#juniorsecondary — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Sex Education and the Singing Street: the thread about Albion Road and Norton Park Schools

Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (those built 1872-1918) hold a particular fascination for me, one most profound where they have been “deconsecrated” and are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but soon snowballed into an alphabetical deep-dive into each.

It’s been a few months now since we last had an instalment of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” series but finally part eleven finds us in that nameless district between Easter Road, Lochend and Abbeyhill where stands the former Albion Road Public School. This institution came about due to a perpetual lack of accommodation at nearby Leith Walk Public School. This was the result of tenement housing being built in the district faster than that school could be expanded. In June 1902 the Edinburgh School Board (ESB) purchased a piece of land from Leith’s Trinity Hospital next to St. Mungo’s Church Halls on Albion Road. These were at that time being used as overspill accommodation for Leith Walk School. Albion Road at this time was merely a dead end lane that gave access to an undeveloped area known as Drum Park home to a number of sports fields, including that of Hibernian Football Club. This area was about to undergo rapid change however, changing its character from a rural periphery to an industrialised and densely populated neighbourhood of tall tenement housing. The principal street was a widened and re-aligned Albion Road, at the far end of which Messrs Redpath Brown & Co. would erect a large steel fabrication works. Also nearby were two large maltings for the city’s brewing industry, multiple print works, a crystal glass works and a railway gas works.

It had no Park but stood among tenements and a variety of industrial buildings which together covered the lands between the Canongate of Edinburgh and the Port of Leith.
A description of Albion Road / Norton Park School by former teacher Dr J. T. R. Ritchie

This was perhaps an odd choice for the location of a new school. Although it was to be paid for and erected by Edinburgh, for the benefit of her children, it had been positioned in a municipal exclave, cut off on two sides by railways and the only way in or out was the territory of neighbouring Leith! Doubly odd was the fact that municipal boundary between these two burghs actually ran straight through the middle of the site (also meaning it had the unusual honour of having to be approved by the Dean of Guild Courts of both Edinburgh and Leith).

1910 Post Office plan of Edinburgh showing the Edinburgh and Leith municipal boundary (red and blue line) cutting through the middle of Albion Road School, highlighted in pink on the right. At this time it was not possible to access the school without crossing through Leith as Albion Road was a cul-de-sac and the Crawford footbridge over the railway had yet to be built to provide access from Bothwell Street. Highlighted pink on the left is Leith Walk Public School and in yellow at the top of the map is Leith School Board’s Lorne Street School. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Despite these obvious drawbacks, plans for a new school were prepared by the Board’s in-house architect, John Alexander Carfrae. It would be a three-storey, asymmetrical, J-plan building with a capacity of 1,403 pupils; 773 juveniles (at 10 square feet per pupil) and 630 infants (at 9 square feet each). The styling has been described by architect Richard Atkins as “free Queen Anne-based London neo-baroque“, finished entirely in red sandstone for reasons of economy. These plans were remitted to the Scotch Education Department in London for approval. This was usually a formality that elicited minor feedback around the arrangements for lighting or ventilation, but in this case they were sent back with strong objections. The Department was unhappy that the infant department was spread across two floors, so Carfrae went back to his drawing board and reduced the infant accommodation to a single floor. This reduced capacity by a third to 460 pupils, with a corresponding increase in the juvenile department. The School Board was vexed by this, as it was infant accommodation that was most in demand. They reluctantly sent the amended plans back to London, but were astonished to have them rejected again! This time a range of further amendments were requested, principally concerning the arrangement of staircases. The ESB was used to some meddling, but nothing this pedantic. But they were chaired by the redoubtable Flora Stevenson who was not to be easily cowed by civil servants far to the south. The Board stood its ground, with Stevenson intimating that they would sooner refuse to build the new school entirely than further compromise its design. This standoff was eventually resolved in their favour, but the Board estimated that the meddling, combined with a recent increase in the mandatory floorspace requirements, had inflated the per pupil construction cost by almost a third; from £11 0s 10d to £15 12s 1d. The total eventual cost was estimated at £23,500 (about £2.5 million in 2026); £20,092 14s 10d being the accepted construction tender and the remainder the purchase cost of the site.

Artist’s impression in the Edinburgh Evening News of Albion Road Public School, February 18th 1903

Carfrae followed the convention for these “barracks-type” schools of a grand, dominant block that was pulled right up to the street as a civic monument to education. This however had the unfortunate side-effect of placing its playground to the rear, the north, where it was largely cut-off from most sunlight. Gloomy playgrounds in the shade of large buildings were a common failing of school design at this time. An unorthodox design feature however was that the janitor’s house was integral to the building, usually it was detached off to the side (this would ultimately mean it was never sold off as an ex-Council house). After the delays were overcome, work progressed quickly and Albion Road Public School was opened in February 1905, the first headmaster being James C. Anderson who had transferred from Castlehill Public School. He instantly faced a double crisis. Firstly, applications to the school from Edinburgh filled only half his seats. Secondly, parents of children in the Leith School Board area wanted to send their children to him. After all, his school was mainly in Leith, as were the majority of nearby houses! The ESB strongly objected to this, they were financed by the Edinburgh ratepayers and it was their roundel that adorned the school’s façade. They referred to a bye-law they had adopted against the practice back in 1890:

No child residing beyond the School Board district shall be hereafter admitted to any of the Board’s School

Leith protested and the matter was remitted to London for adjudication by the Education Department who were rather vague about it all. They told Edinburgh that while they couldn’t legally refuse children from a neighbouring Board, they weren’t actually obliged to take them! Eventually an agreement was reached that Leith children would be accepted into the Infant Department (those under seven years of age ) from the streets of Albion Road and Albion Place, so long as those places were not needed by Edinburgh children. After this any Leithers progressed to the Juvenile Department of a Leith school, usually Lorne Street. The ESB felt that by this age they were now old enough to walk the extra distance this entailed. This angered many parents who had specifically moved into the area to take advantage of the new school. Others had imagined themselves as being in Edinburgh only to find out they had in fact unwittingly moved across the invisible border to Leith! To clarify the situation, the rather drastic step was taken of fixing physical boundary markers on a number of tenements in the district. These were stamped E and L to refer to each School Board, with a dividing line in the middle. Only those living on the side of the E could send their children to Albion Road!

School Board boundary marker above the tenement door of 91 Albert Street. Only children living on the right side of the marker could attend Albion Road School, a ridiculous situation that split the tenement in half. This was despite the fact the Leith half was closer to Albion Road school than the Edinburgh half, and it was only possible to get to the school from the latter by passing through the former! CC-by-SA-2.0, subberculture via Wikimedia

The uneasy compromise ended in September 1910 when two hundred and ten Leith children were sent back to Leith, either to Lorne Street or a new school that had just been opened by the Leith Board at Hermitage Park. At this time the school roll was 1,206, still below its total design capacity of 1,400 children.

Albion Road Public School, postcard probably dating from the time of its opening in February 1905

The first infant headmistress was Miss Kate F. Bremner who had been promoted to the school from Sciennes. She was a well travelled and progressive educator, having been a member of a commission sent from Great Britain to the United States in 1903 to study teaching methods there. Bremner was very interested in improving physical education opportunities for girls and, inspired by song-and-ball games she had observed in Nääs, Sweden, adapted thirty-one of these into English for use in the Albion Road playground.

There is no reason why our girls should not have a share of our large playgrounds and the many open spaces in our public parks, to play games which are suitable for them, and from which we know, by experience, they would derive great pleasure and much benefit
Kate F. Bremner, foreword to “A Book of Song Gales and Ball Games Adapted for School Use”, 1905

The success of these songs and games saw the music and directions published under the title “A Song of Games and Ball Games, Adapted for School Use” in 1905, richly illustrated with photographs featuring the pupils of Albion Road and other local schools (you can read the full book at Archive dot org.) At the school’s first annual concert, on March 28th 1906, the Evening News reported that the highlight was the “graceful rendering of action songs and Swedish song games.”

Example game and song called “Off to China!” from Bremner’s book. The brand new school and playground of Albion Road were used to take the photographs.

In 1909 it was the turn of an American deputation to visit Albion Road and the subsequent report by Corliss Fitz Randolph of the Newark Board of Education has a very rare photograph of an infant pupil’s drawing on a slate.

“Burns’ Cottage”, a specimen of chalk drawing work on slate by an infant aged 6 at Albion Road School in 1909, from “A Report of a Visit to European Schools” by Corliss Fitz Randolph of the Newark Board of Education

As was standard practice at the time, when “infants” became “juveniles” on reaching the age of seven, the sexes were strictly segregated within the school. To this end there were separate playgrounds and entrances for the boys, for the girls and for infants. Within the building itself the stairs that gave access up to the juvenile department were segregated for boys and girls, each having their own route, and there were railings to separate them wherever their paths might cross.

When war broke out in 1914, Albion Road was one of a number of Edinburgh schools that were requisitioned by the War Office for use by the Territorial Army. It was returned to the School Board in 1918, the year that a new Education Act for Scotland totally re-organised the system. One of the major changes was replacing the thousand-odd School Boards with a much smaller number of combined Education Authorities. The new Edinburgh Education Authority replaced the ESB and also subsumed the Boards of Leith and other neighbouring parishes. This resolved the silly boundary situation and just two years after later the Edinburgh Boundaries Extension and Tramways Act 1920 forcefully absorbed the entire Burgh of Leith into its dominant, neighbouring city. Amongst the photographs taken to illustrate the amalgamation bill was one of Albion Road School, helpfully annotated with a line down the middle of the east gable to show which half was in which municipality. But for long afterwards teachers would specify which side of the line they were teaching on. They joked that they might be teaching in Edinburgh in the morning and Leith in the afternoon on account of moving to a classroom on the opposite side of the corridor.

Official photograph taken to support the Edinburgh Boundaries Extension and Tramways Act 1920 which subsumed Leith (and other surrounding parishes) into Edinburgh. This highlights the rather ridiculous nature of the municipal boundary cutting through the middle of a school which served only one side of the line. © Edinburgh City Archives

Despite these simplifications of the school’s administrative status, a fundamental drawback remained – the difficulty in accessing it from the south and the east. This was not finally solved until 1929 with the opening of Hawkhill Avenue, connecting Easter Road to the vast new council housing estates of Lochend, and of the Crawford Footbridge that crossed the railway between Bothwell Street and Albion Terrace. This latter structure was named for Labour Councillor Gerald W. Crawford, who had been elected in 1926 on a campaign promise to have the link constructed and who had been its main champion within the Town Council.

Bartholomew Post Office map of Edinburgh and Leith, 1932. Hawkhill Avenue towards the top connects Albion Road to the vast new housing estates of Lochend to the east (right). The Crawford Footbridge is the thin line between Albion Terrace and Bothwell Street, crossing the railway and making the school far easier to reach from Abbeyhill to the south (bottom). The red line is the old Edinburgh and Leith municipal boundary, by now a council ward boundary. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

This improved connectivity greatly increased the school’s catchment, a change that prompted the transfer of the Lorne Street Commercial Institute from that school to Albion Road. For a small fee (partly refunded for perfect attendance and passing certain grades) this taught night classes for children over the school leaving age. These were both general and vocational, the beginnings of further education aimed at improving students’ workplace opportunities. The advert below details the classes that were on offer in 1930. A Continuation School was also opened, providing more specialised day education for children over the age of eleven – the very beginnings of mass Secondary Education. Up until this point they would have remained in the Advanced Divisions of their elementary school. The evening Commercial Institute lasted until the 1957-58 term, by which time improvements in secondary education and the opening of purpose-built further education colleges made it surplus to requirements and it was discontinued.

Advert for Edinburgh Corporation’s Evening Commercial Institutes, The Scotsman, 6th September 1930

The boys of Albion Road enjoyed particular success on the football field in the 1920s and ’30s and repeatedly won the Inspector’s Cup and the School Board Cup, the two most prestigious trophies contested for by Edinburgh primary schools. They won the Board Cup in 1927 (beating Broughton 1-0), 1928 (beating North Merchiston 1-0) and 1935 (beating North Merchiston 3-1). The Inspector’s Cup was won in 1930, beating North Merchiston 4-1 and thrashing Portobello’s Tower Bank 10-0 in the semi-final. They were also losing finalists in 1929 and 1932 in this cup, going down 2-0 to Gorgie and 2-1 to North Merchiston respectively.

Albion Road school football team, class of 1926-30. This team won both the School Board Cup (1928) and the Inspector’s Cup (1930). The boys are, left to right: front row; D. Cossar, T. Brough, J. Mowat. Middle row; A. Bryce, W. Paterson, P. Armstrong, A. Souness, R. Milne. Back row; A. Gow, A. Stewart, C. Snell. Photo credit Alex Gow (picture), with permission of Norton Park CIC.

With the opening of the Continuation School and expansion of the catchment to serve the new Lochend housing area, the roll inevitably increased. To accommodate this, in 1930 a new gymnasium block was built in the playground to the rear of the school (it can be seen in the aerial photo further down the post). This allowed the internal central halls of the school to be dedicated to use for assemblies and as teaching spaces. At this time the headmaster of four years, John Fraser, chose to take early retirement and was replaced by Alexander Doull of Granton School who in turn was succeeded by John Lumsden.

A class at Albion Road, undated but from the style of haircuts and some of the fashion thought to be from the early 1930s. With permission of Norton Park CIC

The school changed again in 1935 on the occasion of its elevation to Albion Road Intermediate School, with alterations made by the City Architect Ebenezer J. Macrae at a cost of £12,874. This relatively new class of institution was defined by the Scotch Education Department as providing “at least a three years’ course of instruction in languages, mathematics, science and such other subjects as may from time to time be deemed suitable for pupils who, on entering, have reached the stage of attainment in elementary subjects.” This was the next logical step on from the Continuation School towards universal secondary education in Scotland and centralised the teaching of pupils aged between twelve to fifteen in a dedicated, specialised school. These were the children who had not passed the Qually, the Qualification Examination that all sat at the age of eleven and whose outcome streamed their educational future. The Intermediate School absorbed the function of the Continuation School and also some specialised Technical and Commercial Schools that had been instituted. Its students were streamed into Technical (boys only), Domestic (girls only) and Commercial (boys and girls) classes. These were aimed at improving student’s vocational skills in those fields, preparing them for entering the blue-collar or clerical workforce on reaching leaving age (or for most of the girls, marriage, motherhood and domestic labour). This change meant that primary-aged pupils (4 to 11) were dispersed to other nearby schools.

Albion Road girls’ “Qualifying Class” (11-year olds) in 1929. At this time, passing the Qualification Examination gave the chance to attend a Higher Grade School, something not all who passed could afford to do. Most stayed on in Advanced Divisions at Albion Road until leaving age until the Continuation School began in 1930, replaced by the Intermediate School in 1935. CC-by-NC-SA Thelma via Edinburgh Collected, Donor 0048-008

In 1939 there was a further reorganisation of education in Scotland and a new title was conferred; Norton Park Junior Secondary. This nominal change was in preparation for the leaving age being raised to fifteen and the “minimum sentence” of students being extended three to four years. For a few students who showed academic promise despite the system’s best attempts to stamp it out of them, there was the opportunity to stay on beyond that (should their family not need them to leave school and get a job) and get more advanced qualifications. But still however the Junior Secondary offered little more real educational prospects for most children than the Intermediate School had when compared with the High Schools of Broughton or Boroughmuir or of Leith Academy and Trinity Academy. For many pupils, the experience of this former class of schools was not a pleasant one. The state had decided that their educational future should be limited and with it their prospects in life – at the age of just 11. In “Scots at School: An Anthology” former pupil Eddie Mathieson recounted his time at Albion Road:

…that’s when the horror began for me. The teachers were tougher, harder and more prone to use the belt! I have no happy memories at all about that school…
The woodwork teacher hated me, of course, and I hated him. He used to throw lumps of wood at me for talkin’ when I should have been workin’, or puttin’ a chisel down in the wrong way or whatever. He always had a lot of wee bits of wood on his desk and he was a dead shot! He would get you on the skull wi’ this wee lump o’ wood. I hated joinery work…
All I ever thought about was getting’ away from school! That was all that was in my mind. I left school, I think it was a month or two before I was fourteen. I couldn’t get out of the door quick enough.
Eddie Mathieson, quoted in “Scots at School: An Anthology” from “Voices from War. Personal Recollections of War in Our Century by Scottish Men and Women” by Ian MacDougall, 1995

Despite the prevalance of such didactic sadists there were always however glimmers of light; those educators who were quite the opposite. One headmaster in particular, Richard Borthwick, was particularly progressively-minded. He began publication of a school magazine to try better communicate with parents. In 1948 he instituted Mother’s Days, opening the school up one day each week so mothers could observe their children at work. The success of these days lead to an annual Father’s Night beginning in 1951 (it being assumed that all men would be at work during the day). Another such man was Dr James T. R. Ritchie, Jim to his friends and Doccy Ritchie to his students. He was a newly-minted teacher with a PhD in chemistry when he joined Albion Road in 1936 to teach maths and science to reluctant eleven-to-fourteen year olds. A former pupil of his, Donna Ford, wrote fondly of him in her harrowing childhood memoir, recounting:

James Ritchie was an incredibly kind man. By the time I reached Norton Park, I had suffered years of abuse and degradation. I didn’t trust teachers – none of them had ever done anything for me in the past, and they all seemed to walk around with their eyes closed – but this one was different… each time I had a science class with James Ritchie, he made me feel as if I was so important, the centre of the world at the moment he spoke to me.
Dr Ritchie was always interested if I had a rhyme to tell him, or a game to explain. He made me think that these things were important too. Looking back at the work he has left as his mark on history, I can see that he must have made many children feel this way. His books are full of the joys of childhood, the innocent pleasures children enjoy when they are left alone to play and sing.
Donna Ford, writing in “The Step Child: A True Story”

Her recollection of Ritchie’s interest in rhymes and games was on account of this being his real passion in life. Writing later in life, he recalled:

One morning… I was teaching science in Leith, and finding the response on this occasion not very lively, I asked “Then what do you like doing?” The class answered: “We like playing games.” “What games?” They told me, and I began there and then to write them down… From then on I collected every sort of rhyme or playing jingle and my collection grew.
James Ritchie, writing in 1965, quoted in “Golden City: Scottish Children’s Street Games & Songs”, Mercat Press, 1999

Through his painstaking cataloguing of them from the pupils of Norton Park, Ritchie would go on to become an acknowledged expert in the games, rhymes and songs of children. He published two important books on the subject, The Singing Street and Golden City, and in 1951 with Raymond Townsend and Nigel McIssac – two colleagues from the art department – he formed The Norton Park Group. The trio went to work making short films with their pupils, inspired by them at work and play. The most successful and widely known of these was their second effort, their first with sound, the fondly remembered The Singing Street, which you can read all about in this thread.

Chalked titles, The Singing Street, © NLS Moving Image Archive

On April 1st 1947, the minimum school leaving age in Scotland was finally raised to fifteen, meaning that at a stroke Junior Secondary school rolls increased by a third. To provide more space in the main building and better facilities for art and technical instruction, in 1950 an annexe was acquired nearby on Hawkhill Avenue. This was the former printworks of football pools company Thomas Strang. £10,000 was spent on conversion but the building was in a poor state of repair and the roof leaked when it rained. The facility was shared with the nearby St Anthony’s R. C. Junior Secondary, a school also in dire need of more space and better facilities.

Norton Park Junior Secondary (highlighted yellow), with the 1930 gymnasium to its rear. Highlighted in green is the Hakwhill Printworks on Hawkhill Road, which would be acquired as an annexe in 1950. This 1949 photo shows this was a densely industrial area at the time with a number of busy railways running through it. The large building above the annexe was a maltings for Robert Younger’s brewery at Abbeyhill. Picture via Britainfromabove, SAW024457

The painting of a mural by pupils in the art rooms in this annexe was documented in the Norton Park Group’s 1951 debut short film Happy Weekend. Inspired by their classwork, the film ends with the children graffitiing the outside of the annexe with a mural of their own, before being chased away by their teacher and running off down St Clair Road. The leaky roof of the art classroom was made light of in the film – the teacher standing on a chair to place a piece of wood to protect the wet paint of the mural from the water running down the walls, while a pupil holds an umbrella over his head.

In 1947 Norton Park was one of two schools selected to be the first in Scotland to offer something revolutionary: formal sex education. These experimental classes were led by Miss Annabelle P. Duncan, a qualified midwife in the employ of pro-chastity organisation the Scottish Alliance of Honour. James B. Frizell, the city’s Director of Education, wrote that “sex instruction is best dealt with by competent teachers of biology and from a comparative and evolutionary standpoint“, i.e. in a clinical, scientific, matter-of-fact manner. This pilot was in advance of a national conference on the topic to be held in 1949, with Albion Road acting as the case study for the urban population and schools in Aberdeenshire for the rural. Over a period of three weeks in May and June, Miss Duncan lectured girls between the ages of twelve and fifteen on the subject of the “birds and the bees“. There were three lectures in the series:

General health, physical well-being and personal cleanliness. “The body is a complex machine which needs every care if it is to run smoothly and efficiently“.
“The Act of Growing Up“, illustrated with a comic strip for younger girls and a film entitled “Men and Women” for those older. This covered reproduction from a biological point of view, menstruation, behaviour towards the opposite sex and chastity and moral purity. “The sex function is a wonderful thing, possession to be jealously guarded“.
A question and answer session, where girls could anonymously submit questions on the topic “to deal with sex matters in general” to be answered by Miss Duncan.

The experiment was such a success that it was repeated the following year and altered and adapted to include the boys, who had a section on “the menace of venereal diseases” added to their syllabus. The headmaster and four male teachers gave them their lessons while one of the art teachers “specially prepared” the instructive diagrams.

In 1944 the school roll had been around 460, which was particularly low – the equivalent schools of Darroch had 550 and James Clark had almost 900. By 1956 however the raising of the school age and post-war baby boom had altered the city’s demographics such that a “bulge” in pupil numbers at junior secondaries was now imminent. Improvements were once again made to cope, with £9,350 spent on sanitary and heating improvements. These included a new multi-storey toilet block adjacent to the building’s eastern stairwell (a structure described by Atkins as “ugly and cheaply-built“). Headmaster Borthwick had left the school in 1952 to take on the position of rector at Leith Academy. He was replaced in turn by Hugh Tannahill (left in 1956 for Gracemount), D. P. Hendrill and from 1959, William A. Maclean.

Evening News photograph of a performance of “The Water Babies” being given by students of Norton Park on 25th June 1956 at the Church of Scotland’s Gateway Theatre on Elm Row.

An unusual new subject was introduced in the 1957-58 term: Gaelic language. While it had been offered as an evening class since way back in 1908 at Gilmore Place Public School (later Darroch Junior Secondary), this was the first time it had been offered as a part of the secondary curriculum in the city and was only the third lowland school to do so. This was proposed by Director of Education Frizell as an experimental class with a view to making it more widely available in other city secondaries. Norton Park was chosen over the more academic Boroughmuir as the Director felt the latter school should remain focussed on subjects specific to the Higher Leaving Certificate. The course would concentrate on the spoken language and also a study of Highland and Island life, culture, heritage and geography. Bh-uas Murdag Nic Choinnich (Miss Murdina Mackenzie), a native of Knock in Lewis, was appointed as teacher. She was the only qualified candidate in the city and had the previous year taken over the evening classes at Darroch. A classroom was dedicated, with photographic and pictorial materials collected to give it “a suitable Highland atmosphere.” In the first year, 12 girls were taught, expanded to a mixed class of 30 girls and boys the following. Sixteen pupils entered the Edinburgh Mòd in 1959 and “received high praise for their Gaelic“, An Comunn Gàidhealach sending the class an honorary prize of five Pounds with which to buy dictionaries. In June 1961, after three years of study, twenty seven students were put forward to sit examination, of whom seventeen passed. A ceilidh was held in the school to celebrate, reported in the Stornoway Gazette by their Edinburgh correspondent to have been the first ever held in an Edinburgh school. Prizes were awarded in the subject the following year to Margaret Skivington, Margaret Aberdour, Irene Mackenzie, Patricia Maclaren, Joyce Gibson and Andrina Hamilton.

28th June 1961, a ceilidh is held at Norton Park School to celebrate the success of the Gaelic class in that years examinations. The school’s principal teacher of music, Mr Andrew D. Millar, is at the piano as some of the girls sing a Gaelic song.

On 7th April 1961 the Annexe on Hawkhill Avenue was badly damaged by fire, with £12,000 of damage being caused. Two youths were arrested and charged with fire raising the following week.

Norton Park Sports Day, 1959. Credit: TSPL via Scran, DP620440

The schools future was first called in to question in 1962 by Dr George Reith, the new Director of Education. He contended that such Junior Secondaries – old, adapted primary schools with facilities scattered across annexes of dubious quality – should only be regarded as temporary and were “impossible to adapt“. In short, they needed to be replaced. This was against a backdrop of planning for another raise in the school leaving age to sixteen and a continuing, healthy post-war birthrate. Between 1955 and 1970, the total secondary school roll in Edinburgh increased from 14,520 to almost 25,000, putting huge pressure on some schools. However as a result of inner-city depopulation this growth did not extend to places like Norton Park and by 1969 the roll was a mere 280. When the city started to move from the old two-tier secondary system to a comprehensive one in 1970, the writing was on the wall. The city took this juncture as an opportunity to “rid” itself of as many of its old Junior Secondaries as possible. Norton Park was closed with little ceremony at the end of the 1972-73 term.

Norton Park Junior Secondary, class of 1960-63. Credit Alex Jackson, CC-NC-by-SA via Edinburgh Collected.

In its time a number of children would pass through the school who went on to become weel kent names. Lewis Goram, father of Hibs and Scotland goalkeeping legend Andy, was born and raised on Albion Road and attended the school. A talented goalkeeper in his own right, he played with Hibs for a while. Another Hibee was Alex Cropley, who in 1971 became one of two English-born players who were the first to turn out for the Scottish national squad (the other being Bob Wilson, best known as a 1980s and ’90s TV stalwart and sports anchorman). In the world of show-business, stage comedian and actor Alex “Happy” Howden was another former pupil. He had actually passed the qualification exam for Leith Academy but quickly got himself expelled and demoted to Norton Park. Here he claimed he was happier as he was back amongst his friends, they played football instead of rugby, and he had more time to devote to his real calling in life: making everyone around him laugh.

Lewis Goram, right in the goalkeeper’s jumpert, at Bury. In 1951 with George Griffiths.

But even after closure there was an educational future for Norton Park. To accommodate the systemic reconfiguration of secondary education in Leith it had been planned that in the early 1970s two new comprehensive high schools would be built, one at Bangholm (adjacent to Trinity Academy) and the other at Hawkhill sports fields. Neither of these were ever built and Leith would limp on for decades with a hodge-podge of inherited and re-purposed buildings at Trinity and Leith Academies. The latter was given the former Lochend Road and Norton Park schools and had to muddle on as best it could. Although its main building on Duke Street was overcrowded, these donated annexes were in such poor condition that they were never used to their full capacity. Lochend Road was at least just over the road, the three-quarter mile walk to Norton Park was a double disincentive for its use. It was largely relegated to use as exam halls and given up entirely in 1988. The new Leith Academy on the Quarryholes site would finally be completed in May 1991 after a determined local campaign for a modern, purpose-built high school for Leith that had lasted over a decade .

Lothian Regional Council, Norton Park’s owners since local government reform in 1975, now left it to a couple of eccentric departments. These included a workshop for the repair of the metal and woodworking tools across their school estate, another in the former gym hall for its pianos (which included a resident Wurlitzer organ) and the “Renfrew Library“, which collected and sorted surplus textbooks for distribution to third world countries. In July 1989 part of the site was offered for sale to neighbouring Hibernian F.C. for £140,000. Hibs were planning at this time to redevelop their Easter Road stadium and needed additional land and office capacity. This deal fell through on account of their precarious financial situation. This became so serious that it pushed them to the very point of considering a merger with city rivals Hearts and a move to a joint stadium. Ultimately they – and Easter Road stadium – would be saved by a vigorous fan campaign and rescue by Sir Tom Farmer.

Norton Park before its renovation, view from the end of Albion Terrace. Picture credit and with kind permission of Richard Atkins.

Around this time, the Regional Council established a working group to review the availability of suitable office accommodation for voluntary organisations within Edinburgh. They suggested that one of a number of their vacant school buildings might be a suitable blank canvas for conversion to meet this need. The concept was to provide high-quality, low-cost office accommodation for charitable sector tenants while increasing the building’s accessibility and greatly reducing its running costs and environmental footprint. Norton Park was selected and would become something of a case study in re-purposing a traditional building in an environmentally sustainable manner. The Albion Trust was formed with funding from the Tudor Trust (one of the UK’s largest independent grant-making trusts) to take this project forward. The building was transferred to them in 1995 and Richard Atkins of Burnett Pollock Associates was appointed as lead architect. Work would take three years to complete with project funding coming from nine different public and private sources (the National Lottery Charities Board, National Lottery Heritage Fund, Historic Scotland, Lothian & Edinburgh Enterprise Ltd., City of Edinburgh Council Urban Aid, TSB Foundation for Scotland, Scottish Office Social Work Services Group, Esmée Fairbairn Trust and Dulverton Trust.)

New accessible entrance added at Norton Park. This has since been replaced by an entrance to the rear of the building. Picture credit and with kind permission of Richard Atkins.

Given the building was listed, external alterations were minimal and the stonework and roof were repaired to conservation standards. The opportunity was also taken to remedy some slight defects in the original construction to increase roof ventilation, improve guttering and deal with masonry that had allowed water ingress. Internally, given the desire to undertake restoration in the most environmentally efficient manner, a painstaking effort was made to reuse as many of the original fixtures and fittings as possible. Anything that couldn’t be reused was reclaimed by an architectural salvage yard. To allow for full internal insulation, all lath and plaster was stripped out and a thick layer of mineral wool added. This had the added benefit of allowing every piece of potentially rotten structural timber to be identified and replaced, meaning no preventative chemical wood treatments were needed internally. Secondary double glazing was added to all the external windows and a modern, multi-zone heating system fed by efficient gas boilers replaced a creaking old cast-iron, oil-fired system. A solar slate system was incorporated into the roof to preheat the boiler feedwater. These features all combined to greatly reduced the building’s energy demand for heating by almost two thirds, with consequential reductions in its running costs. Also within the roofspace, a specially commissioned grey water system was installed – with a large rainwater retention tank and sterilisation system to use it for flushing toilets – and six bat nesting boxes. The external lighting even specified special lightbulbs to attract insects as a foodsource for these flying residents.

Before and after inside Norton Park. Dark walls and Corporation linoleum floors lit by buzzing fluorescent tubes replaced with bright paint, high-quality carpets and lighting specified to reduce “sick building syndrome”. Picture credit and with kind permission of Richard Atkins.

Internally, the former classroom spaces were converted into self-contained office spaces to suit tenants of all sizes, from a single desk up to seventy or more. To make the best use of the vast Edwardian ceiling heights, each room was given a new mezzanine level. This increased net capacity by 25%, proportionately reducing energy costs and rent per metre floorspace. It also allowed sub-division of workspaces to suit client needs. A new lift system, step-free entrances and automatic doors and disabled toilets and showers on all floors meant the building (with the exception of the mezzanines, although these were designed to accept stairlifts) was fully accessible. A new mechanical ventilation system meant that the air within office spaces was constantly refreshed and a built-in heat exchange system recovered waste heat.

One of the new office spaces with its mezzanine level. Attention to detail meant that even the trunking for power and network cabling was in a material called Econet, a formalehyde-free MDF. Picture credit and with kind permission of Richard Atkins.

Since it opened in mid-1998, the Norton Park Centre has consistently been fully let, with a waiting list. Richard Atkins describes it as “seen as a centre of excellence for the voluntary sector“. Even after the reduced nature of its rents are factored in, all that up-front effort made to reduce the building’s running costs has meant that the institution is self-financing institution and has built up a sinking fund to keep on top of caring for a historic building. This is ever-more important in a funding environment for the third sector that makes grants and funding ever harder to come buy and to depend on. It has also allowed for the acquisition of the neighbouring former Lockhart Memorial Church and St Mungo’s Church Halls next door, for use as a meeting and conference centre. It is all a far cry from a school that was long written off and forgotten about by the authorities.

(Temporary) Footnote. If you would like to visit the former Albion Road / Norton Park School then you can do so on 26th September 2026 as part of Doors Open Day. The film The Singing Street, as produced in the school by the Norton Park Group and its children will be on show in their community cinema, and at 12 Noon there will be a screening followed by a short talk on the subject by yours truly. You can also catch the film and the same talk the previous weekend at 10AM at Abbeyhill Primary School, around which much of it was filmed back in 1951, in association with Colony of Artists. Both venues are free and un-ticketed but capacity is limited so arrive early if you want to avoid missing out – Colony of Artists have the school open from 930AM and Norton Park is open from 10AM.

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