his interest in standardised components and prefabrication to housebuilding, and came up with an interlocking, pre-cast cement block that was pinned together with steel rods. This block system was relatively flexible and meant for easy reconfiguration to build different sizes of houses and rooms, and detached or semi-detached bungalows. They were lined on the inside with fibreboard – there being a shortage of skilled plasterers at the time, with the joins in the board covered in fillets of wood to give a traditional, panelled interior appearance like wainscotting.

As a publicity stunt, Allied built the prototype house in a then record 6 days outside the shipyard and invited the public to inspect it. The house is still there (along with another up the road to a different layout). Allied offered to build these at a rate of one per week for developments larger than 5 houses, after an initial few months of groundworks. Small developments of these houses were built by councils in Forfar and in Melrose. A big public order for Bongate in Jedburgh was cancelled when it was found that traditional methods were cheaper and resulted in larger house; this is the curse of employing a “building system” on a small scale, as it negates the economies when compared to traditional techniques.

Once again, the diversification into housing couldn’t keep the shipyard afloat and it too closed in 1927. McLaren emigrated to the west coast of Canada and was successful in the shipbuilding industry there, his prefabrication techniques and standardised designs finding favour with construction of barges and lighters. He and his son took the Allied Builders name and even logo and used it for a shipyard they later set up in Vancouver, and it’s still going as Allied Shipbuilders Ltd.

4. Cowieson Brieze Block Houses. A pair of these houses were built by F. D. Cowieson & Co., of St. Rollox, Glasgow. Cowiesons are better known as builders of bus and tramcar bodies, but had 20 years of experience building prefabricated steel agricultural buildings like barns and silos, and they also provided anything from huts to pavilions to cinemas. These houses were built of “Brieze” blocks (Breeze is the modern spelling), dense concrete blocks which used colliery waste as the aggregate component.

These two houses, in a semi-detached, two-storey block, were built on a wooden frame and used “Celotex” internal partitions, which was a brand new material made from the waste fibres of sugar-cane processing. This product was being pushed in Scotland by William Beardmore & Co., another heavy industrial concern desperately casting around for new markets – and another that was imminently about to go under. Its manufacturers stated that “IT IS ENDURING, SCIENTIFICALLY STERILISED, VERMIN-PROOFED AND WATER PROOFED”. The houses were harled on the outside and had brick chimneys. Cowiesons also offered a house with a timber frame and steel cladding, the Second Scottish National Housing Company (Housing Trust) would build 500 houses of this type, with around 50 being provided at Lochend in Edinburgh.

5. Rae Concrete Houses. A large number of these houses were built at Riversdale, and a 40-house estate of them later followed up around Baird Grove. These rather plain in appearance little bungalows were built to a system and method devised by Thomas L. Rae, who for 20 years had been the superintendent of the Clydebank and District Water Trust. In that capacity, he had gained huge practical and scientific experience with working concrete and had become familiar with the intricacies of how you made it waterproof (and on the flipside, breathable). He persuaded the water trust to build two prototypes, as workers houses, at the Cochno Water Filters. Convinced he was on to something, he resigned and set up his own company to build these houses.

Rae‘s method used a 3½” thick poured concrete wall reinforced with steel bars. He said that with one man erecting shuttering and ten pouring concrete, the walls of a house could be put up in a single day (so long as the foundations were prepared!) Hr gave his houses a 100 year life span. They’re now 98! You can find more of these houses in Edinburgh around Boswall Green in Wardie.

6. Nissen-Petren Steel & Concrete Houses. Eight pairs of these semi-detached houses were described as being planned, although only 4 appear to have been built. If you’ve been down this street, they are the incongruous-looking ones that look like Dutch Barns. Nissen was Colonel Peter Nissen, DSO, a military engineer of Nissen Hut fame. these distinctive semi-circular, corrugated steel-clad, prefabricated, temporary buildings became synonymous with British military encampments in the 20th century.

Post-war, Nissen attempted to apply his ideas about prefabricated structures to mass-produced housing. He was assisted by “Petren”; the architects John Petter and Percy J. Warren. The resulting houses used a similar framework of curved steel tubes to support a corrugated metal roof as used in the huts, but they were substantially larger, two-storeys and had pre-fabricated concrete block walls. The roofs were “asbestos-protected metal“, which was further coated in asphalt to weatherproof it. These houses had three bedrooms when built, a living room and a kitchenette when new. I am unsure if any more Nissen-Petren houses were built in Scotland. You can read more about Nissen-Petren houses at the Municipal Dreams site here.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/14230388@N03/8561234059

The prototypes were built in Yeovil and have an elegant, curved roofline that flares out towards the bottom. Unfortunately, building prefabricated “system” housing on a small scale deployment inevitably pushes costs up as economies of scale cannot be realised. As a result these houses went well over budget – £350 per house became £510, a 45% increase. I assume the angular roofs employed at Riversdale are the result of a cost-cutting exercise.

7. Consteelwood Houses. The odd names of these houses is a portmanteau word which comes from their building system; Concrete, Steel and Wood. They were built on a wooden frame, infilled with poured concrete and clad in pressed steel panels by the Stelonite Company of London. These panels were interlocking and had the pattern lines of masonry set into them to give them a traditional appearance. The roofing was a traditional wooden frame covered in tiles.

A prototype house was erected in London at Tooting. The pair of houses at Riversdale, their steel panels with fake masonry lines hidden beneath a skin of harling, were (and thus are) probably the only houses of this type in Scotland.

A local furnishings company outfitted these houses when new and invited members of the public to come and see this “unique opportunity to inspect the latest in housing and furniture“.

8. Laurie Houses. The last type I have identified at Riversdale are named for their designer, Arthur Pillans Laurie. He was the Principal of Heriot-Watt College (as it was), a chemist who had made a name for himself pioneering the infra-red photography of Old Masters paintings to analyse them. He designed a neat little pair of cottages, externally they were traditional harled brick with a timer and tile roof, but internally they used no plasterwork (skilled plasterers were in short supply) and instead had an asbestos-cork-asbestos sandwich board for partitions. A single pair of houses were built – again these are unique. Laurie later turned to fascism.

These are the houses I have definitely identified. I have found written references that further types of houses were – or were intended to be – built here;

• An Atholl Steel House and clad house was apparently erected, it is certainly no longer here. Atholls were an attempt by the steel and shipbuilding company, William Beardmores – desperate for work post-war – to diversify into housing. Two estates of Atholl Houses were built by the Second Scottish National Housing Company in Edinburgh around this time; at Lochend and at Wardie. They are all still there, a precious few in near original external condition.
• Corolite No-Fines Houses – these are of in-situ poured “No-Fines” concrete, i.e a mixture with no “fine” material; sand or ash in the aggregate. This improves ventilation of the concrete. I can’t find any at Riversdale, but a small scheme of them were built at Restalrig.
• Laing Easiform Houses by John Laing & Son of Carlisle. Easiform refers to a proprietary system of shuttering into which the solid concrete walls were poured. According to newspaper reports, two 5-apartment houses at £509 each and two 3-apartment houses at £400 each were built here. I can find no trace of them (yet!). These are non-standard houses but not declared defective, so can be mortgaged, so are less likely to have been demolished to rebuild.
• A Weir Steel House was meant to be built, but a 1925 newspaper report says that it was suspended owning to a dispute over wages (the Weir houses were thought to be too cheap to put up in labour terms, and builders refused to work on them as it didn’t pay enough)
• Jones Timber House. It was noted that consideration was being given to building a wooden house by Jones & Sons, timber merchants of Larbert. Some of these houses still exist in that town.

The houses of the Riversdale Demonstration Scheme were all of types approved by the Scottish Department of Health, meaning they were eligible for Government subsidy. These subsidies could be drawn down by Councils (e.g. the Corporation of Edinburgh), by government backed housing bodies like the Second Scottish National Housing Company, by private developers or by groups of individuals.

This latter group was a scheme known as Utility Societies, which were “building clubs” of five or more interested housebuilders who had got together. The Council provided them with land it had set aside for housing and they could borrow money through a public assistance scheme or get a government grant (or both) to build an approved type of house. The builders of those houses would erect them on site on behalf of the Society. These (in theory) cheap, prefabricated, “off the shelf” designs of non-standard construction houses were aimed to suit their needs. A group of Tramway Department employees were noted in a 1925 article in the Scotsman of organising such a society, which I believe are of the Rae type and located around Boswall Green.

The houses at Riversdale are are remarkable collection of 1920s housing innovation and ideas. They are probably the most remarkable collection of such houses anywhere in Scotland – one common feature shared by most of this variety bag of houses has is the great efforts the designers went to to make the most modern and cutting edge houses look traditional and unremarkable. Have a closer look next time you are passing!

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

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

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Winchester council flats: chronic water leaks problems | Hampshire Chronicle
#SocialHousing
#CouncilHousing
#WaterLeak
#WaterLeaks
#Flooding
#Winchester

THE report in the Chronicle on November 14 of “Residents Panicking” because of a water leak at Craddock House, flooding a number of flats and…

https://www.hampshirechronicle.co.uk/news/23199089.winchester-council-flats-chronic-water-leaks-problems/

The thread about Sighthill Neuk; what makes this quiet and leafy, post-war, suburban street so very special and totally unique?

It might look like many other quiet, leafy, post-war suburban streets in Edinburgh, or anywhere at all really, but there’s something very special about Sighthill Neuk and its surrounding streets. If you were to wander around, most of the houses would feel familiar to you. You’ve probably seen them – or ones very like them – before. You’ve probably been seeing them all your life. But look again. No two blocks of houses here are the same. Every single one is different. In fact, some of them are totally unique.

That is because this just isn’t any old street, this is the Sighthill Demonstration Site; a testing ground and living laboratory for post-war public housing experiments for Scotland. Between 1944 and 1965, 69 houses were built to 20 different designs and construction methods in a scheme supervised by the Scottish Special Housing Association, the SSHA. This public agency was formed in Edinburgh in 1937 to provide good quality public housing in Scotland to supplement that constructed by Local Authorities.

At Sighthill, they tested out the latest innovations in building materials, construction techniques, internal configurations, plumbing, heating and more, with the intention of building better and cheaper municipal housing. These houses were demonstrated to local authorities, their architects and contractors, who would go on to build many thousands of houses of the sorts trialled at Sighthill. SSHA staff lived in the houses and reported back on how they performed and what they were like to live in. Most of the houses were later sold on to the SSHA staff who lived in them, and who by accounts were very pleased with them; indeed all but one of the demonstration houses survive to this day and all are very well kept.

However, such was the crash-building nature of the post-war public housing construction boom, unfortunately many mistakes were made before the lessons from Sighthill had been learned. For instance, the Scottish prototype of the Orlit System framed house was built here in 1946 and many thousands were built all over Scotland by the time it became apparent in 1950 that it was a flawed system that produced defective houses. This thread explores each type of house in the Demonstration Site and what makes each special.

20. Weir Paragon House

We start with number 20 because this was the first house built at the Sighthill Demonstration Site. It was also the first post-war prefabricated house built in Scotland (in fact it was completed before the end of the war!) and is the only one which has been demolished – although it was intended to be a permanent structure.

The Weir Paragon House was a prefabricated house with a steel frame, walls and roof. It was a single-storey, detached, modernist cottage coated externally with a weatherproof layer of harling and paint. It was of an E-shape plan, with one “wing” of the house containing the bedrooms and the other the living room, kitchen and a utility room. The first and second prototypes were erected within G. & J. Weir’s factory in Glasgow, the third was sent to Sighthill as its opening showpiece. It was ready to be opened to the public by Viscount Weir on July 21st 1944, just 45 days after Allied forces had landed on the Normandy Beaches. 100 of these houses were built during wartime, for use in rural and mining areas of Scotland to ease a housing crisis in those districts.

The heating worked off a solid-fuel boiler that produced hot water for radiators. All the pipe-work was exposed as a utility measure so that it did not need to be buried within walls. The doors were sliding instead of hinged, to reduce the space needed to open a door. A feature of the house, to reduce unnecessary waste, was there were no internal door locks and a novel system of push-button door handles. Viscount Weir reasoned that “there must be 80 million locks and handles on room doors in Scottish houses” and that that locks were never used and the handles had too many moving parts.

The second house, known as Kendeugh, had been built in the grounds of the Weir Sports Fields next to their Holm Foundry factory in Cathcart. It survived in good condition as a private residence until mid-2022 in Glasgow, at which point it was unceremoniously demolished.

1. Department of Health for Scotland Timber Economy Houses

These houses weren’t built from timber, rather they were built to try and economise the use of softwood timber as there was a fear that due to the UK’s economic conditions, building timber would be too expensive to import. There were built for the Department of Health for Scotland by the SSHA. Each of the four houses in the terrace used a different proportion of timber compared to a standard British house of the same size; 0% standard timber use, 25%, 67% and 92%. These houses were modified from a design prepared in England and one of the space-saving features was an “aggregate ground floor living space“; the living room, kitchen and dining room were open plan. These were the first mass-market first houses in Scotland to feature this.

The structural walls were of standard brick and block construction, but internal partitions were pre-cast plaster or concrete panels or blocks. The roofs used either hardwood or steel frames rather than softwood. The floor structures were pre-cast concrete beams, in-filled with concrete on the ground floor. The first floor differed from house to house.

2. Ministry of Works / Ministry of Housing & Local Government Timber Economy Houses

These houses were built for the same reasons as the DHfS Timber Economy Houses, but were sponsored by the Ministry of Works and the Ministry of Housing & Local Government. They were based on designs for the new towns of Cwmbran, Harlow and Peterlee, modified to suit Scottish standards. They were of traditional construction but used a variety of non-traditional roofing, flooring and internal partitions (pre-cast concrete, plasterboard, hardwood and even plastic tile flooring) to reduce softwood requirements. Eight houses in total were built; a semi-detached house, a 4-in-a-block terrace and a detached upper/lower flat were built.

3. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Flats

The “Space Saving” houses aimed to reduce the costs of housing construction by reducing aspects of the internal sizing and configuration, but particularly the amount of space devoted to the actual supporting structure of the building. This block of flats was inspired by the visit of a Minister of the Scottish Office to Holland in 1951, which impressed upon them features of Dutch housing that were more economical than traditional Scottish practices. This 3-storey block had 3 stairs, each with 6 flats, for 18 houses. The main novelty was the use of stronger bricks that were thinner bricks and resulted in a lighter structure; the traditional 16 inch thick walls used for flats in Scotland was reduced by 1/3 to 11 inches. This meant each flat required 13,700 bricks, compared to 17-21,000 for similar flats of traditional construction and the press reported the unveiling of these flats under the headline “Thinner Walls for Cheaper Flats!”.

Further economies were gained by reducing the sizes of the bedrooms was reduced and in a third of the houses there was no internal hallway; bedrooms and bathrooms lead off the living room. To reduce softwood use, the roofing structure was as light as was permitted and all joists were no longer than 8″ thick timber would allow. A final innovation was to combine the soil (toilet) and waste (sink) drains together, one of the first times this had been tried in Scotland.

4. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Cottages

Like the DHfS Space Saving Flats, these cottages reduced the internal space and the volume of building materials required for traditional construction to demonstrate the principals to Local Authorities. They dispensed with the traditional “pend” that gave access to back gardens through a terrace as this was otherwise unused space and replaced it with an utility room, giving through access internally. Hallways were kept as small as possible to maximise the internal space devoted to living space. Bedrooms were reduced in size and no built-in cupboards or recesses were included in them; this space was reallocated to the kitchen and living room. A controversial change was reducing the 8 foot standard ceiling height by 3 inches on the ground floor and 6 inches upstairs. These houses were 90 square feet (8.3m2) smaller than the equivalent houses of the time, for no loss of living space.

5. Weir Timber Houses

Weirs had been interested in prefabricated housing since Lord Weir’s “Steel Houses” of which 500 were built in Scotland after WW1. Weir Housing Corporation produced the prototype Paragon Steel House at Sighthill in 1944 and in 1951 won an SSHA competition to design a new standard, prefabricated timber house. The prototype was erected here to demonstrate it before 3,000 were supplied from Weir’s factory in Coatbridge for use by the SSHA across Scotland. The first production houses were a scheme of 18 in Kirkintilloch, the first of which was ready in December 1952 after taking only 6 weeks to complete. Due to restrictions on timber imports, 3,000 was the limit of the number of houses that could be built.

6. SSHA Bellrock House & 7. Orlit Bellrock House

Houses 6 and 7 were two semi-detached, two-storey houses built to trial the use of Bellrock load-bearing gypsum wall panels for the internal partitions. One was built to an SSHA design, the other to the Orlit System of prefabricated concrete frames and interlocking cladding blocks. It was unusual for an Orlit house in that the roof was gabled and not hipped (the sides are straight, when viewed from the front, with the external wall meeting the peak of the roof at the top). The SSHA house had an unusual construction method, with the gypsum panels going up first and acting as shuttering, with reinforced concrete being poured between them to form the load-bearing structure. It is a one-of-a-kind prototype and the SSHA built no more of them.

8, 9 & 10. Ministry of Fuel & Power Heating Demonstration Houses

These three semi-detached houses were built in 1949-50 to demonstrate three different new space-heating systems for the Ministry of Fuel and Power. They were supervised and monitored by the Fuel Research Station in East Kilbride. Two used coal-fired boilers; one a hot air system and the other a low-pressure water system with conventional radiators. The third used a gas-fired, warm air system with outlets in all rooms.

The houses themselves were identical inside (to allow comparison between the three systems) and were of traditional construction to the designs of the SSHA as contractor to the Department.

11. Miller-O’Sullivan House

The Miller-O’Sullivan House was a collaboration between James Miller – an Edinburgh-based volume housebuilder who had specialised in small, semi-detached, middle class housing infill sites in the interwar period – and Edward O’ Sullivan, a building contractor to London County Council who specialised in concrete block houses. Both companies had developed their own non-standard construction housing designs. This house used a special machine on-site to pour concrete into moulds to form the components, with a steel spine beam tying it together internally. The outside was roughcast.

12. Atholl Steel House

The Atholl House was named after its builders the Atholl Steel House Company of Mossend in Lanarkshire (named after the Duke of Atholl, one of the company’s founders). The company had built prefabricated steel houses in the inter-war period for public housing schemes; 550 of which were erected in Scotland. An updated steel house design, based on their 1926 model, had already been put into production for England in 1945 and was modified for construction in Scotland. A prototype semi-detached house of the Scottish variant was built at Sighthill in 1946 for the SSHA and DhFS. These houses are a steel frame, covered in harled and painted steel panels with a corrugated steel roof. Steel house production was suspended in 1948 after 1,500 Atholl Houses had been completed due to the post-war economic crisis and a crash in the domestic supply of steel in the country.

13. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Foamslag Block House

This semi-detached house was built in 1944 by one of England’s principal engineering contractors who were a specialist in concrete construction. The technique was traditional, being built of blockwork, but the materials were not. Foamslag was a lightweight concrete building block that had been developed in 1938 by the Department of Housing Research Section using the by-product of steel manufacturing.

14. Canadian Timber House

The last demonstration houses to be built at Sighthill by the SSHA, these were one of three sites sponsored in the UK by the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation of Ottawa, Canada. They were the result of a 1963 visit to Canada by British housing officials to investigate Canadian pre-fabricated housing techniques. The timber components were imported from Canada. They could clad with brick, timber or render on metal lath; one of the Sighthill houses has a Fyfestone synthetic stone block finish.

15. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Poured Foamslag House

This was a version of the other Holland, Hannen & Cubitts house at Sighthill, but instead of being built from blocks it was poured in-situ into prefabricated shuttering. Very few of these houses were ever built.

16. Orlit Frameless House

This was the prototype of the Orlit Frameless House which was developed when it became apparent that the pre-cast, reinforced concrete (PRC) frames of the Orlit System houses were a major structural weakness when they began to suffer corrosion. Orlit set up the Scottish Construction Company to built these houses as the Scotcon Orlit and many thousands were erected by the SSHA and Scottish local authorities in the 1950s. They do not suffer from the same deficiencies as the Orlit System houses. You can read more about the different Orlit houses in the thread about Post-War, Prefabricated, Permanent housing in Edinburgh.

17. Orlit Framed House

This was the prototype in Scotland of the Orlit Framed House, built to the Orlit System of the Czech architect Edwin Katona. This used a system of PRC frames and columns which were infilled with special interlocking concrete blocks. The houses at Sighthill were finished with brick porches and a pitched roof, most Orlit System houses were much more utilitarian in appearance and had a flat roof. Many thousand of these houses were built by the SSHA and local authorities in Scotland prior to 1950, before it became clear that the system suffered from structural weaknesses when the PRC began to corrode prematurely at the joints. Designated as defective, many of these houses have since been demolished but you can still find them around Edinburgh. You can read more about the different Orlit houses in the thread about Post-War, Prefabricated, Permanent housing in Edinburgh.

18. Keyhouse Unibuilt House

This is the only house of this type that was built in Scotland. It is a steel house, with a steel frame and cladding and glasswool and plasterboard internal lining. Like other steel houses, construction was curtailed by the government in 1948 due to a severe shortages of domestic steel and few of these were ever built. They were built for the Ministry of Works by a consortium of J. Brockhouse & Co., engineers; Joseph Sankey & Sons, sheet metal stampers; and Gyproc Products, plasterboard manufacturers.

19. SSHA No-Fines House

This was a prototype of a No-Fines house for the SSHA, built in 1946. No-Fines refers to concrete produced with no sand component (the fine material of the aggregate); just gravel and cement. With no sand to fully fill in the gaps between the gravel, it is a breathable material. It began being used for public housing in the inter-war period and interest arose again post-war as it did not require the specialist skill of bricklaying. Local authorities in Scotland and the SSHA built extensively in No-Fines into the 1970s. It was poured in-situ between wooden shuttering on a brick base. The floors were of wooden joists, and the roof was traditional timber frame covered in tiles.

If you enjoyed this post, you may be pleased to learn that I stumbled upon an inter-war version of it nearby at the Riversdale Housing Demonstration Scheme in Roseburn.

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It might look like many other quiet, leafy, post-war suburban streets in Edinburgh, or anywhere at all really, but there’s something very special about Sighthill Neuk and its surrounding streets. If you were to wander around, most of the houses would feel familiar to you. You’ve probably seen them – or ones very like them – before. You’ve probably been seeing them all your life. But look again. No two blocks of houses here are the same. Every single one is different. In fact, some of them are totally unique.

That is because this just isn’t any old street, this is the Sighthill Demonstration Site; a testing ground and living laboratory for post-war public housing experiments for Scotland. Between 1944 and 1965, 69 houses were built to 20 different designs and construction methods in a scheme supervised by the Scottish Special Housing Association, the SSHA. This public agency was formed in Edinburgh in 1937 to provide good quality public housing in Scotland to supplement that constructed by Local Authorities.

At Sighthill, they tested out the latest innovations in building materials, construction techniques, internal configurations, plumbing, heating and more, with the intention of building better and cheaper municipal housing. These houses were demonstrated to local authorities, their architects and contractors, who would go on to build many thousands of houses of the sorts trialled at Sighthill. SSHA staff lived in the houses and reported back on how they performed and what they were like to live in. Most of the houses were later sold on to the SSHA staff who lived in them, and who by accounts were very pleased with them; indeed all but one of the demonstration houses survive to this day and all are very well kept.

However, such was the crash-building nature of the post-war public housing construction boom, unfortunately many mistakes were made before the lessons from Sighthill had been learned. For instance, the Scottish prototype of the Orlit System framed house was built here in 1946 and many thousands were built all over Scotland by the time it became apparent in 1950 that it was a flawed system that produced defective houses. This thread explores each type of house in the Demonstration Site and what makes each special.

20. Weir Paragon House

We start with number 20 because this was the first house built at the Sighthill Demonstration Site. It was also the first post-war prefabricated house built in Scotland (in fact it was completed before the end of the war!) and is the only one which has been demolished – although it was intended to be a permanent structure.

The Weir Paragon House was a prefabricated house with a steel frame, walls and roof. It was a single-storey, detached, modernist cottage coated externally with a weatherproof layer of harling and paint. It was of an E-shape plan, with one “wing” of the house containing the bedrooms and the other the living room, kitchen and a utility room. The first and second prototypes were erected within G. & J. Weir’s factory in Glasgow, the third was sent to Sighthill as its opening showpiece. It was ready to be opened to the public by Viscount Weir on July 21st 1944, just 45 days after Allied forces had landed on the Normandy Beaches. 100 of these houses were built during wartime, for use in rural and mining areas of Scotland to ease a housing crisis in those districts.

The heating worked off a solid-fuel boiler that produced hot water for radiators. All the pipe-work was exposed as a utility measure so that it did not need to be buried within walls. The doors were sliding instead of hinged, to reduce the space needed to open a door. A feature of the house, to reduce unnecessary waste, was there were no internal door locks and a novel system of push-button door handles. Viscount Weir reasoned that “there must be 80 million locks and handles on room doors in Scottish houses” and that that locks were never used and the handles had too many moving parts.

The second house, known as Kendeugh, had been built in the grounds of the Weir Sports Fields next to their Holm Foundry factory in Cathcart. It survived in good condition as a private residence until mid-2022 in Glasgow, at which point it was unceremoniously demolished.

1. Department of Health for Scotland Timber Economy Houses

These houses weren’t built from timber, rather they were built to try and economise the use of softwood timber as there was a fear that due to the UK’s economic conditions, building timber would be too expensive to import. There were built for the Department of Health for Scotland by the SSHA. Each of the four houses in the terrace used a different proportion of timber compared to a standard British house of the same size; 0% standard timber use, 25%, 67% and 92%. These houses were modified from a design prepared in England and one of the space-saving features was an “aggregate ground floor living space“; the living room, kitchen and dining room were open plan. These were the first mass-market first houses in Scotland to feature this.

The structural walls were of standard brick and block construction, but internal partitions were pre-cast plaster or concrete panels or blocks. The roofs used either hardwood or steel frames rather than softwood. The floor structures were pre-cast concrete beams, in-filled with concrete on the ground floor. The first floor differed from house to house.

2. Ministry of Works / Ministry of Housing & Local Government Timber Economy Houses

These houses were built for the same reasons as the DHfS Timber Economy Houses, but were sponsored by the Ministry of Works and the Ministry of Housing & Local Government. They were based on designs for the new towns of Cwmbran, Harlow and Peterlee, modified to suit Scottish standards. They were of traditional construction but used a variety of non-traditional roofing, flooring and internal partitions (pre-cast concrete, plasterboard, hardwood and even plastic tile flooring) to reduce softwood requirements. Eight houses in total were built; a semi-detached house, a 4-in-a-block terrace and a detached upper/lower flat were built.

3. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Flats

The “Space Saving” houses aimed to reduce the costs of housing construction by reducing aspects of the internal sizing and configuration, but particularly the amount of space devoted to the actual supporting structure of the building. This block of flats was inspired by the visit of a Minister of the Scottish Office to Holland in 1951, which impressed upon them features of Dutch housing that were more economical than traditional Scottish practices. This 3-storey block had 3 stairs, each with 6 flats, for 18 houses. The main novelty was the use of stronger bricks that were thinner bricks and resulted in a lighter structure; the traditional 16 inch thick walls used for flats in Scotland was reduced by 1/3 to 11 inches. This meant each flat required 13,700 bricks, compared to 17-21,000 for similar flats of traditional construction and the press reported the unveiling of these flats under the headline “Thinner Walls for Cheaper Flats!”.

Further economies were gained by reducing the sizes of the bedrooms was reduced and in a third of the houses there was no internal hallway; bedrooms and bathrooms lead off the living room. To reduce softwood use, the roofing structure was as light as was permitted and all joists were no longer than 8″ thick timber would allow. A final innovation was to combine the soil (toilet) and waste (sink) drains together, one of the first times this had been tried in Scotland.

4. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Cottages

Like the DHfS Space Saving Flats, these cottages reduced the internal space and the volume of building materials required for traditional construction to demonstrate the principals to Local Authorities. They dispensed with the traditional “pend” that gave access to back gardens through a terrace as this was otherwise unused space and replaced it with an utility room, giving through access internally. Hallways were kept as small as possible to maximise the internal space devoted to living space. Bedrooms were reduced in size and no built-in cupboards or recesses were included in them; this space was reallocated to the kitchen and living room. A controversial change was reducing the 8 foot standard ceiling height by 3 inches on the ground floor and 6 inches upstairs. These houses were 90 square feet (8.3m2) smaller than the equivalent houses of the time, for no loss of living space.

5. Weir Timber Houses

Weirs had been interested in prefabricated housing since Lord Weir’s “Steel Houses” of which 500 were built in Scotland after WW1. Weir Housing Corporation produced the prototype Paragon Steel House at Sighthill in 1944 and in 1951 won an SSHA competition to design a new standard, prefabricated timber house. The prototype was erected here to demonstrate it before 3,000 were supplied from Weir’s factory in Coatbridge for use by the SSHA across Scotland. The first production houses were a scheme of 18 in Kirkintilloch, the first of which was ready in December 1952 after taking only 6 weeks to complete. Due to restrictions on timber imports, 3,000 was the limit of the number of houses that could be built.

6. SSHA Bellrock House & 7. Orlit Bellrock House

Houses 6 and 7 were two semi-detached, two-storey houses built to trial the use of Bellrock load-bearing gypsum wall panels for the internal partitions. One was built to an SSHA design, the other to the Orlit System of prefabricated concrete frames and interlocking cladding blocks. It was unusual for an Orlit house in that the roof was gabled and not hipped (the sides are straight, when viewed from the front, with the external wall meeting the peak of the roof at the top). The SSHA house had an unusual construction method, with the gypsum panels going up first and acting as shuttering, with reinforced concrete being poured between them to form the load-bearing structure. It is a one-of-a-kind prototype and the SSHA built no more of them.

8, 9 & 10. Ministry of Fuel & Power Heating Demonstration Houses

These three semi-detached houses were built in 1949-50 to demonstrate three different new space-heating systems for the Ministry of Fuel and Power. They were supervised and monitored by the Fuel Research Station in East Kilbride. Two used coal-fired boilers; one a hot air system and the other a low-pressure water system with conventional radiators. The third used a gas-fired, warm air system with outlets in all rooms.

The houses themselves were identical inside (to allow comparison between the three systems) and were of traditional construction to the designs of the SSHA as contractor to the Department.

11. Miller-O’Sullivan House

The Miller-O’Sullivan House was a collaboration between James Miller – an Edinburgh-based volume housebuilder who had specialised in small, semi-detached, middle class housing infill sites in the interwar period – and Edward O’ Sullivan, a building contractor to London County Council who specialised in concrete block houses. Both companies had developed their own non-standard construction housing designs. This house used a special machine on-site to pour concrete into moulds to form the components, with a steel spine beam tying it together internally. The outside was roughcast.

12. Atholl Steel House

The Atholl House was named after its builders the Atholl Steel House Company of Mossend in Lanarkshire (named after the Duke of Atholl, one of the company’s founders). The company had built prefabricated steel houses in the inter-war period for public housing schemes; 550 of which were erected in Scotland. An updated steel house design, based on their 1926 model, had already been put into production for England in 1945 and was modified for construction in Scotland. A prototype semi-detached house of the Scottish variant was built at Sighthill in 1946 for the SSHA and DhFS. These houses are a steel frame, covered in harled and painted steel panels with a corrugated steel roof. Steel house production was suspended in 1948 after 1,500 Atholl Houses had been completed due to the post-war economic crisis and a crash in the domestic supply of steel in the country.

13. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Foamslag Block House

This semi-detached house was built in 1944 by one of England’s principal engineering contractors who were a specialist in concrete construction. The technique was traditional, being built of blockwork, but the materials were not. Foamslag was a lightweight concrete building block that had been developed in 1938 by the Department of Housing Research Section using the by-product of steel manufacturing.

14. Canadian Timber House

The last demonstration houses to be built at Sighthill by the SSHA, these were one of three sites sponsored in the UK by the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation of Ottawa, Canada. They were the result of a 1963 visit to Canada by British housing officials to investigate Canadian pre-fabricated housing techniques. The timber components were imported from Canada. They could clad with brick, timber or render on metal lath; one of the Sighthill houses has a Fyfestone synthetic stone block finish.

15. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Poured Foamslag House

This was a version of the other Holland, Hannen & Cubitts house at Sighthill, but instead of being built from blocks it was poured in-situ into prefabricated shuttering. Very few of these houses were ever built.

16. Orlit Frameless House

This was the prototype of the Orlit Frameless House which was developed when it became apparent that the pre-cast, reinforced concrete (PRC) frames of the Orlit System houses were a major structural weakness when they began to suffer corrosion. Orlit set up the Scottish Construction Company to built these houses as the Scotcon Orlit and many thousands were erected by the SSHA and Scottish local authorities in the 1950s. They do not suffer from the same deficiencies as the Orlit System houses. You can read more about the different Orlit houses in the thread about Post-War, Prefabricated, Permanent housing in Edinburgh.

17. Orlit Framed House

This was the prototype in Scotland of the Orlit Framed House, built to the Orlit System of the Czech architect Edwin Katona. This used a system of PRC frames and columns which were infilled with special interlocking concrete blocks. The houses at Sighthill were finished with brick porches and a pitched roof, most Orlit System houses were much more utilitarian in appearance and had a flat roof. Many thousand of these houses were built by the SSHA and local authorities in Scotland prior to 1950, before it became clear that the system suffered from structural weaknesses when the PRC began to corrode prematurely at the joints. Designated as defective, many of these houses have since been demolished but you can still find them around Edinburgh. You can read more about the different Orlit houses in the thread about Post-War, Prefabricated, Permanent housing in Edinburgh.

18. Keyhouse Unibuilt House

This is the only house of this type that was built in Scotland. It is a steel house, with a steel frame and cladding and glasswool and plasterboard internal lining. Like other steel houses, construction was curtailed by the government in 1948 due to a severe shortages of domestic steel and few of these were ever built. They were built for the Ministry of Works by a consortium of J. Brockhouse & Co., engineers; Joseph Sankey & Sons, sheet metal stampers; and Gyproc Products, plasterboard manufacturers.

19. SSHA No-Fines House

This was a prototype of a No-Fines house for the SSHA, built in 1946. No-Fines refers to concrete produced with no sand component (the fine material of the aggregate); just gravel and cement. With no sand to fully fill in the gaps between the gravel, it is a breathable material. It began being used for public housing in the inter-war period and interest arose again post-war as it did not require the specialist skill of bricklaying. Local authorities in Scotland and the SSHA built extensively in No-Fines into the 1970s. It was poured in-situ between wooden shuttering on a brick base. The floors were of wooden joists, and the roof was traditional timber frame covered in tiles.

If you enjoyed this post, you may be pleased to learn that I stumbled upon an inter-war version of it nearby at the Riversdale Housing Demonstration Scheme in Roseburn.

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) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

https://threadinburgh.scot/2022/12/23/the-thread-about-sighthill-neuk-and-what-makes-this-quiet-and-leafy-post-war-suburban-street-so-very-special-and-unique/

#CouncilHousing #Edinburgh #featured #Houses #Housing #PostWar #PRefab #prefabrication #prefabs #publicHousing #Sighthill #SSHA #Suburbs #Written2022

It might look like many other quiet, leafy, post-war suburban streets in Edinburgh, or anywhere at all really, but there’s something very special about Sighthill Neuk and its surrounding streets. If you were to wander around, most of the houses would feel familiar to you. You’ve probably seen them – or ones very like them – before. You’ve probably been seeing them all your life. But look again. No two blocks of houses here are the same. Every single one is different. In fact, some of them are totally unique.

That is because this just isn’t any old street, this is the Sighthill Demonstration Site; a testing ground and living laboratory for post-war public housing experiments for Scotland. Between 1944 and 1965, 69 houses were built to 20 different designs and construction methods in a scheme supervised by the Scottish Special Housing Association, the SSHA. This public agency was formed in Edinburgh in 1937 to provide good quality public housing in Scotland to supplement that constructed by Local Authorities.

At Sighthill, they tested out the latest innovations in building materials, construction techniques, internal configurations, plumbing, heating and more, with the intention of building better and cheaper municipal housing. These houses were demonstrated to local authorities, their architects and contractors, who would go on to build many thousands of houses of the sorts trialled at Sighthill. SSHA staff lived in the houses and reported back on how they performed and what they were like to live in. Most of the houses were later sold on to the SSHA staff who lived in them, and who by accounts were very pleased with them; indeed all but one of the demonstration houses survive to this day and all are very well kept.

However, such was the crash-building nature of the post-war public housing construction boom, unfortunately many mistakes were made before the lessons from Sighthill had been learned. For instance, the Scottish prototype of the Orlit System framed house was built here in 1946 and many thousands were built all over Scotland by the time it became apparent in 1950 that it was a flawed system that produced defective houses. This thread explores each type of house in the Demonstration Site and what makes each special.

20. Weir Paragon House

We start with number 20 because this was the first house built at the Sighthill Demonstration Site. It was also the first post-war prefabricated house built in Scotland (in fact it was completed before the end of the war!) and is the only one which has been demolished – although it was intended to be a permanent structure.

The Weir Paragon House was a prefabricated house with a steel frame, walls and roof. It was a single-storey, detached, modernist cottage coated externally with a weatherproof layer of harling and paint. It was of an E-shape plan, with one “wing” of the house containing the bedrooms and the other the living room, kitchen and a utility room. The first and second prototypes were erected within G. & J. Weir’s factory in Glasgow, the third was sent to Sighthill as its opening showpiece. It was ready to be opened to the public by Viscount Weir on July 21st 1944, just 45 days after Allied forces had landed on the Normandy Beaches. 100 of these houses were built during wartime, for use in rural and mining areas of Scotland to ease a housing crisis in those districts.

The heating worked off a solid-fuel boiler that produced hot water for radiators. All the pipe-work was exposed as a utility measure so that it did not need to be buried within walls. The doors were sliding instead of hinged, to reduce the space needed to open a door. A feature of the house, to reduce unnecessary waste, was there were no internal door locks and a novel system of push-button door handles. Viscount Weir reasoned that “there must be 80 million locks and handles on room doors in Scottish houses” and that that locks were never used and the handles had too many moving parts.

The second house, known as Kendeugh, had been built in the grounds of the Weir Sports Fields next to their Holm Foundry factory in Cathcart. It survived in good condition as a private residence until mid-2022 in Glasgow, at which point it was unceremoniously demolished.

1. Department of Health for Scotland Timber Economy Houses

These houses weren’t built from timber, rather they were built to try and economise the use of softwood timber as there was a fear that due to the UK’s economic conditions, building timber would be too expensive to import. There were built for the Department of Health for Scotland by the SSHA. Each of the four houses in the terrace used a different proportion of timber compared to a standard British house of the same size; 0% standard timber use, 25%, 67% and 92%. These houses were modified from a design prepared in England and one of the space-saving features was an “aggregate ground floor living space“; the living room, kitchen and dining room were open plan. These were the first mass-market first houses in Scotland to feature this.

The structural walls were of standard brick and block construction, but internal partitions were pre-cast plaster or concrete panels or blocks. The roofs used either hardwood or steel frames rather than softwood. The floor structures were pre-cast concrete beams, in-filled with concrete on the ground floor. The first floor differed from house to house.

2. Ministry of Works / Ministry of Housing & Local Government Timber Economy Houses

These houses were built for the same reasons as the DHfS Timber Economy Houses, but were sponsored by the Ministry of Works and the Ministry of Housing & Local Government. They were based on designs for the new towns of Cwmbran, Harlow and Peterlee, modified to suit Scottish standards. They were of traditional construction but used a variety of non-traditional roofing, flooring and internal partitions (pre-cast concrete, plasterboard, hardwood and even plastic tile flooring) to reduce softwood requirements. Eight houses in total were built; a semi-detached house, a 4-in-a-block terrace and a detached upper/lower flat were built.

3. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Flats

The “Space Saving” houses aimed to reduce the costs of housing construction by reducing aspects of the internal sizing and configuration, but particularly the amount of space devoted to the actual supporting structure of the building. This block of flats was inspired by the visit of a Minister of the Scottish Office to Holland in 1951, which impressed upon them features of Dutch housing that were more economical than traditional Scottish practices. This 3-storey block had 3 stairs, each with 6 flats, for 18 houses. The main novelty was the use of stronger bricks that were thinner bricks and resulted in a lighter structure; the traditional 16 inch thick walls used for flats in Scotland was reduced by 1/3 to 11 inches. This meant each flat required 13,700 bricks, compared to 17-21,000 for similar flats of traditional construction and the press reported the unveiling of these flats under the headline “Thinner Walls for Cheaper Flats!”.

Further economies were gained by reducing the sizes of the bedrooms was reduced and in a third of the houses there was no internal hallway; bedrooms and bathrooms lead off the living room. To reduce softwood use, the roofing structure was as light as was permitted and all joists were no longer than 8″ thick timber would allow. A final innovation was to combine the soil (toilet) and waste (sink) drains together, one of the first times this had been tried in Scotland.

4. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Cottages

Like the DHfS Space Saving Flats, these cottages reduced the internal space and the volume of building materials required for traditional construction to demonstrate the principals to Local Authorities. They dispensed with the traditional “pend” that gave access to back gardens through a terrace as this was otherwise unused space and replaced it with an utility room, giving through access internally. Hallways were kept as small as possible to maximise the internal space devoted to living space. Bedrooms were reduced in size and no built-in cupboards or recesses were included in them; this space was reallocated to the kitchen and living room. A controversial change was reducing the 8 foot standard ceiling height by 3 inches on the ground floor and 6 inches upstairs. These houses were 90 square feet (8.3m2) smaller than the equivalent houses of the time, for no loss of living space.

5. Weir Timber Houses

Weirs had been interested in prefabricated housing since Lord Weir’s “Steel Houses” of which 500 were built in Scotland after WW1. Weir Housing Corporation produced the prototype Paragon Steel House at Sighthill in 1944 and in 1951 won an SSHA competition to design a new standard, prefabricated timber house. The prototype was erected here to demonstrate it before 3,000 were supplied from Weir’s factory in Coatbridge for use by the SSHA across Scotland. The first production houses were a scheme of 18 in Kirkintilloch, the first of which was ready in December 1952 after taking only 6 weeks to complete. Due to restrictions on timber imports, 3,000 was the limit of the number of houses that could be built.

6. SSHA Bellrock House & 7. Orlit Bellrock House

Houses 6 and 7 were two semi-detached, two-storey houses built to trial the use of Bellrock load-bearing gypsum wall panels for the internal partitions. One was built to an SSHA design, the other to the Orlit System of prefabricated concrete frames and interlocking cladding blocks. It was unusual for an Orlit house in that the roof was gabled and not hipped (the sides are straight, when viewed from the front, with the external wall meeting the peak of the roof at the top). The SSHA house had an unusual construction method, with the gypsum panels going up first and acting as shuttering, with reinforced concrete being poured between them to form the load-bearing structure. It is a one-of-a-kind prototype and the SSHA built no more of them.

8, 9 & 10. Ministry of Fuel & Power Heating Demonstration Houses

These three semi-detached houses were built in 1949-50 to demonstrate three different new space-heating systems for the Ministry of Fuel and Power. They were supervised and monitored by the Fuel Research Station in East Kilbride. Two used coal-fired boilers; one a hot air system and the other a low-pressure water system with conventional radiators. The third used a gas-fired, warm air system with outlets in all rooms.

The houses themselves were identical inside (to allow comparison between the three systems) and were of traditional construction to the designs of the SSHA as contractor to the Department.

11. Miller-O’Sullivan House

The Miller-O’Sullivan House was a collaboration between James Miller – an Edinburgh-based volume housebuilder who had specialised in small, semi-detached, middle class housing infill sites in the interwar period – and Edward O’ Sullivan, a building contractor to London County Council who specialised in concrete block houses. Both companies had developed their own non-standard construction housing designs. This house used a special machine on-site to pour concrete into moulds to form the components, with a steel spine beam tying it together internally. The outside was roughcast.

12. Atholl Steel House

The Atholl House was named after its builders the Atholl Steel House Company of Mossend in Lanarkshire (named after the Duke of Atholl, one of the company’s founders). The company had built prefabricated steel houses in the inter-war period for public housing schemes; 550 of which were erected in Scotland. An updated steel house design, based on their 1926 model, had already been put into production for England in 1945 and was modified for construction in Scotland. A prototype semi-detached house of the Scottish variant was built at Sighthill in 1946 for the SSHA and DhFS. These houses are a steel frame, covered in harled and painted steel panels with a corrugated steel roof. Steel house production was suspended in 1948 after 1,500 Atholl Houses had been completed due to the post-war economic crisis and a crash in the domestic supply of steel in the country.

13. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Foamslag Block House

This semi-detached house was built in 1944 by one of England’s principal engineering contractors who were a specialist in concrete construction. The technique was traditional, being built of blockwork, but the materials were not. Foamslag was a lightweight concrete building block that had been developed in 1938 by the Department of Housing Research Section using the by-product of steel manufacturing.

14. Canadian Timber House

The last demonstration houses to be built at Sighthill by the SSHA, these were one of three sites sponsored in the UK by the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation of Ottawa, Canada. They were the result of a 1963 visit to Canada by British housing officials to investigate Canadian pre-fabricated housing techniques. The timber components were imported from Canada. They could clad with brick, timber or render on metal lath; one of the Sighthill houses has a Fyfestone synthetic stone block finish.

15. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Poured Foamslag House

This was a version of the other Holland, Hannen & Cubitts house at Sighthill, but instead of being built from blocks it was poured in-situ into prefabricated shuttering. Very few of these houses were ever built.

16. Orlit Frameless House

This was the prototype of the Orlit Frameless House which was developed when it became apparent that the pre-cast, reinforced concrete (PRC) frames of the Orlit System houses were a major structural weakness when they began to suffer corrosion. Orlit set up the Scottish Construction Company to built these houses as the Scotcon Orlit and many thousands were erected by the SSHA and Scottish local authorities in the 1950s. They do not suffer from the same deficiencies as the Orlit System houses. You can read more about the different Orlit houses in the thread about Post-War, Prefabricated, Permanent housing in Edinburgh.

17. Orlit Framed House

This was the prototype in Scotland of the Orlit Framed House, built to the Orlit System of the Czech architect Edwin Katona. This used a system of PRC frames and columns which were infilled with special interlocking concrete blocks. The houses at Sighthill were finished with brick porches and a pitched roof, most Orlit System houses were much more utilitarian in appearance and had a flat roof. Many thousand of these houses were built by the SSHA and local authorities in Scotland prior to 1950, before it became clear that the system suffered from structural weaknesses when the PRC began to corrode prematurely at the joints. Designated as defective, many of these houses have since been demolished but you can still find them around Edinburgh. You can read more about the different Orlit houses in the thread about Post-War, Prefabricated, Permanent housing in Edinburgh.

18. Keyhouse Unibuilt House

This is the only house of this type that was built in Scotland. It is a steel house, with a steel frame and cladding and glasswool and plasterboard internal lining. Like other steel houses, construction was curtailed by the government in 1948 due to a severe shortages of domestic steel and few of these were ever built. They were built for the Ministry of Works by a consortium of J. Brockhouse & Co., engineers; Joseph Sankey & Sons, sheet metal stampers; and Gyproc Products, plasterboard manufacturers.

19. SSHA No-Fines House

This was a prototype of a No-Fines house for the SSHA, built in 1946. No-Fines refers to concrete produced with no sand component (the fine material of the aggregate); just gravel and cement. With no sand to fully fill in the gaps between the gravel, it is a breathable material. It began being used for public housing in the inter-war period and interest arose again post-war as it did not require the specialist skill of bricklaying. Local authorities in Scotland and the SSHA built extensively in No-Fines into the 1970s. It was poured in-situ between wooden shuttering on a brick base. The floors were of wooden joists, and the roof was traditional timber frame covered in tiles.

If you enjoyed this post, you may be pleased to learn that I stumbled upon an inter-war version of it nearby at the Riversdale Housing Demonstration Scheme in Roseburn.

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) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

https://threadinburgh.scot/2022/12/23/the-thread-about-sighthill-neuk-and-what-makes-this-quiet-and-leafy-post-war-suburban-street-so-very-special-and-unique/

#CouncilHousing #Edinburgh #featured #Houses #Housing #PostWar #PRefab #prefabrication #prefabs #publicHousing #Sighthill #SSHA #Suburbs #Written2022

It might look like many other quiet, leafy, post-war suburban streets in Edinburgh, or anywhere at all really, but there’s something very special about Sighthill Neuk and its surrounding streets. If you were to wander around, most of the houses would feel familiar to you. You’ve probably seen them – or ones very like them – before. You’ve probably been seeing them all your life. But look again. No two blocks of houses here are the same. Every single one is different. In fact, some of them are totally unique.

That is because this just isn’t any old street, this is the Sighthill Demonstration Site; a testing ground and living laboratory for post-war public housing experiments for Scotland. Between 1944 and 1965, 69 houses were built to 20 different designs and construction methods in a scheme supervised by the Scottish Special Housing Association, the SSHA. This public agency was formed in Edinburgh in 1937 to provide good quality public housing in Scotland to supplement that constructed by Local Authorities.

At Sighthill, they tested out the latest innovations in building materials, construction techniques, internal configurations, plumbing, heating and more, with the intention of building better and cheaper municipal housing. These houses were demonstrated to local authorities, their architects and contractors, who would go on to build many thousands of houses of the sorts trialled at Sighthill. SSHA staff lived in the houses and reported back on how they performed and what they were like to live in. Most of the houses were later sold on to the SSHA staff who lived in them, and who by accounts were very pleased with them; indeed all but one of the demonstration houses survive to this day and all are very well kept.

However, such was the crash-building nature of the post-war public housing construction boom, unfortunately many mistakes were made before the lessons from Sighthill had been learned. For instance, the Scottish prototype of the Orlit System framed house was built here in 1946 and many thousands were built all over Scotland by the time it became apparent in 1950 that it was a flawed system that produced defective houses. This thread explores each type of house in the Demonstration Site and what makes each special.

20. Weir Paragon House

We start with number 20 because this was the first house built at the Sighthill Demonstration Site. It was also the first post-war prefabricated house built in Scotland (in fact it was completed before the end of the war!) and is the only one which has been demolished – although it was intended to be a permanent structure.

The Weir Paragon House was a prefabricated house with a steel frame, walls and roof. It was a single-storey, detached, modernist cottage coated externally with a weatherproof layer of harling and paint. It was of an E-shape plan, with one “wing” of the house containing the bedrooms and the other the living room, kitchen and a utility room. The first and second prototypes were erected within G. & J. Weir’s factory in Glasgow, the third was sent to Sighthill as its opening showpiece. It was ready to be opened to the public by Viscount Weir on July 21st 1944, just 45 days after Allied forces had landed on the Normandy Beaches. 100 of these houses were built during wartime, for use in rural and mining areas of Scotland to ease a housing crisis in those districts.

The heating worked off a solid-fuel boiler that produced hot water for radiators. All the pipe-work was exposed as a utility measure so that it did not need to be buried within walls. The doors were sliding instead of hinged, to reduce the space needed to open a door. A feature of the house, to reduce unnecessary waste, was there were no internal door locks and a novel system of push-button door handles. Viscount Weir reasoned that “there must be 80 million locks and handles on room doors in Scottish houses” and that that locks were never used and the handles had too many moving parts.

The second house, known as Kendeugh, had been built in the grounds of the Weir Sports Fields next to their Holm Foundry factory in Cathcart. It survived in good condition as a private residence until mid-2022 in Glasgow, at which point it was unceremoniously demolished.

1. Department of Health for Scotland Timber Economy Houses

These houses weren’t built from timber, rather they were built to try and economise the use of softwood timber as there was a fear that due to the UK’s economic conditions, building timber would be too expensive to import. There were built for the Department of Health for Scotland by the SSHA. Each of the four houses in the terrace used a different proportion of timber compared to a standard British house of the same size; 0% standard timber use, 25%, 67% and 92%. These houses were modified from a design prepared in England and one of the space-saving features was an “aggregate ground floor living space“; the living room, kitchen and dining room were open plan. These were the first mass-market first houses in Scotland to feature this.

The structural walls were of standard brick and block construction, but internal partitions were pre-cast plaster or concrete panels or blocks. The roofs used either hardwood or steel frames rather than softwood. The floor structures were pre-cast concrete beams, in-filled with concrete on the ground floor. The first floor differed from house to house.

2. Ministry of Works / Ministry of Housing & Local Government Timber Economy Houses

These houses were built for the same reasons as the DHfS Timber Economy Houses, but were sponsored by the Ministry of Works and the Ministry of Housing & Local Government. They were based on designs for the new towns of Cwmbran, Harlow and Peterlee, modified to suit Scottish standards. They were of traditional construction but used a variety of non-traditional roofing, flooring and internal partitions (pre-cast concrete, plasterboard, hardwood and even plastic tile flooring) to reduce softwood requirements. Eight houses in total were built; a semi-detached house, a 4-in-a-block terrace and a detached upper/lower flat were built.

3. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Flats

The “Space Saving” houses aimed to reduce the costs of housing construction by reducing aspects of the internal sizing and configuration, but particularly the amount of space devoted to the actual supporting structure of the building. This block of flats was inspired by the visit of a Minister of the Scottish Office to Holland in 1951, which impressed upon them features of Dutch housing that were more economical than traditional Scottish practices. This 3-storey block had 3 stairs, each with 6 flats, for 18 houses. The main novelty was the use of stronger bricks that were thinner bricks and resulted in a lighter structure; the traditional 16 inch thick walls used for flats in Scotland was reduced by 1/3 to 11 inches. This meant each flat required 13,700 bricks, compared to 17-21,000 for similar flats of traditional construction and the press reported the unveiling of these flats under the headline “Thinner Walls for Cheaper Flats!”.

Further economies were gained by reducing the sizes of the bedrooms was reduced and in a third of the houses there was no internal hallway; bedrooms and bathrooms lead off the living room. To reduce softwood use, the roofing structure was as light as was permitted and all joists were no longer than 8″ thick timber would allow. A final innovation was to combine the soil (toilet) and waste (sink) drains together, one of the first times this had been tried in Scotland.

4. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Cottages

Like the DHfS Space Saving Flats, these cottages reduced the internal space and the volume of building materials required for traditional construction to demonstrate the principals to Local Authorities. They dispensed with the traditional “pend” that gave access to back gardens through a terrace as this was otherwise unused space and replaced it with an utility room, giving through access internally. Hallways were kept as small as possible to maximise the internal space devoted to living space. Bedrooms were reduced in size and no built-in cupboards or recesses were included in them; this space was reallocated to the kitchen and living room. A controversial change was reducing the 8 foot standard ceiling height by 3 inches on the ground floor and 6 inches upstairs. These houses were 90 square feet (8.3m2) smaller than the equivalent houses of the time, for no loss of living space.

5. Weir Timber Houses

Weirs had been interested in prefabricated housing since Lord Weir’s “Steel Houses” of which 500 were built in Scotland after WW1. Weir Housing Corporation produced the prototype Paragon Steel House at Sighthill in 1944 and in 1951 won an SSHA competition to design a new standard, prefabricated timber house. The prototype was erected here to demonstrate it before 3,000 were supplied from Weir’s factory in Coatbridge for use by the SSHA across Scotland. The first production houses were a scheme of 18 in Kirkintilloch, the first of which was ready in December 1952 after taking only 6 weeks to complete. Due to restrictions on timber imports, 3,000 was the limit of the number of houses that could be built.

6. SSHA Bellrock House & 7. Orlit Bellrock House

Houses 6 and 7 were two semi-detached, two-storey houses built to trial the use of Bellrock load-bearing gypsum wall panels for the internal partitions. One was built to an SSHA design, the other to the Orlit System of prefabricated concrete frames and interlocking cladding blocks. It was unusual for an Orlit house in that the roof was gabled and not hipped (the sides are straight, when viewed from the front, with the external wall meeting the peak of the roof at the top). The SSHA house had an unusual construction method, with the gypsum panels going up first and acting as shuttering, with reinforced concrete being poured between them to form the load-bearing structure. It is a one-of-a-kind prototype and the SSHA built no more of them.

8, 9 & 10. Ministry of Fuel & Power Heating Demonstration Houses

These three semi-detached houses were built in 1949-50 to demonstrate three different new space-heating systems for the Ministry of Fuel and Power. They were supervised and monitored by the Fuel Research Station in East Kilbride. Two used coal-fired boilers; one a hot air system and the other a low-pressure water system with conventional radiators. The third used a gas-fired, warm air system with outlets in all rooms.

The houses themselves were identical inside (to allow comparison between the three systems) and were of traditional construction to the designs of the SSHA as contractor to the Department.

11. Miller-O’Sullivan House

The Miller-O’Sullivan House was a collaboration between James Miller – an Edinburgh-based volume housebuilder who had specialised in small, semi-detached, middle class housing infill sites in the interwar period – and Edward O’ Sullivan, a building contractor to London County Council who specialised in concrete block houses. Both companies had developed their own non-standard construction housing designs. This house used a special machine on-site to pour concrete into moulds to form the components, with a steel spine beam tying it together internally. The outside was roughcast.

12. Atholl Steel House

The Atholl House was named after its builders the Atholl Steel House Company of Mossend in Lanarkshire (named after the Duke of Atholl, one of the company’s founders). The company had built prefabricated steel houses in the inter-war period for public housing schemes; 550 of which were erected in Scotland. An updated steel house design, based on their 1926 model, had already been put into production for England in 1945 and was modified for construction in Scotland. A prototype semi-detached house of the Scottish variant was built at Sighthill in 1946 for the SSHA and DhFS. These houses are a steel frame, covered in harled and painted steel panels with a corrugated steel roof. Steel house production was suspended in 1948 after 1,500 Atholl Houses had been completed due to the post-war economic crisis and a crash in the domestic supply of steel in the country.

13. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Foamslag Block House

This semi-detached house was built in 1944 by one of England’s principal engineering contractors who were a specialist in concrete construction. The technique was traditional, being built of blockwork, but the materials were not. Foamslag was a lightweight concrete building block that had been developed in 1938 by the Department of Housing Research Section using the by-product of steel manufacturing.

14. Canadian Timber House

The last demonstration houses to be built at Sighthill by the SSHA, these were one of three sites sponsored in the UK by the Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation of Ottawa, Canada. They were the result of a 1963 visit to Canada by British housing officials to investigate Canadian pre-fabricated housing techniques. The timber components were imported from Canada. They could clad with brick, timber or render on metal lath; one of the Sighthill houses has a Fyfestone synthetic stone block finish.

15. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Poured Foamslag House

This was a version of the other Holland, Hannen & Cubitts house at Sighthill, but instead of being built from blocks it was poured in-situ into prefabricated shuttering. Very few of these houses were ever built.

16. Orlit Frameless House

This was the prototype of the Orlit Frameless House which was developed when it became apparent that the pre-cast, reinforced concrete (PRC) frames of the Orlit System houses were a major structural weakness when they began to suffer corrosion. Orlit set up the Scottish Construction Company to built these houses as the Scotcon Orlit and many thousands were erected by the SSHA and Scottish local authorities in the 1950s. They do not suffer from the same deficiencies as the Orlit System houses. You can read more about the different Orlit houses in the thread about Post-War, Prefabricated, Permanent housing in Edinburgh.

17. Orlit Framed House

This was the prototype in Scotland of the Orlit Framed House, built to the Orlit System of the Czech architect Edwin Katona. This used a system of PRC frames and columns which were infilled with special interlocking concrete blocks. The houses at Sighthill were finished with brick porches and a pitched roof, most Orlit System houses were much more utilitarian in appearance and had a flat roof. Many thousand of these houses were built by the SSHA and local authorities in Scotland prior to 1950, before it became clear that the system suffered from structural weaknesses when the PRC began to corrode prematurely at the joints. Designated as defective, many of these houses have since been demolished but you can still find them around Edinburgh. You can read more about the different Orlit houses in the thread about Post-War, Prefabricated, Permanent housing in Edinburgh.

18. Keyhouse Unibuilt House

This is the only house of this type that was built in Scotland. It is a steel house, with a steel frame and cladding and glasswool and plasterboard internal lining. Like other steel houses, construction was curtailed by the government in 1948 due to a severe shortages of domestic steel and few of these were ever built. They were built for the Ministry of Works by a consortium of J. Brockhouse & Co., engineers; Joseph Sankey & Sons, sheet metal stampers; and Gyproc Products, plasterboard manufacturers.

19. SSHA No-Fines House

This was a prototype of a No-Fines house for the SSHA, built in 1946. No-Fines refers to concrete produced with no sand component (the fine material of the aggregate); just gravel and cement. With no sand to fully fill in the gaps between the gravel, it is a breathable material. It began being used for public housing in the inter-war period and interest arose again post-war as it did not require the specialist skill of bricklaying. Local authorities in Scotland and the SSHA built extensively in No-Fines into the 1970s. It was poured in-situ between wooden shuttering on a brick base. The floors were of wooden joists, and the roof was traditional timber frame covered in tiles.

If you enjoyed this post, you may be pleased to learn that I stumbled upon an inter-war version of it nearby at the Riversdale Housing Demonstration Scheme in Roseburn.

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) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

https://threadinburgh.scot/2022/12/23/the-thread-about-sighthill-neuk-and-what-makes-this-quiet-and-leafy-post-war-suburban-street-so-very-special-and-unique/

#CouncilHousing #Edinburgh #featured #Houses #Housing #PostWar #PRefab #prefabrication #prefabs #publicHousing #Sighthill #SSHA #Suburbs #Written2022

The thread about AIROH, ARCON, Tarran and Uni-SECO; temporary, prefabricated post-war housing in Edinburgh

This thread is a bit of an A-to-Z of the different types of temporary, prefabricated, post-war housing built in Edinburgh immediately after WW2.

In 1944, the Government passed the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act, in anticipation of a post-war housing and house-building crisis. While the primary intention of the act was to replace the c. 450,000 homes lost due to aerial bombing, a secondary consideration was to pick up where there pre-war slum clearance projects had left off in trying to provide better mass-housing for people. 300,000 temporary homes were planned to be built in the first two years after the war, to rapidly increase housing supply while the construction of new, permanent housing (be it traditional or prefabricated) tried to catch up.

The Ministry of Works approved 4 (later more) standard designs of prefabricated, two-bedroom temporary bungalows which could be rapidly built and give a life span of 10-15 years. They made use of as little traditional housebuilding materials (brick, stone and timber) as possible and many made use of the skills and industrial capacity of wartime industries. All of the temporary houses were of almost identical dimensions of approximately 32.5ft x 21.5ft (9.75 x 6.5m), so were all had about a 60m2footprint and ceilings 7ft 6in high. This meant they could all be built on the same (standard) foundation panel, on the same sized plot, in the same densities. Estates were often built of a mix of types depending on what was available.

All the temporary houses came with standardised, prefabricated kitchen and bathrooms units to designs approved by the Ministry of Works, including the Prefabricated Plumbing Unit which combined the kitchen sinks, water tank and hot water cylinder and was connected to the back boiler of the living room heater. Manufacturers had no flexibility to alter these, and only a small amount of leeway on the size and positioning of the other rooms.

While central government provided the houses, local authorities were responsible for identifying, securing and planning the sites for the Temporary Housing schemes. They also had to do the groundworks for them; build the roads, sewers, and lay the electricity, gas (if used) and water supplies up to each house. Three standard foundation types were used to suit different ground conditions and the authority was responsible for surveying the site and specifying which should be used. They could also specify the colours of external paint to be used.

Four thousand temporary prefabs were built in Edinburgh post-war, the first arriving in June 1945. In that year the Corporation estimated it had 5,000 families on their waiting list for housing and had requested 7,500 of the houses from the government. There were delays, however and in July 1946 there had been little more progress than the first 100 houses. The three largest schemes accounted for over half of the provision and were at Moredun & Ferniehill, at West Pilton and Muirhouse and at “The Calders” in Sighthill. All were built on the fringes of the city, sometimes where there were few (or no) facilities for people and where public transport was poor. Innovations such as temporary schools and mobile shops were required. The Corporation’s libraries department deployed its first mobile “bookmobiles”.

Where they were largely used for slum clearance and so displaced people away from their communities and families, meaning they could be quite unpopular. On the other hand, when new the houses were good, clean and modern and came with generous gardens.

No temporary prefabs survive in Edinburgh (the ones you can still see were all built as permanent prefabs), all were demolished in a programme starting in 1964, after lifespans around twice what had been intended. Most were replaced by permanent council housing on the same sites, some of which in itself was prefabricated.

Four types of temporary houses were built in Edinburgh:

A is for AIROH

This name is an acronym of Air Industry Research Organisation for Housing, developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment, and to make use of a glut of scrap aluminium from surplus aircraft. One of the 4 aircraft companies involved in their production was the Blackburn Aircraft Company at Dumbarton. These were the most common temporary prefab in both Edinburgh and across the UK, with 1,792 and 54,000 built respectively. The walls were aluminium trays sprayed with bitumen and filled with aereated concrete and coated on the inside with plasterboard. The roofs were lightweight alumnium trusses with corrugated aluminium sheet covering.

These houses have been described as an “airplane in house form“; manufactured in sub-assemblies on an aircraft production line, combined into 4 sections (complete with roofs, floors, windows, doors and all standard interior fittings) that could be transported by road and quickly joined together on site by unskilled labour. This material has its advantages; it is light, strong, does not rust or readily corrode and – initially – was readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter aircraft like a Typhoon give you all the aluminium for a house. The problem for aluminium houses of all types was that the price of the material soon rebounded and they became very expensive to produce, much more so than other types, but they filled a gap and were not the worst of the temporary prefabs by any stretch.

Identification features are the corrugated roof, the three equally-sized windows (with 4 to the rear) and the curved canopy over the front door. Some of the first permanent prefab houses ordered for Edinburgh were of the Permanent Aluminium or Blackburn Mk.II design. Visually almost identical, it was to a generally more robust standard of insulation and weatherproofing and was designed to last 60 years instead of the AIROH‘s ten.

A is (also) for ARCON

The ARCON name was a portmanteau of Architectural Consultants, was founded as a collaborative research body between architects and builders. The. It was based on the steel-clad Portal House prototype by Tailor Woodrow . It has a similar tubular steel frame (designed by renowned Anglo-Danish engineer Ove Arup) but is covered with a double layer of corrugated asbestos sheeting, with a curving roof built out of the same material.

ARCON was the second most-produced temporary prefab after the AIROH, 39,000 were built across the UK with 757 built in Edinburgh. Many were prefabricated in St. Boswellsi n Roxburghshire, now the Scottish Borders.For recognition, these were the only temporary prefabs built in Edinburgh with a curving roof and corrugated cladding. They had the usual steel windows and doors, with two large windows on either side of the front door, which itself was next to two smaller windows for the WC and bathroom.

T is for Tarran

The Tarran was named for its builders, Tarran Industries Ltd. of Hull. It was built of pre-cast, externally pebble-dashed, concrete panels with a timber floor and a lightweight steel truss roof covered in corrugated asbestos sheets.

19,000 Tarrans were ordered by the government, with 636 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition features are the distinct vertical, pebbled panels, two large windows to the front and a squat, tapering chimney with a large metal cowled ventilator on top. Sometimes they had the front door recessed to the side, creating a distinctive notch in the building and a small, covered porch area.

U is for Uni-SECO

The name stood for Unit and Selection Engineering Co. Ltd. – the company that had been formed London to design and built them. The design was based off of that for temporary wartime military offices. These were built from pre-fabricated plywood-framed panels filled with wood waste and cement insulation, with a roof of similar construction covered in asbestos sheets and roofing felt. They were sent to sites as a flat-pack kit to be assembled and it was amongst the cheapest of the temporary prefabs; the AIROH was 43% more expensive in 1947.

29,000 Uni-SECO houses were ordered, with 815 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition feature is the roof pitch, which was was so shallow as to appear flat. They had a small, tapered chimney and two large windows to the front; the door was either offset to the left or central (Mark III model), in which case the living room window wrapped-around to the side.

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This thread is a bit of an A-to-Z of the different types of temporary, prefabricated, post-war housing built in Edinburgh immediately after WW2.

In 1944, the Government passed the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act, in anticipation of a post-war housing and house-building crisis. While the primary intention of the act was to replace the c. 450,000 homes lost due to aerial bombing, a secondary consideration was to pick up where there pre-war slum clearance projects had left off in trying to provide better mass-housing for people. 300,000 temporary homes were planned to be built in the first two years after the war, to rapidly increase housing supply while the construction of new, permanent housing (be it traditional or prefabricated) tried to catch up.

The Ministry of Works approved 4 (later more) standard designs of prefabricated, two-bedroom temporary bungalows which could be rapidly built and give a life span of 10-15 years. They made use of as little traditional housebuilding materials (brick, stone and timber) as possible and many made use of the skills and industrial capacity of wartime industries. All of the temporary houses were of almost identical dimensions of approximately 32.5ft x 21.5ft (9.75 x 6.5m), so were all had about a 60m2footprint and ceilings 7ft 6in high. This meant they could all be built on the same (standard) foundation panel, on the same sized plot, in the same densities. Estates were often built of a mix of types depending on what was available.

All the temporary houses came with standardised, prefabricated kitchen and bathrooms units to designs approved by the Ministry of Works, including the Prefabricated Plumbing Unit which combined the kitchen sinks, water tank and hot water cylinder and was connected to the back boiler of the living room heater. Manufacturers had no flexibility to alter these, and only a small amount of leeway on the size and positioning of the other rooms.

While central government provided the houses, local authorities were responsible for identifying, securing and planning the sites for the Temporary Housing schemes. They also had to do the groundworks for them; build the roads, sewers, and lay the electricity, gas (if used) and water supplies up to each house. Three standard foundation types were used to suit different ground conditions and the authority was responsible for surveying the site and specifying which should be used. They could also specify the colours of external paint to be used.

Four thousand temporary prefabs were built in Edinburgh post-war, the first arriving in June 1945. In that year the Corporation estimated it had 5,000 families on their waiting list for housing and had requested 7,500 of the houses from the government. There were delays, however and in July 1946 there had been little more progress than the first 100 houses. The three largest schemes accounted for over half of the provision and were at Moredun & Ferniehill, at West Pilton and Muirhouse and at “The Calders” in Sighthill. All were built on the fringes of the city, sometimes where there were few (or no) facilities for people and where public transport was poor. Innovations such as temporary schools and mobile shops were required. The Corporation’s libraries department deployed its first mobile “bookmobiles”.

Where they were largely used for slum clearance and so displaced people away from their communities and families, meaning they could be quite unpopular. On the other hand, when new the houses were good, clean and modern and came with generous gardens.

No temporary prefabs survive in Edinburgh (the ones you can still see were all built as permanent prefabs), all were demolished in a programme starting in 1964, after lifespans around twice what had been intended. Most were replaced by permanent council housing on the same sites, some of which in itself was prefabricated.

Four types of temporary houses were built in Edinburgh:

A is for AIROH. This name is an acronym of Air Industry Research Organisation for Housing, developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment, and to make use of a glut of scrap aluminium from surplus aircraft. One of the 4 aircraft companies involved in their production was the Blackburn Aircraft Company at Dumbarton. These were the most common temporary prefab in both Edinburgh and across the UK, with 1,792 and 54,000 built respectively. The walls were aluminium trays sprayed with bitumen and filled with aereated concrete and coated on the inside with plasterboard. The roofs were lightweight alumnium trusses with corrugated aluminium sheet covering.

These houses have been described as an “airplane in house form“; manufactured in sub-assemblies on an aircraft production line, combined into 4 sections (complete with roofs, floors, windows, doors and all standard interior fittings) that could be transported by road and quickly joined together on site by unskilled labour. This material has its advantages; it is light, strong, does not rust or readily corrode and – initially – was readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter aircraft like a Typhoon give you all the aluminium for a house. The problem for aluminium houses of all types was that the price of the material soon rebounded and they became very expensive to produce, much more so than other types, but they filled a gap and were not the worst of the temporary prefabs by any stretch.

Identification features are the corrugated roof, the three equally-sized windows (with 4 to the rear) and the curved canopy over the front door. Some of the first permanent prefab houses ordered for Edinburgh were of the Permanent Aluminium or Blackburn Mk.II design. Visually almost identical, it was to a generally more robust standard of insulation and weatherproofing and was designed to last 60 years instead of the AIROH‘s ten.

A is for ARCON. The ARCON name was a portmanteau of Architectural Consultants, was founded as a collaborative research body between architects and builders. The. It was based on the steel-clad Portal House prototype by Tailor Woodrow . It has a similar tubular steel frame (designed by renowned Anglo-Danish engineer Ove Arup) but is covered with a double layer of corrugated asbestos sheeting, with a curving roof built out of the same material.

ARCON was the second most-produced temporary prefab after the AIROH, 39,000 were built across the UK with 757 built in Edinburgh. Many were prefabricated in St. Boswellsi n Roxburghshire, now the Scottish Borders.For recognition, these were the only temporary prefabs built in Edinburgh with a curving roof and corrugated cladding. They had the usual steel windows and doors, with two large windows on either side of the front door, which itself was next to two smaller windows for the WC and bathroom.

T is for Tarran. The Tarran was named for its builders, Tarran Industries Ltd. of Hull. It was built of pre-cast, externally pebble-dashed, concrete panels with a timber floor and a lightweight steel truss roof covered in corrugated asbestos sheets.

19,000 Tarrans were ordered by the government, with 636 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition features are the distinct vertical, pebbled panels, two large windows to the front and a squat, tapering chimney with a large metal cowled ventilator on top. Sometimes they had the front door recessed to the side, creating a distinctive notch in the building and a small, covered porch area.

U is for Uni-SECO. The name stood for Unit and Selection Engineering Co. Ltd. – the company that had been formed London to design and built them. The design was based off of that for temporary wartime military offices. These were built from pre-fabricated plywood-framed panels filled with wood waste and cement insulation, with a roof of similar construction covered in asbestos sheets and roofing felt. They were sent to sites as a flat-pack kit to be assembled and it was amongst the cheapest of the temporary prefabs; the AIROH was 43% more expensive in 1947.

29,000 Uni-SECO houses were ordered, with 815 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition feature is the roof pitch, which was was so shallow as to appear flat. They had a small, tapered chimney and two large windows to the front; the door was either offset to the left or central (Mark III model), in which case the living room window wrapped-around to the side.

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) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

https://threadinburgh.scot/2022/12/21/the-thread-about-airohs-arcons-tarrans-and-uni-secos-temporary-post-war-prefabricated-housing-in-edinburgh-and-where-it-was-built/

#CouncilHousing #Housing #prefabrication #prefabs #Suburbs #temporaryPrefabs #Written2022

The thread about AIROHs, ARCONs, Tarrans and Uni-SECOs; temporary, post-war, prefabricated housing in Edinburgh and where it was built

This thread is a bit of an A-to-Z of the different types of temporary, prefabricated, post-war housing built in Edinburgh immediately after WW2.

In 1944, the Government passed the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act, in anticipation of a post-war housing and house-building crisis. While the primary intention of the act was to replace the c. 450,000 homes lost due to aerial bombing, a secondary consideration was to pick up where there pre-war slum clearance projects had left off in trying to provide better mass-housing for people. 300,000 temporary homes were planned to be built in the first two years after the war, to rapidly increase housing supply while the construction of new, permanent housing (be it traditional or prefabricated) tried to catch up.

The Ministry of Works approved 4 (later more) standard designs of prefabricated, two-bedroom temporary bungalows which could be rapidly built and give a life span of 10-15 years. They made use of as little traditional housebuilding materials (brick, stone and timber) as possible and many made use of the skills and industrial capacity of wartime industries. All of the temporary houses were of almost identical dimensions of approximately 32.5ft x 21.5ft (9.75 x 6.5m), so were all had about a 60m2footprint and ceilings 7ft 6in high. This meant they could all be built on the same (standard) foundation panel, on the same sized plot, in the same densities. Estates were often built of a mix of types depending on what was available.

All the temporary houses came with standardised, prefabricated kitchen and bathrooms units to designs approved by the Ministry of Works, including the Prefabricated Plumbing Unit which combined the kitchen sinks, water tank and hot water cylinder and was connected to the back boiler of the living room heater. Manufacturers had no flexibility to alter these, and only a small amount of leeway on the size and positioning of the other rooms.

While central government provided the houses, local authorities were responsible for identifying, securing and planning the sites for the Temporary Housing schemes. They also had to do the groundworks for them; build the roads, sewers, and lay the electricity, gas (if used) and water supplies up to each house. Three standard foundation types were used to suit different ground conditions and the authority was responsible for surveying the site and specifying which should be used. They could also specify the colours of external paint to be used.

Four thousand temporary prefabs were built in Edinburgh post-war, the first arriving in June 1945. In that year the Corporation estimated it had 5,000 families on their waiting list for housing and had requested 7,500 of the houses from the government. There were delays, however and in July 1946 there had been little more progress than the first 100 houses. The three largest schemes accounted for over half of the provision and were at Moredun & Ferniehill, at West Pilton and Muirhouse and at “The Calders” in Sighthill. All were built on the fringes of the city, sometimes where there were few (or no) facilities for people and where public transport was poor. Innovations such as temporary schools and mobile shops were required. The Corporation’s libraries department deployed its first mobile “bookmobiles”.

Where they were largely used for slum clearance and so displaced people away from their communities and families, meaning they could be quite unpopular. On the other hand, when new the houses were good, clean and modern and came with generous gardens.

No temporary prefabs survive in Edinburgh (the ones you can still see were all built as permanent prefabs), all were demolished in a programme starting in 1964, after lifespans around twice what had been intended. Most were replaced by permanent council housing on the same sites, some of which in itself was prefabricated.

Four types of temporary houses were built in Edinburgh:

A is for AIROH

This name is an acronym of Air Industry Research Organisation for Housing, developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment, and to make use of a glut of scrap aluminium from surplus aircraft. One of the 4 aircraft companies involved in their production was the Blackburn Aircraft Company at Dumbarton. These were the most common temporary prefab in both Edinburgh and across the UK, with 1,792 and 54,000 built respectively. The walls were aluminium trays sprayed with bitumen and filled with aereated concrete and coated on the inside with plasterboard. The roofs were lightweight alumnium trusses with corrugated aluminium sheet covering.

These houses have been described as an “airplane in house form“; manufactured in sub-assemblies on an aircraft production line, combined into 4 sections (complete with roofs, floors, windows, doors and all standard interior fittings) that could be transported by road and quickly joined together on site by unskilled labour. This material has its advantages; it is light, strong, does not rust or readily corrode and – initially – was readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter aircraft like a Typhoon give you all the aluminium for a house. The problem for aluminium houses of all types was that the price of the material soon rebounded and they became very expensive to produce, much more so than other types, but they filled a gap and were not the worst of the temporary prefabs by any stretch.

Identification features are the corrugated roof, the three equally-sized windows (with 4 to the rear) and the curved canopy over the front door. Some of the first permanent prefab houses ordered for Edinburgh were of the Permanent Aluminium or Blackburn Mk.II design. Visually almost identical, it was to a generally more robust standard of insulation and weatherproofing and was designed to last 60 years instead of the AIROH‘s ten.

A is (also) for ARCON

The ARCON name was a portmanteau of Architectural Consultants, was founded as a collaborative research body between architects and builders. The. It was based on the steel-clad Portal House prototype by Tailor Woodrow . It has a similar tubular steel frame (designed by renowned Anglo-Danish engineer Ove Arup) but is covered with a double layer of corrugated asbestos sheeting, with a curving roof built out of the same material.

ARCON was the second most-produced temporary prefab after the AIROH, 39,000 were built across the UK with 757 built in Edinburgh. Many were prefabricated in St. Boswellsi n Roxburghshire, now the Scottish Borders.For recognition, these were the only temporary prefabs built in Edinburgh with a curving roof and corrugated cladding. They had the usual steel windows and doors, with two large windows on either side of the front door, which itself was next to two smaller windows for the WC and bathroom.

T is for Tarran

The Tarran was named for its builders, Tarran Industries Ltd. of Hull. It was built of pre-cast, externally pebble-dashed, concrete panels with a timber floor and a lightweight steel truss roof covered in corrugated asbestos sheets.

19,000 Tarrans were ordered by the government, with 636 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition features are the distinct vertical, pebbled panels, two large windows to the front and a squat, tapering chimney with a large metal cowled ventilator on top. Sometimes they had the front door recessed to the side, creating a distinctive notch in the building and a small, covered porch area.

U is for Uni-SECO

The name stood for Unit and Selection Engineering Co. Ltd. – the company that had been formed London to design and built them. The design was based off of that for temporary wartime military offices. These were built from pre-fabricated plywood-framed panels filled with wood waste and cement insulation, with a roof of similar construction covered in asbestos sheets and roofing felt. They were sent to sites as a flat-pack kit to be assembled and it was amongst the cheapest of the temporary prefabs; the AIROH was 43% more expensive in 1947.

29,000 Uni-SECO houses were ordered, with 815 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition feature is the roof pitch, which was was so shallow as to appear flat. They had a small, tapered chimney and two large windows to the front; the door was either offset to the left or central (Mark III model), in which case the living room window wrapped-around to the side.

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.

These threads © 2017-2025, 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.

#CouncilHousing #Housing #prefabrication #prefabs #Suburbs #temporaryPrefabs

This thread is a bit of an A-to-Z of the different types of temporary, prefabricated, post-war housing built in Edinburgh immediately after WW2.

In 1944, the Government passed the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act, in anticipation of a post-war housing and house-building crisis. While the primary intention of the act was to replace the c. 450,000 homes lost due to aerial bombing, a secondary consideration was to pick up where there pre-war slum clearance projects had left off in trying to provide better mass-housing for people. 300,000 temporary homes were planned to be built in the first two years after the war, to rapidly increase housing supply while the construction of new, permanent housing (be it traditional or prefabricated) tried to catch up.

The Ministry of Works approved 4 (later more) standard designs of prefabricated, two-bedroom temporary bungalows which could be rapidly built and give a life span of 10-15 years. They made use of as little traditional housebuilding materials (brick, stone and timber) as possible and many made use of the skills and industrial capacity of wartime industries. All of the temporary houses were of almost identical dimensions of approximately 32.5ft x 21.5ft (9.75 x 6.5m), so were all had about a 60m2footprint and ceilings 7ft 6in high. This meant they could all be built on the same (standard) foundation panel, on the same sized plot, in the same densities. Estates were often built of a mix of types depending on what was available.

All the temporary houses came with standardised, prefabricated kitchen and bathrooms units to designs approved by the Ministry of Works, including the Prefabricated Plumbing Unit which combined the kitchen sinks, water tank and hot water cylinder and was connected to the back boiler of the living room heater. Manufacturers had no flexibility to alter these, and only a small amount of leeway on the size and positioning of the other rooms.

While central government provided the houses, local authorities were responsible for identifying, securing and planning the sites for the Temporary Housing schemes. They also had to do the groundworks for them; build the roads, sewers, and lay the electricity, gas (if used) and water supplies up to each house. Three standard foundation types were used to suit different ground conditions and the authority was responsible for surveying the site and specifying which should be used. They could also specify the colours of external paint to be used.

Four thousand temporary prefabs were built in Edinburgh post-war, the first arriving in June 1945. In that year the Corporation estimated it had 5,000 families on their waiting list for housing and had requested 7,500 of the houses from the government. There were delays, however and in July 1946 there had been little more progress than the first 100 houses. The three largest schemes accounted for over half of the provision and were at Moredun & Ferniehill, at West Pilton and Muirhouse and at “The Calders” in Sighthill. All were built on the fringes of the city, sometimes where there were few (or no) facilities for people and where public transport was poor. Innovations such as temporary schools and mobile shops were required. The Corporation’s libraries department deployed its first mobile “bookmobiles”.

Where they were largely used for slum clearance and so displaced people away from their communities and families, meaning they could be quite unpopular. On the other hand, when new the houses were good, clean and modern and came with generous gardens.

No temporary prefabs survive in Edinburgh (the ones you can still see were all built as permanent prefabs), all were demolished in a programme starting in 1964, after lifespans around twice what had been intended. Most were replaced by permanent council housing on the same sites, some of which in itself was prefabricated.

Four types of temporary houses were built in Edinburgh:

A is for AIROH. This name is an acronym of Air Industry Research Organisation for Housing, developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment, and to make use of a glut of scrap aluminium from surplus aircraft. One of the 4 aircraft companies involved in their production was the Blackburn Aircraft Company at Dumbarton. These were the most common temporary prefab in both Edinburgh and across the UK, with 1,792 and 54,000 built respectively. The walls were aluminium trays sprayed with bitumen and filled with aereated concrete and coated on the inside with plasterboard. The roofs were lightweight alumnium trusses with corrugated aluminium sheet covering.

These houses have been described as an “airplane in house form“; manufactured in sub-assemblies on an aircraft production line, combined into 4 sections (complete with roofs, floors, windows, doors and all standard interior fittings) that could be transported by road and quickly joined together on site by unskilled labour. This material has its advantages; it is light, strong, does not rust or readily corrode and – initially – was readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter aircraft like a Typhoon give you all the aluminium for a house. The problem for aluminium houses of all types was that the price of the material soon rebounded and they became very expensive to produce, much more so than other types, but they filled a gap and were not the worst of the temporary prefabs by any stretch.

Identification features are the corrugated roof, the three equally-sized windows (with 4 to the rear) and the curved canopy over the front door. Some of the first permanent prefab houses ordered for Edinburgh were of the Permanent Aluminium or Blackburn Mk.II design. Visually almost identical, it was to a generally more robust standard of insulation and weatherproofing and was designed to last 60 years instead of the AIROH‘s ten.

A is for ARCON. The ARCON name was a portmanteau of Architectural Consultants, was founded as a collaborative research body between architects and builders. The. It was based on the steel-clad Portal House prototype by Tailor Woodrow . It has a similar tubular steel frame (designed by renowned Anglo-Danish engineer Ove Arup) but is covered with a double layer of corrugated asbestos sheeting, with a curving roof built out of the same material.

ARCON was the second most-produced temporary prefab after the AIROH, 39,000 were built across the UK with 757 built in Edinburgh. Many were prefabricated in St. Boswellsi n Roxburghshire, now the Scottish Borders.For recognition, these were the only temporary prefabs built in Edinburgh with a curving roof and corrugated cladding. They had the usual steel windows and doors, with two large windows on either side of the front door, which itself was next to two smaller windows for the WC and bathroom.

T is for Tarran. The Tarran was named for its builders, Tarran Industries Ltd. of Hull. It was built of pre-cast, externally pebble-dashed, concrete panels with a timber floor and a lightweight steel truss roof covered in corrugated asbestos sheets.

19,000 Tarrans were ordered by the government, with 636 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition features are the distinct vertical, pebbled panels, two large windows to the front and a squat, tapering chimney with a large metal cowled ventilator on top. Sometimes they had the front door recessed to the side, creating a distinctive notch in the building and a small, covered porch area.

U is for Uni-SECO. The name stood for Unit and Selection Engineering Co. Ltd. – the company that had been formed London to design and built them. The design was based off of that for temporary wartime military offices. These were built from pre-fabricated plywood-framed panels filled with wood waste and cement insulation, with a roof of similar construction covered in asbestos sheets and roofing felt. They were sent to sites as a flat-pack kit to be assembled and it was amongst the cheapest of the temporary prefabs; the AIROH was 43% more expensive in 1947.

29,000 Uni-SECO houses were ordered, with 815 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition feature is the roof pitch, which was was so shallow as to appear flat. They had a small, tapered chimney and two large windows to the front; the door was either offset to the left or central (Mark III model), in which case the living room window wrapped-around to the side.

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) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

https://threadinburgh.scot/2022/12/21/the-thread-about-airohs-arcons-tarrans-and-uni-secos-temporary-post-war-prefabricated-housing-in-edinburgh-and-where-it-was-built/

#CouncilHousing #Housing #prefabrication #prefabs #Suburbs #temporaryPrefabs #Written2022

This thread is a bit of an A-to-Z of the different types of temporary, prefabricated, post-war housing built in Edinburgh immediately after WW2.

In 1944, the Government passed the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act, in anticipation of a post-war housing and house-building crisis. While the primary intention of the act was to replace the c. 450,000 homes lost due to aerial bombing, a secondary consideration was to pick up where there pre-war slum clearance projects had left off in trying to provide better mass-housing for people. 300,000 temporary homes were planned to be built in the first two years after the war, to rapidly increase housing supply while the construction of new, permanent housing (be it traditional or prefabricated) tried to catch up.

The Ministry of Works approved 4 (later more) standard designs of prefabricated, two-bedroom temporary bungalows which could be rapidly built and give a life span of 10-15 years. They made use of as little traditional housebuilding materials (brick, stone and timber) as possible and many made use of the skills and industrial capacity of wartime industries. All of the temporary houses were of almost identical dimensions of approximately 32.5ft x 21.5ft (9.75 x 6.5m), so were all had about a 60m2footprint and ceilings 7ft 6in high. This meant they could all be built on the same (standard) foundation panel, on the same sized plot, in the same densities. Estates were often built of a mix of types depending on what was available.

All the temporary houses came with standardised, prefabricated kitchen and bathrooms units to designs approved by the Ministry of Works, including the Prefabricated Plumbing Unit which combined the kitchen sinks, water tank and hot water cylinder and was connected to the back boiler of the living room heater. Manufacturers had no flexibility to alter these, and only a small amount of leeway on the size and positioning of the other rooms.

While central government provided the houses, local authorities were responsible for identifying, securing and planning the sites for the Temporary Housing schemes. They also had to do the groundworks for them; build the roads, sewers, and lay the electricity, gas (if used) and water supplies up to each house. Three standard foundation types were used to suit different ground conditions and the authority was responsible for surveying the site and specifying which should be used. They could also specify the colours of external paint to be used.

Four thousand temporary prefabs were built in Edinburgh post-war, the first arriving in June 1945. In that year the Corporation estimated it had 5,000 families on their waiting list for housing and had requested 7,500 of the houses from the government. There were delays, however and in July 1946 there had been little more progress than the first 100 houses. The three largest schemes accounted for over half of the provision and were at Moredun & Ferniehill, at West Pilton and Muirhouse and at “The Calders” in Sighthill. All were built on the fringes of the city, sometimes where there were few (or no) facilities for people and where public transport was poor. Innovations such as temporary schools and mobile shops were required. The Corporation’s libraries department deployed its first mobile “bookmobiles”.

Where they were largely used for slum clearance and so displaced people away from their communities and families, meaning they could be quite unpopular. On the other hand, when new the houses were good, clean and modern and came with generous gardens.

No temporary prefabs survive in Edinburgh (the ones you can still see were all built as permanent prefabs), all were demolished in a programme starting in 1964, after lifespans around twice what had been intended. Most were replaced by permanent council housing on the same sites, some of which in itself was prefabricated.

Four types of temporary houses were built in Edinburgh:

A is for AIROH. This name is an acronym of Air Industry Research Organisation for Housing, developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment, and to make use of a glut of scrap aluminium from surplus aircraft. One of the 4 aircraft companies involved in their production was the Blackburn Aircraft Company at Dumbarton. These were the most common temporary prefab in both Edinburgh and across the UK, with 1,792 and 54,000 built respectively. The walls were aluminium trays sprayed with bitumen and filled with aereated concrete and coated on the inside with plasterboard. The roofs were lightweight alumnium trusses with corrugated aluminium sheet covering.

These houses have been described as an “airplane in house form“; manufactured in sub-assemblies on an aircraft production line, combined into 4 sections (complete with roofs, floors, windows, doors and all standard interior fittings) that could be transported by road and quickly joined together on site by unskilled labour. This material has its advantages; it is light, strong, does not rust or readily corrode and – initially – was readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter aircraft like a Typhoon give you all the aluminium for a house. The problem for aluminium houses of all types was that the price of the material soon rebounded and they became very expensive to produce, much more so than other types, but they filled a gap and were not the worst of the temporary prefabs by any stretch.

Identification features are the corrugated roof, the three equally-sized windows (with 4 to the rear) and the curved canopy over the front door. Some of the first permanent prefab houses ordered for Edinburgh were of the Permanent Aluminium or Blackburn Mk.II design. Visually almost identical, it was to a generally more robust standard of insulation and weatherproofing and was designed to last 60 years instead of the AIROH‘s ten.

A is for ARCON. The ARCON name was a portmanteau of Architectural Consultants, was founded as a collaborative research body between architects and builders. The. It was based on the steel-clad Portal House prototype by Tailor Woodrow . It has a similar tubular steel frame (designed by renowned Anglo-Danish engineer Ove Arup) but is covered with a double layer of corrugated asbestos sheeting, with a curving roof built out of the same material.

ARCON was the second most-produced temporary prefab after the AIROH, 39,000 were built across the UK with 757 built in Edinburgh. Many were prefabricated in St. Boswellsi n Roxburghshire, now the Scottish Borders.For recognition, these were the only temporary prefabs built in Edinburgh with a curving roof and corrugated cladding. They had the usual steel windows and doors, with two large windows on either side of the front door, which itself was next to two smaller windows for the WC and bathroom.

T is for Tarran. The Tarran was named for its builders, Tarran Industries Ltd. of Hull. It was built of pre-cast, externally pebble-dashed, concrete panels with a timber floor and a lightweight steel truss roof covered in corrugated asbestos sheets.

19,000 Tarrans were ordered by the government, with 636 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition features are the distinct vertical, pebbled panels, two large windows to the front and a squat, tapering chimney with a large metal cowled ventilator on top. Sometimes they had the front door recessed to the side, creating a distinctive notch in the building and a small, covered porch area.

U is for Uni-SECO. The name stood for Unit and Selection Engineering Co. Ltd. – the company that had been formed London to design and built them. The design was based off of that for temporary wartime military offices. These were built from pre-fabricated plywood-framed panels filled with wood waste and cement insulation, with a roof of similar construction covered in asbestos sheets and roofing felt. They were sent to sites as a flat-pack kit to be assembled and it was amongst the cheapest of the temporary prefabs; the AIROH was 43% more expensive in 1947.

29,000 Uni-SECO houses were ordered, with 815 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition feature is the roof pitch, which was was so shallow as to appear flat. They had a small, tapered chimney and two large windows to the front; the door was either offset to the left or central (Mark III model), in which case the living room window wrapped-around to the side.

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) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur

https://threadinburgh.scot/2022/12/21/the-thread-about-airohs-arcons-tarrans-and-uni-secos-temporary-post-war-prefabricated-housing-in-edinburgh-and-where-it-was-built/

#CouncilHousing #Housing #prefabrication #prefabs #Suburbs #temporaryPrefabs #Written2022

Blackburns, BISFs, Orlits and Whitson-Fairhursts. The thread about pre-fabricated, permanent, post-war housing in Edinburgh

This thread is a bit of an A-to-Z of the different types of permanent, prefabricated, post-war housing built in Edinburgh between 1945-1950.

In the aftermath of WW2, hundreds of thousands of temporary, prefabricated houses were built across the UK, as part of a national crash-building programme to ease urban slum dwelling, replace war losses and provide housing for men returning from war until the construction of permanent housing could catch up with demand. In Edinburgh, some 4,000 temporary prefabs were built, of four types; AIROHs, ARCONs, Tarrans and Uni-SECOs. But prefab housing wasn’t just temporary, it was also for permanent construction. It was hoped that by mass-manufacturing standard designs of modern houses in factories, they could be rapidly built with limited skilled labour.

A is for Aluminium

Some of the first permanent prefab houses ordered for Edinburgh were of the Permanent Aluminium or Blackburn Mk.II design. These were based on the AIROH (Air Industry Research Organisation for Housing) single-storey, temporary, aluminium cottages – of which some 54,000 were built – but with thicker walls and insulation, designed to last 60 years instead of the AIROH‘s ten. These were developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment, and to make use of a glut of scrap aluminium from surplus aircraft. This material has its advantages; it is light, strong, does not rust or readily corrode and – initially – readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter aircraft like a Typhoon give you all the aluminium for a house. The Blackburn Aircraft Company of Dumbarton got on board.

They have been described as an “airplane in house form“; manufactured in sections on an aircraft production line, in sections that could be transported by road, and assembled quickly on site by unskilled labour. They came pre-fitted with standard kitchens and bathrooms, all of which just needed connected together on site on a simple brick or concrete plinth. The problem for aluminium houses of all types was that the price of the material soon rebounded and they became very expensive to produce, but they filled a gap and were not the worst of the temporary prefabs by any stretch.

Edinburgh purchased 166 permanent Blackburn Aluminium Houses; 145 for the Craigour Scheme in Moredun and 21 for Muirhouse.

These houses are quite easy to identify, as they are small, detached cottages with 3 regularly-sized windows and an offset front door. The shallow-pitched roof has a small brick chimney stack and was originally aluminium sheeting. There were 3 overlapping joints on the façade where the 4 prefabricated modules were joined together. These houses were quite popular, they sit on large plots and have big gardens. They are detached and the frames have not been subject to corrosion. Many have been insulated, re-clad, re-roofed and even extended. Some have been demolished and new houses built on their plots.

B is for BISF

These houses were named after their manufacturer and designer, the British Iron and Steel Federation. The house is of a conventional, semi-detached design, but uses a steel frame with steel window and door surrounds and Critall-Hope steel framed windows. The lower storey was clad in render applied to a steel lath and the upper storey had steel sheeting formed to look like timber. Interior partitions were plasterboard or wooden fibreboard and insulation was glass fibre. Most have been stripped back to their frames, re-insulated and re-clad with pebble-dash, and given modern plastic double glazing units. The fibreboard walls were prone to damp and fire and most were replaced with plasterboard during refurbishments.

In Edinburgh, c. 300 of these houses were built in Southhouse / Buirdiehouse (1947) and Moredun / Fernieside (1949) Schemes and most (if not all) remain to this day. They are somewhat unusual in that they were always intended to be permanent, and have not suffered from the usual structural degradation and corrosion that have plagued other non-standard houses. As such they are one of the few prefab designs that have never been designated as defective (which means you can get a mortgage on one).

Useful identification features for BISF houses are that they are always semi-detached; they have a single, squat, central chimney on a pitched roof; the re-clad houses often have a mix of brick and pebble-dash cladding; the main ground floor window extends almost to floor level; and they lack the heavy reinforced concrete door and window surrounds of the concrete houses.

B is for Blackburn Orlit

These houses were a collaboration between the Blackburn Aircraft Company in Dumbarton and the Orlit Construction Company (see under O). They were designed in 1949 and used an improved, simplified version of the Orlit reinforced concrete frame and wall panel system, combined with the lightweight aluminium roof structure and pre-fabricated internal partitions covered in plasterboard, by Blackburn. Kitchens and bathrooms were also prefabricated “pods” produced by the Scottish Myton Company, based on experience with the Tarran temporary prefab houses. Four houses were built as a prototype in Clydebank in 1949, followed by 214 in 1950-51 on the Saughton Mains Scheme in Edinburgh, as semi-detached and terraces. Around 1,300 were built in total across Scotland.

These houses have the usual heavy, PRC door and window surrounds of Orlit houses and the irregularly-spaced concrete “quoins” on the corners. The ground floor front room window is deep (deeper than standard Orlits), but has often been in-filled with a shallower window. They have a shallow-pitched, gabled Blackburn roof (the roofs of Scotcon Orlits and those added to earlier Orlits are “hipped”) and lack the usual Orlit narrow, first-floor window over the front door. Instead they have 3 windows squeezed into the façade upstairs.

B is for Blackburn Mk.IV

Another collaboration between Blackburn and Orlit. These houses were of a more traditional construction, with walls constructed out of pre-cast “no fines” concrete blocks on a concrete slab foundation and Crittal steel-framed windows. I assume given Blackburn‘s involvement there were aluminium internal components used. You will find these in Edinburgh at the West Mains Scheme in Blackford,where 134 were built in 1951 as 4-in-a-block terraces. Nearly all have now been re-rendered, hiding their original concrete blockwork structure. Because they lack the Orlit‘s PRC frame and steel joints, they have not been classed as defective.

Identification features are the blockwork walls (where you can see them); the lack of the heavy, PRC door and window surrounds of most Orlit houses; the door surround has as small concession to detail (usually absent from such houses) with a moulding line around it; the central bay windows at ground floor level originally had a copper-sheathed roof.

B is for Blackburn Permanent

Also known as the Blackburn Mk.III, as the name suggests, this was a permanent house making use of Blackburn’s prefabricated internal partitioning and shallow-pitched aluminium roof structure, which was originally covered in aluminium sheeting. The form was basically the same as the Blackburn-Orlit house, but without the heavy PRC window and door frames and walls are traditional blockwork. Edinburgh built these as semi-detached and 4-in-a-block terraces, at Moredun in 1949 and the then Midlothian County Council as semi-detached houses in Currie in 1950.

Identification features are the shallow roof pitch, squat chimneys, and the strip of 4 windows with brick infill on the first floor. Again there is a very deep sitting room window. These houses are usually harled or pebbledashed.

O is for Orlit

The Orlit System was developed by the Czech architect Erwin Katona, a Jewish refugee who had come to London in the late 1930s. He developed a modular, pre-cast reinforced concrete (PRC) system of construction that could be built in a factory and rapidly assembled on site with limited and unskilled labour. PRC columns and beams slotted together to form the structure, in-filled with an interlocking system of concrete tiles. Floors and roofs were of concrete channels. The roof could be a flat concrete slab covered in bitumen paper or a traditional wooden, pitched structure with tiles. Windows were Critall steel-framed, set within PRC concrete frames of standard sizes. The Orlit System could build a range of buildings, from single-storey cottages and municipal buildings to tenement flats. Usually they were semi-detached houses though.

The System was meant to be for permanent houses, with a 60 year lifespan, but was unfortunately riddled with flaws and weaknesses. Over time, PRC deteriorates, particularly at construction joints and junctions between components, with a gradual reduction in structural effectiveness. It suffers from inadequate thermal insulation, as well as thermal bridging – making houses cold and prone to condensation on the walls. As early as 1949, people in Edinburgh were writing to the newspapers to complain about the flaws in brand new Orlit houses. The original Type 1 system was replaced with the Type 2 to try and remedy the deficiencies. By 1950, they had abandoned the pre-cast frame system almost entirely (except for the window surrounds) and moved on to modular concrete block construction, which eliminated the structural weaknesses at least! All Orlit houses built to the original Type 1 or 2 systems have been designated defective.

Orlits were popular with Scottish local authorities and set up a subsidiary – the Scottish Orlit Company – with its headquarters and factory in Sighthill. Around 6,000 were built across Scotland, of which half have been subsequently demolished. Edinburgh built around 668, 410 of which have been demolished. These were a mix of the usual 2-storey semis and tenement flats; all of the latter were built at Bingham and were demolished in 1985. 134 semis were built at Saughton Mains (in 1948) and 80 at Southhouse / Burdiehouse (in 1947), all of which remain. This post does not cover the later 1950s-built Orlits at Ratho Craigpark, Oxgangs Farm and Gilmerton Dykes.

The Orlit System evolved over time, and has a large amount of variety available due to the flexibility of the system, however the best things to look for are the heavy outlines of the pre-cast concrete window surrounds, the narrow windows over the front door and to the side, and the bulky outline of the original concrete flat roof slab to which the later hipped roofs were added to remedy the deficient nature of the structure. I believe all Orlit System houses built in Edinburgh were originally flat roofed.

S is for Scotcon Orlit

Scotcon (from Scottish Construction Company) were a subsidiary of the Scottish Orlit Company, formed expressly to undertake local authority housebuilding in Scotland. While much of their work was prefabricated tower blocks, they also built on the standard Orlit system. 296 Scotcon Orlit houses were built in Edinburgh in 1950-51, a mixture of semi-detached houses and 3-storey tenements. 126 have since been demolished, but 170 remain; in the Niddrie Marischal Scheme (tenements and semis); at Saughton Mains (only 3 semis, perhaps built as demonstration models given their proximity to the Scottish Orlit Co. factory at Sighthill); Dunsmuir Court in Corstorphine (tenements) and at Easter Drylaw (tenements).

Because they use the Orlit system of PRC beams and columns, with pre-cast interlocking concrete block walls and PRC window and door surrounds, they are designated defective. They have traditional timber-framed, pitched roofs.

Scotcon Orlits look like other Orlits, with the heavy PRC window surrounds, but that of the ground floor front room is much deeper. They have the trademark narrow window over the front door, and (where they haven’t been covered up with pebbledash), irregular concrete “quoins”. The “hipped” roofs were built as pitched timber and tile structures, so they lack the heavy slab of the early Orlits built with flat roofs (to which a pitched structure was later added).

The tenements can be recognised by the heavy PRC window surrounds, with the usual wide and deep front-room window, and narrow windows over the front door. All the Scotcon Orlit tenements in Edinburgh are 6-in-a-block. The ground floor houses have their own entrance doors to the side.

S is for Swedish Timber House

The Swedish government sold 5,000 flat-pack timber houses of a standard design to to the British Government after WW2. Half went to Scotland, particularly for rural housing, and the first 350 arrived as early as October 1945. Similar houses had been built in Glasgow in 1937 by the Swedish Government to demonstrate them to Scottish local authorities. 100 were gifted to Edinburgh Corporation by Sweden as a gesture of post-war good will, with 50 each erected in West Pilton and Sighthill under the supervision of Swedish foremen, as a mix of semi-detached and 4-in-a-block terraces. An additional handful were built by the SSHA at their Sighthill Demonstration Site.

Because they are of traditional timber construction with pitched, slate roofs, they have never been designated defective. Most have been externally insulated, and re-clad with harl or render, but some retain their original timber cladding.

The original tongue-and-groove timber cladding of thin strips, with those of the first floor overlapping the ground floor, are the best identification feature. They have a large front room window on the ground floor and a small canopy over the door. Most of those that still retain their timber cladding have been treated with dark brown or red preservatives, but originally they were brightly painted in cream. The roof is tiled and well pitched, with a single, central chimney to the front.

W is for Whitson-Fairhurst

These houses are named after their designers, W. A. Fairhurst and Melville, Dundas & Whitson Ltd. They were of a modular, prefabricated concrete system built by the Scottish Housing Group, a post-war conglomerate of housing builders who had pooled their resources to meet government and local authority contracts for mass construction. They use a system of PRC columns and beams to form the structure of the house, which are in-filled with an outer skin of brick and an inner skin of breeze blocks. Window surrounds and door frames are relatively heavy PRC structures. A traditional timber roof structure was covered in concrete roof tiles and they were harled or pebbledashed. 3,400 Whitson-Fairhurst houses were built in Scotland,. In Edinburgh they were only built in the Southhouse / Burdiehouse Scheme, where 100 semi-detached houses were built. They are designated defective.

At first glance they could be confused for an Orlit house, with heavy PRC window surrounds. The biggest difference is that the roof is of the gable-type (when seen from the front, the sides of the house are flat all the way to the top of the roof), not “hipped” as in Orlits (when seen from the front, the sides of the roof are pitched towards the top) The front window is much deeper and they lack the Orlit‘s signature narrow window above the front door.

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