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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?

Smokey Brae street sign in 2023. Photo © Self

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.

The eastern end of St. Margaret’s Depot, with the houses of Smokey Brae in the background.

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.

Piershill Housing, Edinburgh, John Harper Campbell, 1951. © Edinburgh City Libraries

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.

1893 OS Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

1944 OS Town Plan showing the Piershill Housing Scheme next to St. Margaret’s Depot. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

Ebenezer J. Macrae’s “Masterpiece” – Piershill Square West. CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell

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.

“Black-out” at Piershill. Housewives and the Soot Menace. Evening News, 23/10/39

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.

Picture from Piershill flats towards St. Margaret’s Depot from the Evening News, 23/10/39

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.

B1 61404 at the St. Marharet’s ash pits, 27/3/65 . Brian J. Dickson, Steam Finale Scotland

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.

Nelson’s Column in December. Foggy Day in December 1952. CC-by-SA 2.0 N. T. Stobbs.

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.

“To Take the Reek from Auld Reekie”. Scotsman 22/4/54

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.

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

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.

“PROGRESS”. A poster optimistically heralding the ultimately badly flawed Modernisation Plan, with a bold new diesel locomotive replacing a rust steam engine alongside.

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.

St Margarets Locomotive Depot, Dock Tank 8334, 13 August 1948. CC-by-SA 2.0 Ben Brooksbank

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.

J36 0-6-0 No. 65234 at St Margaret’s shed, Easter 1967 CC-by-SA 3.0 8474tim

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.

Stoorie Brae, a common place in the Oor Wullie universe.

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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 #Health #Houses #Housing #JockSLodge #Meadowbank #pollution #PublicHealth #publicHousing #Railway #Railways #Restalrig #StMargaretsDepot #Toponymy

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.

The eastern end of St. Margaret’s Depot, with the houses of Smokey Brae in the background.

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.

Piershill Housing, Edinburgh, John Harper Campbell, 1951. © Edinburgh City Libraries

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.

1893 and 1944 OS Town Plans. Move the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

Ebenezer J. Macrae’s “Masterpiece” – Piershill Square West. CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell

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.

Smokey Brae street sign in 2023. Photo © Self

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.

“Black-out” at Piershill. Housewives and the Soot Menace. Evening News, 23/10/39

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.

Picture from Piershill flats towards St. Margaret’s Depot from the Evening News, 23/10/39

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.

B1 61404 at the St. Marharet’s ash pits, 27/3/65 . Brian J. Dickson, Steam Finale Scotland

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.

Nelson’s Column in December. Foggy Day in December 1952. CC-by-SA 2.0 N. T. Stobbs.

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.

“To Take the Reek from Auld Reekie”. Scotsman 22/4/54

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.

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

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.

“PROGRESS”. A poster optimistically heralding the ultimately badly flawed Modernisation Plan, with a bold new diesel locomotive replacing a rust steam engine alongside.

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.

St Margarets Locomotive Depot, Dock Tank 8334, 13 August 1948. CC-by-SA 2.0 Ben Brooksbank

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.

J36 0-6-0 No. 65234 at St Margaret’s shed, Easter 1967 CC-by-SA 3.0 8474tim

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.

Stoorie Brae, a common place in the Oor Wullie universe.

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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.

#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret

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?

Smokey Brae street sign in 2023. Photo © Self

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.

The eastern end of St. Margaret’s Depot, with the houses of Smokey Brae in the background.

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.

Piershill Housing, Edinburgh, John Harper Campbell, 1951. © Edinburgh City Libraries

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.

1893 OS Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

1944 OS Town Plan showing the Piershill Housing Scheme next to St. Margaret’s Depot. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

Ebenezer J. Macrae’s “Masterpiece” – Piershill Square West. CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell

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.

“Black-out” at Piershill. Housewives and the Soot Menace. Evening News, 23/10/39

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.

Picture from Piershill flats towards St. Margaret’s Depot from the Evening News, 23/10/39

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.

B1 61404 at the St. Marharet’s ash pits, 27/3/65 . Brian J. Dickson, Steam Finale Scotland

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.

Nelson’s Column in December. Foggy Day in December 1952. CC-by-SA 2.0 N. T. Stobbs.

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.

“To Take the Reek from Auld Reekie”. Scotsman 22/4/54

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.

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

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.

“PROGRESS”. A poster optimistically heralding the ultimately badly flawed Modernisation Plan, with a bold new diesel locomotive replacing a rust steam engine alongside.

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.

St Margarets Locomotive Depot, Dock Tank 8334, 13 August 1948. CC-by-SA 2.0 Ben Brooksbank

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.

J36 0-6-0 No. 65234 at St Margaret’s shed, Easter 1967 CC-by-SA 3.0 8474tim

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.

Stoorie Brae, a common place in the Oor Wullie universe.

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 #Health #Houses #Housing #JockSLodge #Meadowbank #pollution #PublicHealth #publicHousing #Railway #Railways #Restalrig #StMargaretsDepot #Toponymy

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?

Smokey Brae street sign in 2023. Photo © Self

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.

The eastern end of St. Margaret’s Depot, with the houses of Smokey Brae in the background.

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.

Piershill Housing, Edinburgh, John Harper Campbell, 1951. © Edinburgh City Libraries

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.

1893 OS Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

1944 OS Town Plan showing the Piershill Housing Scheme next to St. Margaret’s Depot. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

Ebenezer J. Macrae’s “Masterpiece” – Piershill Square West. CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell

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.

“Black-out” at Piershill. Housewives and the Soot Menace. Evening News, 23/10/39

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.

Picture from Piershill flats towards St. Margaret’s Depot from the Evening News, 23/10/39

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.

B1 61404 at the St. Marharet’s ash pits, 27/3/65 . Brian J. Dickson, Steam Finale Scotland

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.

Nelson’s Column in December. Foggy Day in December 1952. CC-by-SA 2.0 N. T. Stobbs.

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.

“To Take the Reek from Auld Reekie”. Scotsman 22/4/54

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.

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

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.

“PROGRESS”. A poster optimistically heralding the ultimately badly flawed Modernisation Plan, with a bold new diesel locomotive replacing a rust steam engine alongside.

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.

St Margarets Locomotive Depot, Dock Tank 8334, 13 August 1948. CC-by-SA 2.0 Ben Brooksbank

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.

J36 0-6-0 No. 65234 at St Margaret’s shed, Easter 1967 CC-by-SA 3.0 8474tim

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.

Stoorie Brae, a common place in the Oor Wullie universe.

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 #Health #Houses #Housing #JockSLodge #Meadowbank #pollution #PublicHealth #publicHousing #Railway #Railways #Restalrig #StMargaretsDepot #Toponymy

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?

Smokey Brae street sign in 2023. Photo © Self

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.

The eastern end of St. Margaret’s Depot, with the houses of Smokey Brae in the background.

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.

Piershill Housing, Edinburgh, John Harper Campbell, 1951. © Edinburgh City Libraries

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.

1893 OS Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

1944 OS Town Plan showing the Piershill Housing Scheme next to St. Margaret’s Depot. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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.

Ebenezer J. Macrae’s “Masterpiece” – Piershill Square West. CC-by-SA 2.0, Tom Parnell

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.

“Black-out” at Piershill. Housewives and the Soot Menace. Evening News, 23/10/39

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.

Picture from Piershill flats towards St. Margaret’s Depot from the Evening News, 23/10/39

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.

B1 61404 at the St. Marharet’s ash pits, 27/3/65 . Brian J. Dickson, Steam Finale Scotland

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.

Nelson’s Column in December. Foggy Day in December 1952. CC-by-SA 2.0 N. T. Stobbs.

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.

“To Take the Reek from Auld Reekie”. Scotsman 22/4/54

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.

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

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.

“PROGRESS”. A poster optimistically heralding the ultimately badly flawed Modernisation Plan, with a bold new diesel locomotive replacing a rust steam engine alongside.

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.

St Margarets Locomotive Depot, Dock Tank 8334, 13 August 1948. CC-by-SA 2.0 Ben Brooksbank

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.

J36 0-6-0 No. 65234 at St Margaret’s shed, Easter 1967 CC-by-SA 3.0 8474tim

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.

Stoorie Brae, a common place in the Oor Wullie universe.

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#CouncilHousing #Health #Houses #Housing #JockSLodge #Meadowbank #pollution #PublicHealth #publicHousing #Railway #Railways #Restalrig #StMargaretsDepot #Toponymy

Victoria Station: the thread abut a forgotten Royal rail halt you’ve probably never heard of

This thread was originally written and published in June 2020.

This is the sort of unexpected riddle that I like. You’re out for a walk and you see an old gateway that is rather too well made for the wall it sits in and doesn’t seem to lead anywhere.

Why is this gate so wide and why does it seem to go nowhere?Why is that gate pier so substantial and so well formed for something that leads nowhere?

Beyond the unimpressive wooden gate itself, there’s just a little wedge of grass and overgrowth beyond it, before it descends straight down towards the East Coast Mainline railway.

Incongruous walls and gates

So why is this old gate here? Well, if you rake around in the books and maps you’ll find out that this isn’t just any old railway access gate, this is an old Royal railway access gate. You see, these gate piers are all that remains of Queen Victoria’s personal, private railway station for when she was visiting Edinburgh and lodging in the Palace of Holyroodhouse. We can just see the station in the below photo taken looking east from “Muschet’s Cairn” in Holyrood Park in the 1880s; to the right of the tenement there is a projection, with a distant chimney above it. This is a covered walkway and an iron archway over the gate.

“Muschat’s Cairn, entrance to Holyrood Park”. Thomas Begbie, 1887,© Edinburgh City Libraries

Through the gateway, it was just a short royal stroll down a flight of steps to a private platform for the royal train. Here it could be met by one’s personal carriage so that one could be whisked the short distance away to the back gate of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, far from the prying eyes of the Edinburgh crowd.

OS 1849 Town plan showing “The Queen’s Station”, the platform and the gates. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

In 1850 The Scotsman reported that the Directors of the North British Railway were “in the course of erection” of a platform at Meadowbank for the Royal Train to stop at following its inaugural run over the Tweed on the Royal Border Bridge.

“The Queen, Prince Albert & the Royal Children departing in their Railway Carriage for Scotland”, 1850. CC-BY-NC National Galleries Scotland.

The newspaper described the new station was” to be tastefully ornamented for the occasion, there is to be a stair leading up to the old public road at Meadowbank, and distant only a few yards from the gate into Holyrood Park. Her Majesty’s private carriage will here be in waiting to receive her; so that, in the course of ten minutes are the arrival of the train, the Queen and the Royal Consort will, in all likelihood, be occupying the apartments that have been fitted up for their reception in Holyrood Palace.“ Fortunately for us, the London Illustrated News sent ahead an artist who was there to capture the scene and gives us the only known image of the station. Notice the crown atop the royal carriage.

London Illustrated News, 6th September 1852

For the Queen’s visit to Edinburgh in September 1852, the Scotsman went so far as to refer to the “Victoria Station at Meadowbank“. Ten horses and two royal private carriages were sent ahead from London to Edinburgh via York, arriving by the afternoon mail train for her Majesty’s personal use in travelling between Meadowbank and Holyrood. When the Queen arrived on September 1st, “The engine was beautifully decorated, having in front the words “God Save the Queen” in large gilt letters.” After the formalities were concluded with the greeting party, the Queen and Prince Albert ascended the stairs from the platform to their waiting carriages, where a guard of honour of the 7th Hussars from Piershill Barracks was waiting, their band striking up God Save the Queen.

The Royal Train behind the engine Albion for the journey to Scotland, 1850. CC-by-SA 4.0 Science Museum Group Collection, © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum

Once the royal party were officially in residence at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Royal Standard was run up the flagpole and the gunners of Edinburgh castle fired a salute. This was however their second of the day; a signal hoisted earlier in the morning from the Nelson Memorial on the top of Calton Hill to a London steamer approaching Leith had been misinterpreted and an over-enthusiastic garrison had fired the royal salute. This created a minor panic amongst the dignitaries, railway officials and spectators of the city who suddenly feared that the Queen had arrived and nobody was there to greet her. One can only imagine the pandemonium until the railway telegraph office located the royal train outside Dunbar.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert are shown onto a Royal carriage by George Hudson, a London Illustrated News image

For the 1860 visit, a description is given of how the station was decorated for such visits. “The stair leading from the platform to the road was covered with an awning of white and pink calico, and the recesses on either side contained a neatly arranged assortment of flowers, evergreens and heather. The stair-case was covered with a merled carpet, with a stripe of Stuart tartan in the centre“.

As far as is known, there was only one occasion when a regular passenger train stopped here; on August 22nd 1872 a London to Edinburgh express was temporarily halted to allow some of Queen Victoria’s children to disembark. The last use of the station was for the Royal visit to Scotland in 1881. Even the Victorians realised stopping trains on the mainline into Edinburgh from London just a mile shy of the final destination for Royal purposes wasn’t the best use of the railway. The practice of also loading wagons onto the back of the royal train carrying state coaches and horses incurred further delays, as these had to be brought down the line from North Bridge Station (what would later become Waverley).

In 1882, an irate letter was written to the green ink page of the Scotsman to complain that the Town Council were now using the platform as a collection point for the “ashes and dirt” of one quarter of the city before its onwards transport by rail for disposal. The station was only “open” for 31 years – and even then it was used only once or twice a year – but those gate piers have survived 141 years longer than that. There’s a planning application out though to build on this gushet*, so catch them while you still can. (* = gushet is a Scots term for a triangular portion of land). The same stretch of wall has another (unresolved) little secret too. The ghost of a small building that I can’t quite unravel. It looks like two wall ends (green) with the back of a fireplace or window (yellow) in between.

What have we here?

If there was something here, it’s missing from the 1817 and 1849 town plans, so either is older than both or came and went in between. The boundary wall pre-dates the railway and this road was widened on a number of occasions starting with the Royal Visit of George IV in 1822. No structure is marked but this could have been a gardener’s bothy removed when the road was widened.

Kirkwood’s 1817 Town plan showing the location where there was at one time a lean-too structure built into the wall. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret

The thread about the history of Jock’s Lodge; just who was “Jock”?

It’s a Friday, so let’s start the day with an animated image transition to visualise a bit of local history. The view below shows Jock’s Lodge toll house in the mid-late 19th century, looking east down the Portobello Road at the junction with Willowbrae.

#NowAndThen transition of old Jock’s Lodge, looking east.

The original image here is from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant, which was published 1885. The toll house is in the middle of the image, you can see the barriers, one on each side of the cottage opened against its walls and another on the left side of the road.

Jock’s Lodge toll house from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant

Other features we can see are what was the Jock’s Lodge Tavern (for now, The Willow), with a cavalryman from Piershill Barracks standing outside. The belfry behind belongs to the barracks’ chapel.

A cavalry trooper stands outside the Jock’s Lodge Tavern, with the belfry of the barracks chapel behind him.

Another cavalryman is in the foreground, the pillbox undress hats of the troopers suggest a date of 1870s or thereabouts. Behind him is the row of taverns and villas at Piershill that grew up around the barracks, and where many of the officers and their families would have lived. In the distance is a stagecoach.

A cavalryman on the Portobello Road, with a row of buildings beyond.

And on the right of the scene we can see a haycart approaching from the direction of Duddingston, a reminder that this part of Edinburgh was thoroughly rural and not even with the city’s administrative limits until the very end of the 19th century.

Haycart in front of a thatched byre. This is coming from the road to Duddingston, now known as Willowbrae

The 1876 OS Town Plan matches this view more or less exactly. The rounded western gable of the toll house, sitting in the middle of the road junction, the buildings beyond, the Jock’s Lodge public house on the left, the barracks and its chapel on the right.

1876 OS Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

There had long been a village here at it was about the only settlement of note on the King’s Highway between Edinburgh and Musselburgh. It was conveniently located at a road junction, where alternative routes east via either Easter Duddingston or the Figgate whins met a road to Restalrig Village. This village seems to have included in the 18th century stables, taverns, lodging houses and a brewery, exactly what you’d expect on a Georgian transport route. The area was long the haunt of highwaymen, one of the earliest recorded incidents being in 1692.

William Roy’s Lowland Map of Scotland, showing Jock’s Lodge on the route from Edinburgh (the red area on the left of the frame) to Musselburgh and on to Berwick. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

As for the toponymy – the meaning of the place name – Jock’s Lodge is mentioned back in the 1650s in Nicoll’s Diary as Jokis Ludge. Oliver Cromwell mustered the New Model Army infantry here in July 1650 before his failed assault on Leith. Other forms of the name were always plural; Joks, Jokes, Jocks and Jock’s. So who was Jock? Well Jock wasn’t one person, Jock was a whole lodge of persons. Specifically, the Jockies.

The Jockies were also known as King’s Bedesmen or Bluegowns; they were a class of Royally-appointed beggars, first licensed to beg by King James VI. They had a uniform of a licence badge and blue gown. Every birthday of the monarch each Bluegown received a new cloak, a tin badge with the motto “pass and repass“, a Scots shilling for every year of the monarch’s age and their dinner. David Allan, who painted lots of the city’s lower classes at work, has an illustration of a late 18th century Bluegown wearing his badge, begging at one of the city ports, the steeple of St. Giles’ in the background. Clearly an old soldier, he has lost a leg – possibly why he was accorded the “privilege” of his station.

David Allan, 1785ish, A Peg-Legged Beggar, with Donkey and Children, Asking a Lady for Alms Outside One of the City Gates

“Pass and repass” on the beggar’s badge referred to the holder being allowed to pass freely through the land, not being subject to local begging laws or charges of vagrancy.

1847 Bluegown’s badge, issued in the reign of Victoria. CC-BY-SA 3.0 Roy Oaks

The Bluegowns referred to themselves as Jockies and reputedly had a lodge house outside the city; the Jockies Lodge. I do not know of any further details or images of what this house may have looked like, or where exactly it was, but this 1818 sketch is the earliest view identified as being Jock’s Lodge that I could find.

Cottage at Jock’s Lodge, by Daniel Somerville, c. 1818. © Edinburgh City Libraries

A photo in the Book of the Old Edinburgh Club (vol. 23) shows the back of the toll house and a now-demolished villa beyond, which may have been the site of the Jockies Lodge. This house in turn was cleared away to widen the road to Restalrig, also known as Smokey Brae, in the 1930s.

Jock’s Lodge “as it used to be” an old photo, 1860s-80s of the lodge house and a villa beyond.

A thread about Jock’s Lodge cannot fail to mention Piershill (and indeed, already has!). Suffice to say that in 1794 a big cavalry barracks was built immediately to the east on the site of a house called Piershill. This illustration below was made in 1798 and it is almost certain that the prominent central block of the barracks, the officers’ mess and accommodation, was an extension of the original Piershill House.

Late 18th century illustration of Piershill Barracks, looking towards the Forth. From collection at Blickling Hall © National Trust/ Tania Adams

The origin of Piershill as a placename is lost to time, but it’s probably descriptive, something to do with willow trees, and nothing to do with a man named Piers or Pierre. The name is much older than the house which adopted it in the 1760s.

Piershill Barracks in 1894. The Officer’s Mess in the centre is likely partly comprised of the original Piershill House. © Edinburgh City Libraries

The barracks were demolished in the 1930s and replaced with two large U-shaped circuses of show-piece council housing by the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae. Much of the masonry from the barracks was re-cut and used in the façade dressing and as boundary walls of these houses. Macrae was a big fan of traditional Scottish building style and techniques and was not alone in Scottish City Architects of his time in persisting in the old ways, in the face of modernity, for a variety of reasons including job creation and the fact many of the tried and tested features performed their functions well in their native climate.

Piershill Housing, Edinburgh, John Harper Campbell, 1951. © Edinburgh City Libraries

If you wander down Smokey Brae towards Marionville Fire Station and Restalrig, you can still find the old back gate of the barracks.

Smokie Brae, former back gate and perimeter wall of Piershill BarracksSmokie Brae, former back gate and perimeter wall of Piershill Barracks“BACK GATE”“BACK GATE”

As if there was any doubt that this was from the Piershill barracks, if you look at an old photo of the main gate, the legend is a perfect match:

The main gate to Piershill Barracks © Edinburgh City Libraries

You can see this gate on old maps. The railway cut through the northern part of the barracks site in the 1840s, so rather than leave some of it marooned on the wrong side of the tracks, the North British Railway bought a parcel of land to the east of the barracks and transferred it to the government, to where the barracks’ riding school, stabling, grazing ground and hospital were relocated. In turn it kept the exclave to the north and built itself a gasworks here.

1849 OS Town Plan, showing the back gate of Piershill Barracks, with a slope up to the main parade ground level. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

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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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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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret

Misaligned: the thread about the origins of London Road

I would like this morning to deal with a troubling subject. Why does London Road have an almost imperceptible kink in it through Abbeyhill? And while we’re at it, why is Lower London Road even a thing?

London Road through Abbeyhill. Kinky.

Let’s start with a little bit of background on London Road, which we’ve also covered some of already in the thread about the Regent Road and why it had to be built. The name is obvious in its derivation; it was the route into and out of Edinburgh to the east, and therefore also the south and ultimately to London. It was planned at the turn of the 19th century with the eminent Robert “Lighthouse” Stevenson as the engineer. It was to be a centrepiece of the Calton (or Third) New Town, the final phase of expansion of Georgian Edinburgh, to provide a grand processional entrance into the city befitting its status as the “Athens of the North“.

The original plan for the grand entrance of the “Great London Road” into the city at Hillside. A certain artistic licence has been taken with the street width!

John Ainslie’s town plan of 1804 and Robert Kirkwood’s of 1817 show both the new planned road and also the old, narrow, winding approach to the city (marked below in red). From Jock’s Lodge, at the right of the map where Piershill Barracks was located, the old road ran past Meadowbank Tower (now Regent Park Terrace), crossing the East Foul Burn on the Clockmill Bridge, then along Spring Gardens to old Abbeyhill and then past the Water Yett to the Canongate.

Route into the city from the east at the turn of the 19th century, Kirkwood’s Town Plan of 1817. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

The new road bypassed all this. It was wide and straight from Jock’s Lodge, across Restalrig Irrigated Meadows and the East Foul Burn, passing through the lands of Fletcher Norton (Norton Park), turning slightly around the north side of the Calton Hill to join with Leith Walk just to the north of Greenside. From there the New Town could be approached along Queen Street or up Leith Street to Princes Street.

There was dissatisfaction with this proposed route however; the vistas it offered of the approach to the city were negligible due to the Calton Hill being in the way, and it terminated at Leith Street, again offering a very poor approach up to Princes Street. As a consequence, an alternative route, the Regent Road, branched off the London Road just north of Abbeyhill (present day Montrose Terrace) and climbed up the southern slopes of Calton Hill, crossing the Calton ravine on the Regent Bridge and connecting straight onto Princes Street at Waterloo Place. This allowed the route of the London Road to be bent slightly to the south, improving the vistas over it from Royal Terrace above.

W. H. Playfair’s Plan of the Third or Calton New Town, approved 1819. Orientation is south to the right and north to the left. Almost none of this would be built, apart from the sections on Calton Hill and parts around Greenside and Leith Walk.

In October 1818 it was announced in the Caledonian Mercury that the work to connect the new London Road with the Regent Road “near the pond on Baron Norton’s ground” was expected to begin within a few days. Through Meadowbank, where it crossed the Irrigated Meadows and the Foul Burn, it required substantial groundworks.

Robert Stevenson’s plan for the embankment, bridge over the East Foul Burn (River Tumble) and culverts for the Irrigated Meadows drains, 1816. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandThe embankment of the newly completed London Road can be seen crossing the Irrigated Meadows in this “View from the Door of Nelson’s Monument on the Calton Hill, looking to the East” Lady Mary Elton, 1823. © The Trustees of the British Museum

The 1849 Town Plan shows London Road between Easter Road and Jocks Lodge as wide and dead straight in the best traditions of Roman road building.

1849 Ordnance Survey Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

And this is the problem that has been bugging me. This is not the current alignment of London Road! Or is it? It is infact the the alignment of Lower London Road. Lower London Road, you see, is actually the original alignment of London Road as built by Robert Stevenson; really we should calling the modern bit of London Road here between Meadowbank and the foot of Montrose Terrace Upper London Road.

The original alignment of London Road fits perfectly with Lower London Road on the 1893 OS Town Plan. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

So how did that happen then? Why shift such a major road a few feet to the north? Did Robert Stevenson get the alignment wrong? The answer can be found if we look again at the map above, just to the left of the middle. Somebody (the North British Railway in fact) had decided to build a railway underneath it!

In the 1860s, tired of the impracticalities of running trains from Granton and Leith into the city centre up the Scotland Street tunnel, the NBR planned a diversion loop to avoid it. The Abbeyhill Diversion as it was known came off the existing North British mainline at Piershill Junction (for trains approaching from the east) and at Abbeyhill Junction (for trains coming from the west and what would become Waverley Station.) These two branches joined together before heading under Easter Road and Leith Walk and joining the existing alignments at Trinity. But to do this it had to squeeze under London Road (and those other two main streets of Easter Road and Leith Walk).

Existing North British Railway lines from Canal Street / General Station to the east and to Leith and Granton (olive green) and the new diversion lines in yellow.

The Edinburgh Town Council mandated that the widths and alignments of Easter Road and Leith Walk had to be maintained, but this was found not to be practical for London Road, so the Railway was obliged to rebuild the entire 750m section between where Meadowbank Stadium now is and Montrose terrace on a new alignment a few metres to the north and with the gradients altered to cross over the new lines at Abbeyhill.

To pass under Easter Road, the Railway built a bridge over the trackbed, giving the street a distinctive hump and blind summit.

The “hump” on Easter Road where the railway passes underneath. Note that the distant signals are raised on repeaters so that they are visible at the blind summit.

And under Leith Walk, the railway managed to squeeze in a steel-lined tunnel, literally inches below the surface. This was exposed during excavations recently for the tramway extension down that street.

The Leith Walk tunnel arches, these are so shallow below the surface of thae street that a special concrete slab had to be poured over them to support the new tramway as the standard foundations for it were too deep. © Self

So it’s obvious now why London Road was realigned, but why was Lower London Road maintained? The answer lies within Comely Green Place and –Crescent, a small Georgian development where Abbeyhill met London Road and the old road to Restalrig (Marionville Road). To protect the proprietors of these developments, it was again mandated by the Town Council that this direct access to existing properties be retained.

Comely Green Place and Crescent, OS Town Plan of 1849, prior to re-alignment of London Road. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

In the image below, the Georgian tenement of Comely Green Place is on the left. “Lower” London Road rises steeply here towards the green-clad building in the distance to join the level of the realigned London Road over the railway, which now runs up on the embankment to the right. The staircase was built by the railway to provide foot access between the new and old alignments of London Road from Comely Green.

A similar set of steps was built further east to give access from Kirkwood and Taylor Place where there’s an old, established right of way here under the North British / East Coast Mailine railway.

At Abbeyhill, it is harder to notice the change of alignment and difference in height between the old and new roads due to the 1897 tenements of Cadzow Place, but if you go around the back into the sheltered housing development you will notice that the ground at the rear is considerably lower. You may also notice that there is an extra storey to the rear of the tenements compared to the front as they are built into quite a slope.

The rear of Cadzow Place. This is the original level of London Road, which would have between the back of the tenements and the red brick wall

The Abbeyhill Colonies, built between 1867 and 1876, were built to provide good quality workers housing for the district, appealing in particular to employees of the Railway at St. Margaret’s Depot and to the maltings and iron foundry nearby. Built on the original ground level, they had progressively more awkward and steep approaches to London Road as you headed east. These would later be replaced by steps (there’s quite a few public stairways in this neighbourhood!)

Top to bottom – 1876 (no steps), 1893 (one set of steps) and 1944 (5 sets of steps) as shown on the OS Town Plans. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

At the eastern end of Lower London Road, is splits off of London Road at a very fine angle, the two effectively run in parallel a few metres apart for most of the length, with London Road getting ever higher as it climbs up to cross the railway.

Lower London Road (left) splits off of London Road at a barely perceptible angle.

The final, compelling clue that Lower London Road is not quite what it seems is to be found on the retaining wall between it and London Road. It’s quite clearly two different walls, one on top of the other! The original road boundary wall is in a rough, reddish sandstone. Above the pale line of the original coping stones is a completely different material and finish of wall; it was extended up to support the embankment when the road was re-aligned.

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