#now-and-then — Public Fediverse posts

Street in Pompeii,
c. 1910
2022

Some places don't change much :)

#Pompeii #NowAndThen #100Years

Bristol Cathedral & Statue, c.1910 & 2022.
The statue has moved slightly so the angle is different (and there's a busy street directly behind me that I was trying not to step into).

#Bristol #NowAndThen #100Years

Bristol Bridge and High & Baldwin Streets, c.1910 and October 2022

#Bristol #NowAndThen #PostcardVsPhoto #100Years

Não foi exatamente "inteligência artificial" que os #Beatles usaram, mas sim técnicas de aprendizado de máquina para que fosse possível separar a voz de John da gravação original.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM0jMZqEVQo

#NowAndThen #JohnLennon #GilesMartin

"This Masquerade" is a song written by American singer and musician #LeonRussell. It was originally recorded in 1972 by Russell for his album #Carney and as a #Bside for the album's hit single "#TightRope". The song was then covered on #HelenReddy's 1972 album, #IAmWoman. It was then recorded by American vocal duo, #theCarpenters, for their 1973 album #NowAndThen and as the B-side of the Carpenters's single "#PleaseMrPostman". Three years later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9W0g3NGSj4

"This Masquerade" is a song written by American singer and musician #LeonRussell. It was originally recorded in 1972 by Russell for his album #Carney and as a #Bside for the album's hit single "#TightRope". The song was then covered on #HelenReddy's 1972 album, #IAmWoman. It was then recorded by American vocal duo, #theCarpenters, for their 1973 album #NowAndThen and as the B-side of the Carpenters's single "#PleaseMrPostman". Three years later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9se2fqFMfw8

#TheBeatles won their eighth #Grammy five decades after they broke up
#NowandThen
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/03/entertainment/the-beatles-grammys-2025/index.html

The Beatles' "Now and Then," created using AI and a 1970s lo-fi demo, wins Best Rock Performance at the Grammys. McCartney and Starr completed it in 2021. #TheBeatles #NowAndThen #AI #Grammys2025 #RockPerformance #PaulMcCartney #RingoStarr #MusicHistory #AIinMusic

Since the release of The Beatles’ Now And Then I have listened to the song at least 1800 times while brushing Dabi’s teeth, grooming her, giving her T Touch massages and during play. Many times I think of Caroline Buckman a violist who played on the record but died before she knew the true nature of the piece.

#Caroline_Buckman #TheBeatles #NowAndThen #Music #Dabi

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/beatles-now-and-then-caroline-buckman-viola-1234872833/

https://americansongwriter.com/woman-who-played-on-now-and-then-died-without-knowing-she-contributed-to-a-beatles-song/

Filming locations, then and now, 1930 vs today. From the Nat Carr comedy short "Traffic Tangle." The complete video documentary is at: https://ChrisBungoStudios.com

#filminglocations #movielocations #pathe #culvercity #history #thenandnow #filmlocation #nowandthen #movielocation #movies #oldmovies #chrisbungostudios

Time capsule, 1930 vs Today. From the Pathe comedy short TRAFFIC TANGLE. More details at the bottom of the photo. More then and now filming location photos at: https://ChrisBungoStudios.com

#filminglocations #movielocations #natcarr #traffictangle #filmhistory #losangeles #culvercity #history #thenandnow #nowandthen #comedy #nostalgia #movies #oldmovies #moviescenes #chrisbungostudios

95 years ago, 1929 vs today. From the Laurel and Hardy film BIG BUSINESS. More details at the bottom of the photo and more like this on my website: https://ChrisBungoStudios.com

#filminglocations #movielocations #tlaurelandhardy #bigbusiness #losangeles #culvercity#filmhistory #history #thenandnow #nowandthen #comedy #nostalgia #movies #oldmovies #moviescenes #chrisbungostudios

Looking for a Christmas tree? These two gentlemen may be able to help! Movie locations, then and now, 1929 vs today. From the Laurel and Hardy film Big Business. The complete video documentary is at: https://ChrisBungoStudios.com

#filminglocations #movielocations #laurelandhardy #movielocation #filminglocation #filmlocation #bigbusiness #losangeles #culvercity #history #thenandnow #nowandthen #nostalgia #movies #oldmovies #chrisbungostudios

Filming locations, then and now, 1929 vs today. From the 1929 film "Boxing Gloves" from The Little Rascals. The complete video documentary is at: https://ChrisBungoStudios.com

#filminglocations #filmlocation #movielocations #movielocation #thelittlerascals #ourgang #littlerascals #losangeles #history #thenandnow #nowandthen #nostalgia #movies #oldmovies #chrisbungostudios

From the Charlie's Angels episode Angels on the Street. The complete filming locations photo gallery and video documentary is at: https://ChrisBungoStudios.com

#filminglocations #movielocations #filmlocations #charliesangels #1970s #70s #tv #tvshows #thenandnow #nowandthen #nostalgia #chrisbungostudios

Filming locations, then and now, 1979 vs today preview video 4 of 4. From the Charlie's Angels episode Angels on the Street. The complete video documentary is at: https://ChrisBungoStudios.com

#filminglocations #movielocations #filmlocations #charliesangels #1970s #70s #70stv #tv #tvshows #thenandnow #nowandthen #nostalgia #chrisbungostudios

From the Charlie's Angels episode Angels on the street. The complete filming locations photo gallery and video documentary is at: https://ChrisBungoStudios.com

#filminglocations #movielocations #filmlocations #charliesangels #1970s #70s #tv #tvshows #thenandnow #nowandthen #nostalgia #chrisbungostudios

Charlie's Angels filming locations then and now 1979 vs today. Preview video 3 of 4. From the episode Angels on the Street. The complete video documentary is at: https://ChrisBungoStudios.com

#filminglocations #movielocations #filmlocations #charliesangels #1970s #70s #tv #tvshows #thenandnow #nowandthen #nostalgia #chrisbungostudios

The bad guys are getting out of the car to confront CHARLIE'S ANGELS. More details at bottom of the photo. The complete filming locations photo gallery and video documentary is at: https://ChrisBungoStudios.com

#filminglocations #movielocations #filmlocations #charliesangels #angelsonthestreet #1970s #70s #tv #tvshows #thenandnow #nowandthen #nostalgia #chrisbungostudios

Filming locations, then and now, 1979 vs today preview video 2 of 4. From the Charlie's Angels episode Angeles on the street. The complete video documentary is at: https://ChrisBungoStudios.com

#filminglocations #movielocations #filmlocations #charliesangels #70stv #1970s #70s #tv #tvshows #thenandnow #nowandthen #nostalgia #chrisbungostudios

Jewel Carriageway: the thread about a curious street that recalls a lost mining village

There’s an isolated section of suburban dual carriageway in eastern Edinburgh that runs through the middle of a 1980s housing estate. This 1983 road has the curious name of The Jewel and the streets off of it have equally odd sounding names; Corbieshot, North Greens, Parrotshot, Vexhim Park, Hosie Rigg… The road is closed at its eastern end by a bus gate, so serves mainly as access from the west to the housing estates clustered around it.

This formal name for this road when it was planned in the 1970s was the Niddrie-Bingham Relief Road (sometimes called the Niddrie Bypass), and it was to link up with the Eastern Approach Road – now known as the Harry Lauder Road at the large roundabour at Brunstane, connecting to the Musselburgh Bypass section of the the A1 road. This road, along with a branch or “Spur” to St Leonards on the old alignment of the Innocent Railway was intended to carry traffic from the city’s Southside to the east (and vice versa) without going through the residential estates of Niddrie, Craigmillar, Peffermill and Prestonfield.

But by the time the road was approved for construction in 1980, Edinburgh District Council granted planning permission only on the proviso that it would be closed at its eastern end once the Musselburgh Bypass and Harry Lauder Roads were completed. By this time the planned roads to its west from the Southside had been abandoned and therefore it would serve only as a temporary access to the new ASDA superstore at what was then optimistically termed Niddrie Glen before reverting to a residential access road.

The final name for the road – The Jewel – takes its name from a long gone village here of the same name. The Jewel Cottages were built in the period of 1880-1900 by the Niddrie and Benhard Coal Company as miners housing for the pits in this area of Edinburgh. They constituted a “company village”, known as the Jewel Village, totalling eventually 168 houses. There were two rows, one on either side of the Niddrie Road, each of two storeys; the ground floor houses being accessed from the front door and the upper flats by external staircases to the rear.

In addition to the pits at Niddrie and Edmonstone, new workings were sunk by the company in the district. Shafts nos. 11 – 13 were added at Niddrie; in 1897 a large new colliery commenced sinking nearby at Newcraighall, often called the Klondyke as it was being sunk during the gold rush of that name between 1896-99; and in 1898 another further south at Woolmet commenced production. The need for workers for these new pits were the reason for the building and expansion of the villages of both Jewel and Newcraighall.

Coal had been mined since antiquity in the Niddrie area, the landowning Wauchope family of Niddrie Marischal being the coalmasters in the 18th and in the earlier part of the 19th century. The Niddrie Coal Company Limited was formed in 1874 to acquire all the mineral rights in this area of Edinburgh, including Niddrie, Woolmet and Edmonstone and all the associated plant, from George Simpson Esq. of Benhar. It was a subsidiary of the Benhar Coal Company Limited; Simpson remained a director, the others being Henry Aitken Esq. of the Benhar Coal Co., Robert Orr a Glasgow coal merchant and Thomas Thornton Esq. a coalmaster from Fauldhouse in West Lothian. The relative importance of the Niddrie pits to this concern saw the company reconstituted in 1882 as the Niddrie and Benhar Coal Company Limited.

The working seams of this endeavour were the Great Seam, the South Parrot, the Stairhead and the North Greens – or Jewel – all of which produced household and cannel coals and the Stairhead also produced ironstone. Cannel coals are those verging on being oil shale, heavy in bituminous oils and hydrogen, meaning it was very useful for producing coal oil. They produced a clean, bright light when burned, hence the name; Cannel being an old word for candle in both Scotland and England. Although they were not particularly effective domestic fuels for heating and cooking, they were prized for this light until domestic gas became widely available. Its geological properties meant it could be carved, turned and polished to produce jewellery and ornaments, hence the local name of Jewel seam. It was this that gave the village (and the 1980s road) their name and I do wonder if the naming committee was having a bit of a private joke amongst itself naming a dual carriageway “jewel”.

At this time, the field was described as presenting “the advantages of superior cannel coals of exceptional thickness… The winning of these minerals in one working greatly diminishes the cost of production, enabling the cannel to be wrought almost as at the cost of common coal“. The pits here had the advantage of the North British Railway running through them and being the closest to the Edinburgh and Leith market. A further 20 seams, extending to 77 feet thickness were known to be workable – take a note of the seam names:

The Jewel, along with the villages of Craigmillar, Niddrie and Newcraighall and the estate of Niddrie Marischal were annexed by Edinburgh in the same 1920 municipal expansion that claimed Leith’s independence, forming the Craigmillar Ward of the city.

The Jewel Miners Welfare Insitute was opened in 1931, replacing a smaller hall that had been provided by the Coal Company in 1903 (although the miners had their wages garnished to the sum of 3d per fortnight to contrbute). The new hall was financed by the Miners’ Welfare Fund, itself funded by a levy of 1d per ton of coal won in British mines. It was estimated at this time that the mines and miners of the Niddrie district had contributed £20,000 to the fund and had received £5,500 for the institute and £1,600 towards a bowling green and pavilion. An additional £8,432 had gone towards the Newcraighall Miners’ Welfare Institute. The fund also contributed to providing conveniences for the miners at collieries; e.g. £12,000 had been spent on pithead baths for Woolmet in 1930.

The institute is a handsome edifice and comprises a commodious hall, billiard room, reading room, games room, a library which will be stocked by Edinburgh Public Library, a cinema and re-winding room and the usual ante-rooms kitchen etc.

Description of the Jewel Miners’ Welfare Institute on its opening in May 1931

The Niddrie collieries were closed before nationalisation in 1947. Newcraighall Colliery closed in 1967, earlier than anticipated after work to modernise the production underground had failed. Woolmet had predeceased it in 1966, although it was retained as a training centre for a number of years. The workforce of both pits transferred to the new “Super Pit” at Monktonhall. Although there was still mining work in the area, the village fell into decline and by 1972 was largely abandoned and derelict. It was demolished, along with the original Newcraighall village and both would be replaced by modern housing schemes. At the Jewel, only the bowling club and the Miner’s Welfare Club survived the wrecker’s ball.

Coming to the names of the modern streets, and reflecting back on the table of coal seams further up, those odd street names now begin to make a bit more sense;

I think the names are nice touches, recalling a long mining history in the area which is no longer readily apparent, but the whole place is a bit of a case study in bad 1980s urban planning ideas, with a motorway through the middle and disconnected residential areas.

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

An unhappy matrimonial home: the thread about Lynedoch House and the building hidden within its walls

Today’s property listing of historical interest is a flat in a curious Victorian, mock-Tudorbethan house at 1 Belford Road at the head of the road above the Dean Village (or as it would have been known at the time, the Water of Leith village). n.b. the property listing has long since been removed, but you can view an archive copy of it here.

The insides of this flat are almost entirely modern, all plasterboard walls and mod cons, so not much to write about, but the views are both pretty and pretty spectacular!

What was once a single house is now split up into three separate flats and offices. Visually, it’s quite a remarkable – and more than a little bonkers – structure; a fantasia of different styles all cobbled together into one reasonably coherent structure on quite a challenging plot.

One of the most intriguing features of the house is a band of stucco around the lower courses of the building, impressed with the motif of an H, an eagle and a thistle along with love hearts in the original cast iron window bars:

This house was built in 1891 as Lynedoch House by the architect Sir George Washington Browne who had an admiration for the Old English style and is perhaps best known for Edinburgh’s Caledonian Hotel. It was built for Charles Martin Hardie RSA (1858-1916), a native of East Lothian and a fashionable and successful artist known for paintings of Scottish life and also portraits of Robert Burns and Walter Scott. Hardie built the house as a family home and his studio. The name Lynedoch was already a local placename, having been applied in the 1820s by the landowner Major James Weir RM to honour Thomas Graham, Baron Lynedoch, a hero of the peninsular war.

The “H” impressed in the render is Hardie’s initial; the thistle is for Scotland and the eagle is for America, from where his first wife – Mary Lewis – hailed. The couple married in 1889 and the love heart was a symbol of their matrimonial bond. It didn’t work out however, Charles divorced her in 1895 after she ran off with an actor. The case was heard by Lord Moncrieff in the Court of Session and caused a sensation in the papers at the time. It was so heavily attended at court that his Lordship had to have the public ejected to make room for all the junior lawyers and reporters who had attended. The husband alleged that after the birth of their second child – who did not live to see his first birthday – his wife had become weak and had spent a lot of time in London staying with friends to recuperate. He was too busy with work to either accompany her or care for her himself but on one of her visits away he decided to go to London to find her. His suspicions were aroused when he could not do so and she turned up later in Sydney, Australia! It transpired that she had voyaged with an actor and opera singer by the name of Mr Courtice Pounds and “she admitted misconduct with him in his rooms“. The manager of the hotel in question would testify that she had been playing the part of Pounds’ wife, that the room had but one bed and that they had occupied it overnight. On this evidence alone the judge granted Charles his divorce and custody of the couple’s daughter.

Pounds soon abandoned Mary and took up with another woman of the same name, the Irish actress Mary Gertrude Cranfield. Mary Hardie refused to reconcile with either her husband or her wealthy parents back in America and instead took up the name Jones to try her hand as an actress. Her family continued to give her an allowance of £240 a year (about £40,000 in 2022) which she ended up spending on drink and what the newspapers called “stimulants“. The same newspapers reported as being depressed. The death of her second child, the breakdown of her marriage, the loss of custody of her first child, her abandonment by her lover and the schism with her parents must have all been heartbreaking for her. While touring with the play How London Lives in Burnley she drank herself to death on Thursday 6th October 1898, aged just 27.

Lynedoch House clearly had a very short and unhappy life as a matrimonial home, but all is not quite what it seems with the place; within its walls is an older and smaller house called Drumsheugh Toll. This 1820s cottage was for the keeper who enforced the turnpike road tolls of the Cramond district; the roads from the city leading to the Cramond Brig and onwards to the west along the Queensferry Road route.

The trustees of the turnpike roads did not employ tollkeepers, rather they built a tollhouse and then let it out to the highest bidder, who made their income from enforcing and collecting the tolls.

For every coach, berlin, landau chariot, chaise or calash, drawn by six horses, the levy was 2s; but a one-horse chaise paid only 3d. Waggons, wains or carts paid charges graded from 6s, if pulled by six horses, to 3d if pulled by one only. a single horse, unyoked, incurred a charge of 3/4d; oxen, 7 1/2d per score, and sheep 3 3/4 d per score.”

A description of the tolls in force at Kirkbreahead

Drumsheugh was the third location of the district toll bar. In its first incarnation of 1755 it was known as the West Kirk Toll (after the West Kirk, now known as St. Cuthbert’s) and was positioned at the end of what was then known as the Lang Dykes, a fairly rough road on the alignment of what would later become Princes Street. The toll migrated around 1790-1800 to a location now underneath the Queensferry Road, where Bell’s Brae and Belford Road now split off of it where it was known as the Kirkbreahead Toll. The Kirkbraehead was literally the top of the hill to the kirk (church), referring to the walk that the parishioners of the Dean and Water of Leith villages would have to have made to get to the West Kirk. To make way for the Dean Bridge, construction of which began in 1829, the toll moved again, about 100m west to the position at 1 Belford Road; the Drumsheugh Toll. It is this toll house which would be incorporated into Hardie’s Lynedoch House.

When the Dean Bridge opened in 1831 the Queensferry Road was redirected across it, rather than down the hill to the Belford Bridge, bypassing the Drumsheugh Toll. A further toll house, the fourth, therefore had to be opened opened on the Queensferry Road at the head of Orchard Brae; the Dean Check Toll, to make sure nobody slipped by without paying. In 1832 the city boundary had moved some 800 metres west but the toll bars did not follow suit until 1854. This made the Drumsheugh and Dean Check tolls redundant and a new toll was opened where Queensferry Road meets Queensferry Terrace; the Dean Park Toll.

The Drumsheugh keeper’s cottage was retained by the Cramond District at this time, in 1855 the resident was Walter Gordon, a stonemason in their employ. a residence. The nearby building of Kirkbrae House is frequently mistaken for the toll house given its prominent location at the end of the Dean Bridge however this was instead the home and business premises of Cabbie Stewart, a horse cab proprietor and local worthie. Stewart accumulated considerable wealth and built himself this rambling Scottish Baronial pile incorporating many old decorative stones from the neighbourhood. His stables however do form the basement levels of Lynedoch House to its rear on Bell’s Brae.

You can see how the Drumsheugh toll fits into Lynedoch House by overlaying an 1887 photo by Thomas Begbie with the current street view (original image can be viewed here © The Cavaye Collection of Thomas Begbie Prints; The City of Edinburgh Council Museums & Galleries).

It is the projecting window of the toll house, which would have allowed the keeper a clear view up and down the road that they controlled, and the front door which is the point of constant reference here. A further clue to Lynedoch House’s predecessor is the name painted above the door!

Charles Hardie remarried in 1899 to Margaret Sommerville Smart and kept his studio at Lynedoch but wisely did not reoccupy the house as his matrimonial residence. Instead the rest of the building was split up, the house occupied by the Misses Boyd. In the photos above and below, the Norman-style church is the Dean Free Church which was built in the 1840s. It removed itself to a much grander and larger building at the other end of Belford Road to better serve its parish in 1888, the old building becoming another artists studio; the Dean Studio. The lower storey, formerly the church school, became the Edinburgh Arts & Crafts Club and the upper levels were occupied by a variety of artists. The 1905 postal directory lists William Grant Stevenson RSA (sculptor and painter), Joseph Hayes (sculptor), Miss Meta Napier Brown (arts and crafts silversmith) and Thomas Beattie (sculptor).

In 1906 Charles Hardie stood in the Town Council elections as a Unionist candidate, putting his address as Lynedoch Studio, but was soundly beaten by the incumbent. In 1912 he was still based at the studio for work but by this time was living in North Queensferry. The Misses Boyd were still in the house, now number 2 Belford Road and the Edinburgh Arts & Crafts Club and the Dean Studio still in the church at number 4. Hardie died in 1916, aged 58, after a heart attack. His obituary did not mention his first marriage and divorce. After this studio was occupied by R. S. Kennedy, a dealer in Austin cars, who remained here until 1939.

In 1934 the former main hall of the old Free Church was converted into a theatre by the author and playwright Christine Orr who had 100 seats installed in front of a stage and based her theatre company – The Makars – here. It was taken over during WW2 as an ARP (Air Raid Precautions) and first aid post. She was unable to return after the war and instead it was taken over by ornamental woodworkers Robert Laurie & Son., who were still based here when the premises burned down in 1954.

Lynedoch House was split into 3 private residences at some point before 1940 and was category B listed in December 1970. The ground floor had by this time became occupied by the Waddel School of Music and the upper floors by the Edinburgh Society of Musicians, who have a recital room and practice rooms there to this day.

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about a view of 18th century Leith and its talented, young English artist

This thread was originally written and published in December 2021.

Here is a Now and Then transition that shows a view of Leith in the distance overlaid on the same vista these days. This particular original view is by the English artist Paul Sandby and is called “View of Leith from the East Road“. It was sketched here around 1750, making it one of the earliest accurate views of the town.

It’s possible to use the relative positions of the primary landmarks of old Leith – the steeple of South Leith Kirk , the first cone-shaped glass bottle kiln down on Salamander Street and in the distance the island of Inch Keith – to establish an fairly good approximate position from where Sandby sketched out his scene. However a modern building means we can’t get into quite the right place now.

My experience of looking at the detail of Sandby’s images of Edinburgh and Leith is that his draughtsmanship is exceptionally good and faithful to reality on the ground. There are occasions where he explicitly chooses not to do things like flip key details around to make a more dramatic or romantic scene, but it’s usually done in an obvious and deliberate way and was completely in line with his contemporaries. I think we can therefore be confident he was faithfully and accurately drawing the scene that he saw before him of Leith in 1751.

Our picture is an etching, with the detail composed of fine lines scratched into a wax-coated copper plate and then used to produce a print, and it was made by Sandby himself after his original watercolour. While watercolour was his primary medium, he was also a skilled etcher and printmaker. The original in the collection of the Ashmoleon Museum in Oxford. Sadly I cannot show you the colour original as it has not been digitised or included in print, but you can see from the below black and white scan that it is a perfect match.

There are multiple different versions of this view by Sandby. Below are two engravings, again by his own hand – engraving was another art in which he was particularly gifted and involved incising a copper printing plate with a cutting tool to use for printmaking. Version 1 seems to be for a large print with much detail and Version 2 was possibly for inclusion as a plate within a book judging by its simplification and cruder detail.

The Lowland part of William Roy’s “Great Map”, which was made just a few years after Sandby’s illustration shows the Kirk (1), the glass cone (2) and that windmill (3). Sandby is just off the Easter Road looking downhill probably somewhere off of the modern street of Thorntreeside

Zooming in on the detail in Engraving 1, to the right of the scene we can see the glass cone, the windmill (which was built early in the 18th century and was possibly in association with a saw mill and the farmhouse of Coatfield. The workers are bringing in the crops in the foreground. Sandby was keen on adding romantic elements such as these to his work – you can see that while they are included in the original watercolour he has varied and elaborated them here.

In the foreground, workers at leisure. A couple dance on the left (the main is in typical lowland garb), those on the right may be sitting down to eat, the central figure holds the stoup to drink from. The piper with kilt and tartan hose suggests a Government soldier, the Dress Act of 1746 having forbidden the wearing of “the clothes commonly called Highland clothes” by anyone apart from officers and soldiers. These gaily frolicking figures are absent from the watercolour, these were the sorts of detail a printmaker added to their work to make it more commercially attractive to a London market.

The young Paul Sandby was in Edinburgh for work and had a position as a cartographer to the Board of Ordnance under Lt. Col. David Watson at this time. He was usually based in a drawing office at Edinburgh Castle, but at times went out in the field in the Highlands to accompany Watson and make on-the-spot illustrations (such as that below) to illuminate the latter’s reports, so would have been used to being accompanied by soldiers. Watson, a son of the Lothians, came up with the idea for the military survey of Scotland and had appointed William Roy as its very capable cartographer. Sandby’s principal job was working under Roy as a cartographic draughtsman, turning the surveyor’s field observations and triangulations into a beautifully illustrated map. When you look at Roy’s Highland maps, you are looking at Sandby’s hand too.

But back to our engraving. To the left of the print is South Leith itself (North Leith was an entirely separate parish and jurisdiction at this time), with the distinctive Dutch steeple of the Kirk. The large house in the foreground, directly below the church may be that known as Whitfield House, it is approximately where Crown Street is in modern Leith. The line of buildings of the Kirkgate – the principal north-south street of auld Leith – is obvious, running off to the left from the Kirk. The tall building left of the Kirk may be the Tollbooth. The masts of the ships sitting in the port beyond are to the right of the Kirk.

A few doors down from the Tolbooth was a signal tower, seen in this engraving in “Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time” by Daniel Wilson, which may be the tall structure left of the steeple.

This signal tower wasn’t very well located, particularly as the taller tenements grew up around and it would be relocated to Robert Mylne’s late 17th century windmill at the head of the Shore in around 1805. We can see this structure in the below watercolour by John Clerk of Eldin; this is some time inbetween its abandonment as a windmill and its conversion to a signal tower, as it retains its original roof. When Sandy had been in Edinburgh, he fell in with the artistically inclined Clerk of Penicuik family, and the Adam family of architects who were in their circle. Sandy was a particular friend to John Clerk of Eldin and Robert Adam, and the three whiled away their youth travelling Midlothian and sketching ruinous castles together. John was a capable artist and printmaker in his own right, but was much influenced by Paul.

Daniel Wilson’s book also has the below engraving of South Leith Kirk with that steeple again. We can see just how closely Sandby’s image matches this. I have said it before and will say it again, his mix of artistic skill, a cartographers eye and a bit of military discipline means that Sandby’s landscapes are usually very accurate. These sorts of Dutch Steeple belfries were very common on both religious and civic buildings in post-Reformation East Scotland, and amongst others North Leith (St. Ninian’s), the Tron Kirk and the Holyrood Abbey church also had them.

An interesting thing about South Leith kirk is that it’s really only one half of a church; the nave (west bit) and its aisles. The chancel (east part), crossings and central tower were destroyed or damaged beyond repair in the Siege of 1560. If you squint at it on the contemporary siege map, you can see a central tower and the crossing. The sketch is a little bit squished, it was quite a long, low building in reality, twice as long as the church we have today.

Daniel Wilson’s engraving shows the rather crudely filled in arches at the east end of the nave (blue arrows) and the remains of the arches supporting the original tower and crossing roof (orange). The 1560 map and arch remains suggests a crossing only to the north.

Back to Paul Sandby, he made this rather nice sketch of his boss Lt. Col David Watson around this time. Watson was son of Thomas Watson of Muirhouse and a seasoned campaigner, present at the battles of Dettingen, Fontenoy and Culloden. It was Watson who picked up General Wade’s road and fortification building scheme after the 1745 Jacobite rising and massively extended it. He spent eight and a half years in the Highlands on this project, which would spawn Roy’s Military Survey and give us those beautiful and insightful maps of most of Scotland, the first really accurate topographic survey of the country.

This was not the only panorama that Sandby made of Leith, he made a watercolour with the town in the distance in 1747, probably painted from the vicinity of the old village of Broughton. Given that the Ashmoleon collection explicitly forbid any sharing of their images in any form, you’ll have to go and take a look on their site. In another thread, we look at another remarkably detailed and accurate Sandby illustration, painted from the ramparts of Edinburgh Castle and looking north towards Leith over the lands were the New Town would follow a few decades later.

Paul Sandby’s work heavily influenced many British watercolour artists who would follow. The Scottish artist Alexander Carse made a similarly pastoral view of South Leith from the Easter Road around 20-30 years after Sandby. Again we see workers at rest and play, set in a rural landscape but one that is not far removed from the urban and from creeping industrialisation.

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about the changing face and footprint of the Tron Kirk and why it’s now 5 miles away from where it began

This thread was originally written and published in November 2019.

Historic Environment Scotland tweeted a “Spot the difference?” competition about the Tron Kirk in Edinburgh. It observed the differences in the steeple between a pre-1824 Engraving and a post-1824 photograph. I have animated these into a transition (below)to better show the changes.

The obvious change here is that the squat Dutch steeple has been replaced by a much taller stone pinnacle, supported by 4 masonry columns. The reason behind this is the Great Fire of Edinburgh, which started on the day of the original tweet – November 15th – back in 1824. It raged for 5 days, toppling the wooden framed, lead-covered spire of the Tron Kirk in the process. The spire was rebuilt in stone in 1828, but not to its original design. But there’s another, bigger difference between the original Tron Kirk and the one seen in both of these images. Look below. Can you spot it?

That’s right – the outer bays are different and there is a whole extra bay window on the left (east) side. The reason is that the whole church had to be “truncated” in 1785 to allow South Bridge to be driven through on one side (the left, East) and Blair Street (the right, West) on the other. Notice also that at this time the tenements on either side were built right up to the church and abutted it, and wooden booths wound their way around the front. There was not really sentimentality at this time in Scotland about the exteriors of churches being particularly sacred; it was what went on inside that was important.

Tron is an odd-sounding word to my ear. It sounds a bit Norse to me, but I can assure you it’s good Scots, from the Old French Trone. The name dates back to the public weighing beams, which were known as trons. The Salt or Over Tron stood in the centre of the High Steet near where the Tron Kirk was built.

There were other Trons – the Butter Tron stood at the head of the old West Bow – but the Salt Tron was the principal, and it was where all the merchandise imported into Leith had to be brought to be publicly weighed and taxed. It lent its name to a parish forming the south east of the Old Town and the Southside one of the 4 old parishes of Reformation Edinburgh. The Tron parish was created in 1598 but worshipped at St. Giles, which had been split into 4 separate parish churches internally by stone walls after the Reformation. The congregation had been preached to by John Knox and saw themselves as “representing the spirit” of Knox. Coincidentally, Jenny Geddes – of stool throwing fame – was a market seller at the Tron.

If you’re not familiar with the story, she is reputed to have thrown her stool at the minister, Dean James Hannay, when he attempted to preach from the Book of Common Prayer. In those days, if you were common you stood, or brought your own seat to the church. Geddes reputedly shouted “De’il gie you colic, the wame o’ ye, fause thief; daur ye say Mass in my lug?” at the minister. The riot was probably more organised and pre-meditated than the popular tale suggests. Nevertheless, Charles I’s attempt to introduce Anglican service into the Scottish Kirk was a disastrous failure that precipitated a war with Scotland that he lost.

When Charles I raised Edinburgh from a burgh to a city in (I think) 1638, he also raised St. Giles to Cathedral status as part of his program of Anglicising the Scottish Kirk. As such this displaced the Tron congregation and and a new church was ordered to be built for them. It took 10 years to build in total, by which time the Scots army had handed Charles over to the English parliament. It was ready to be dedicated in 1641 as “Christ’s Kirk at the Tron”, by which time the majority in Scotland was firmly Presbyterian. I think this would make the Tron the first purpose-built Presbyterian kirk in Scotland?

The Town Council of Edinburgh was obliged (reluctantly) to build and pay for the church by Charles I who threatened to withhold tax duties from the city if they didn’t comply. It was built by the King’s master mason, John Mylne, and his brother Alexander. It is for this reason that over the door of the Tron is the crest of the City of Edinburgh (a 3-towered castle supported by a deer and a maiden) plus the engraving (in Latin) “This building the citizens of Edinburgh to Christ and his Church, in the year 1641“

An engraving of the original Tron. This picture shows the Church to be symettrical in elevation, but maps and prints show that the right (west) side always had a truncated 2nd bay with no window.

The Tron was an important church and was preferred by the upper classes of Old Town Edinburgh over St. Giles.

This thread was started by the observation that the Tron originally had a Dutch-style steeple. They were common in these parts; South Leith had one.

North Leith had one too.

And Holyrood Abbey church had one too, when it was used as the parish church for the Canongate after the Reformation and before a purpose-built Kirk was constructed.

Then along came classical-obsessed Georgians and even Gothic-obsessed Victorians and the appearance of Edinburgh churches took something of a different direction. It was these architects who gave the truncated Tron Kirk it’s enormous spire when it was rebuilt. No apologies offered but I really find Victorian church architecture hugely boring.

As a parish kirk, the Tron was deconsecrated as early as 1952 due to rapid depopulation of Old Town Edinburgh and declining post-war Church attendance rates. The City bought it back, but has struggled to find a use for it ever since. Various craft markets, tat stalls and pop-up bars have come and gone and for extended periods it has been locked up.

The best use it has seen (in my opinion) that it has seen is as a heritage centre. You see, because the Tron is (relatively) new in an Old Town, underneath its wooden floors lurk the foundations and closes of medieval Edinburgh.

Except that’s not quite the end of the Tron. When it closed, it did so because the bulk of its congregation departed the Old Town as a result of slum clearances. Many were given new Council houses in the Moredun area of the City, and the congregation moved in to a new parish church, the Moredun Tron Kirk (now Gilmerton & Moredun Tron).

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about #NowAndThen photo montages of old railway stations, tramways and bridges around Edinburgh and Leith

This thread was originally written and published in December 2017 and a further part in May 2019.

This thread features #NowAndThen photo-montages of long gone railway stations, tramways and bridges in Edinburgh and Lieth; period photos overlaid on the current streetscape to show just how much or little things have changed over time.

Duke Street in 1954 on the last day of service for the No. 25 tram. This service ran from Corstorphine to Portobello King’s Road via Leith Walk and the Links. Not much else has changed on this side of the road, although the occupants of the buildings certainly have. On the left was the Palace Cinema, with a snooker hall above. It is now a J. D. Wetherspoon pub.

Commercial Street in 1955. The No. 17 tram from Granton passes the “Highland Queen” bonded warehouse of MacDonald and Muir. It is running across the railway lines that crossed into the docks from the former North British railway at North Leith / Leith Citadel station. The bond is now flats, through the West Dock Gate where the railway ran is the now the Scottish Government building – Victoria Quay. The Old West and East docks are infilled, unimaginatively used as car parks. The Victoria Dock is cut off from the harbour basin and is a sterile and bleak water feature in front of Victoria Quay.

King’s Road at Portobello in the 1950s. The No. 12 tram from Corstorphine via Leith, it has just passed the ghost of a car heading the other way to Portobello. The background is dominated by the great red brick lump of Ebenenzer J. Macrae’s Corporation electric power station.

Tollcross in 1956. There was a tramway depot here – where the central fire station now is – and the route was also a junction where 3 routes from the suburbs converged and then split immediately into two to head into the city by different routes. As such this was always a busy place on the network and this scene is busy with shoppers and tramcars. The tenement on the right and the castle are all that remain of the original buildings in this shot now.

Trinity Crescent in the 1950s. A no. 17 tram squeezes under the bridge carrying the railway from Trinity Station along Lower Granton Road to the docks. The low bridge and tight S-shaped turn of the road meant that the tramway here was single line in the middle of the road, with the overhead line lowered. A set of traffic signals allowed only 1 tram at a time into this short section and warned motor vehicles that a tram was about to pass as their route swung onto the right lane to make the turn.

And Trinity again in 1986. A ghost train crosses Trinity Road on track removal duties. Click on the link to the EdinPhoto website to see more images of this series.

Moving on to animated transitions, here is Balgreen Halt station. A 1934 addition to the suburban railway network by the LNER (London & North Eastern Railway), it was closed in 1968. Estimate the old photo is early 1960s.

And at the end of the line at Corstorphine. Always a hard one to get your head around as no hint of the stations presence is left under the 1980s housing, beyond the name “Station Road”

Side fact, Corstorphine had extraordinarily long platforms for a suburban station (250m, sufficient for a 12 coach train of 60 foot stock), I believe this was because the railway company hoped that a new barracks to replace the Georgian cavalry establishment at Piershill would be built nearby. The new barracks were ultimately built at Redford instead but Corstorphine was left with its overly large station. There were 2 full platforms and 2 full length carriage sidings. As a result it was used to stable and clean coaching stock overnight and on occasions such as rugby and football matchdays.

Another overlooked Edinburgh suburban station; the awkwardly located Piershill at the foot of Smokey Brae, between Meadowbank and Restalrig. The road here running under the bridge is Clockmill Road, which connected to the Clockmill Lane. This was the ancient route from the Canongate to Restalrig, cut in two by the London Road when it was built in the early 1820s. The road was obliterated and the bridge cut off by the groundworks for the 1970s Commonwealth Games stadium, the velodrome being built on top of the road. The bridge is now blocked up as a garage, but may be re-opened as a through route in the future when the eastern end of the stadium site is redeveloped as housing.

Leith Walk station – no, not the big one at the Foot, but the one called Leith Walk towards the top.The demolished tenements of Shrub Hill and Shrub Place are in the background, plus an intriguing belfry. I’m guessing it was the old school next to Pilrig Model Buildings, which later became the “Royal Caledonian Bazaar”.

Now the site of the Inchkeith House multi-storey flats, the Royal Caledonian Bazaar was a “posting and livery establishment”; basically a horse transport depot. The proprietor was one John Croall. The Croalls were established in the horse business and were pioneers of motoring in Edinburgh. They gave their name, unsurprisingly, to Croall Place, the tenement at the top of Leith Walk where it meets Macdonald Road. Croall & Croall later built car and bus bodies and had a number of works around the West Port and Lothian Road. They later became part of the SMT (Scottish Motor Transport) empire.

Granton Road, once an important suburban commuter station and tram route. It was much more conveniently located for the wealthy suburb of Trinity than the station of that name, and later for the big new housing scheme at Boswall.

There’s an old cast iron column just outside where the station was, I always assumed it was a tramway pole for the overhead wires. This photo shows it supported no wires – there’s an actual tramway pole right behind it – and it had a crown-shaped vent cap. It’s not a pole or a lamp post at all, it’s actually a sewer vent – a stink pipe – which is why it has survived.

We move on to Granton station itself. One of the first in Edinburgh and originally the site of a pioneering train ferry to Burntisland before the Forth was bridged. It closed in 1925 as an economy as there was little need by this time for a passenger station in the middle of the docks – most people taking the ferry across the Forth found the electric tramway much more convenient to get into the city than taking the train.

The slip for the train ferries is still used by the Royal Forth Yacht Club. Thomas Bouch’s Floating Railway was an ingenious and effective solution to bridging the Forth before the technology allowed a permanent structure. Basically an early, steam-raised linkspan that lowered a ramp on to a special ferry boat, allowing wagons and carriages to be run aboard. The whole apparatus, rails and all, was on a great wheeled carriage, allowing it to move with the tides. The rails were in short sections, bolted together in such a way that they could flex.

Thomas Bouch is an engineer remembered for his greatest and most infamous creation, the first Tay Bridge, but he had a long career in which he constructed many pioneering and innovative solutions to the problems of getting railways across obstacles.

I’m quite chuffed with this image, which shows the evolution of the Upper Drawbridge at Sandport Place. Not only is the river much higher now since the docks were dammed, but the deck was widened and the central arch of the current bridge replaced the lifting section.

The Water of Leith is no longer a tidal river, as in the 1960s a set of lock gates were installed at the mouth of the docks to keep the dock basin always filled with water to allow bigger and deeper ships to use the port, and not be so restricted by the tides when coming and going. The water level these days is frequently within a foot of the central arch but you can still see the “river bed” in the right conditions only a few feet below that, there must be a good 20 foot of mud and silt and sludge built up on the river bed, unable to be washed out by the tide.

The next image is the same spot as before but looking the other way, to St. Ninian’s Wharf (named for the old North Leith Kirk behind, with its distinctive Dutch tower). The site of a dry dock and boatbuilding yard in the 1850s and 60s.

The photo confused me for a good while, as I assumed that the ship must be in the dry dock, which was one of the first dry dock in Scotland so pre-dated the photo by about 100 years. I later realised that the ship being built in the picture is not in the dry dock at all, but on a building slip alongside, with a temporary coffer dam following the line of the river wall – marked in red on the Town Plan below.

That ship may even be on a “patent slip”, a Leith invention.

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

Take the “High Line”: the thread about Leith’s unbuilt park through the rooftops

I found something very interesting hidden away in a cardboard file in a corner of Leith Library. The title – City of Edinburgh, Leith Local Plan, Draft Final Report, April 1975. Volume Two. Schedules and Appendices. – was so snappy that I couldn’t help but start reading it. This was the plan for a £90 million redevelopment and rejuvenation of Leith, which by this time was suffering badly from industrial decline, urban depopulation, poor housing stock and a general lack of public amenities. As part of this plan it was proposed that the Edinburgh Corporation as it then was (after 1975 it was Edinburgh District Council) would purchase the abandoned trackbed of the Caledonian Railway which ran from Pilrig Park to Seafield via Restalrig, over Leith Walk and Easter Road. This would be converted into a landscaped walkway through the area, what nowadays we might term a linear park.

This section of railway, formally known as the Leith New Lines, was one of the last to be built in the city and did not open until 1903. Its purpose was to give the Caley access from its existing line into Leith Docks from the west to the expanding eastern portion of the docklands. It would cut its way through the dense industrial heartlands of Leith and Bonnington, serving these with large and convenient new goods stations.

On paper this was a sound proposal but by this time the best potential routes through Leith were already well built on, therefore it had to take a winding and circuitous route requiring substantial and expensive engineering. There were numerous cuttings and viaducts required plus skew girder bridges over thoroughfares at Bonnington Toll, Leith Walk and Easter Road. As if that wasn’t enough, it also had to cross three different North British Railway lines, the Water of Leith and cut beneath Ferry Road.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/40040319893/

This railway never fulfilled its potential, a planned passenger service was never introduced and its twin tracks soon singled. The western section between Newhaven and Bonnington closed in 1965. In 1968 the low bridge over Bonnington Toll was removed and the goods station off Leith Walk at Stead’s Place (Leith Walk West) was closed. For a few years the eastern section at Seafield lingered on giving access to the Leith East goods yard at Salamander Street but this too closed in 1973, making the entire line redundant. British Rail gave notice at this point that it intended to demolish its monumental girder bridges over Leith Walk and Easter Road plus a smaller one over Halmyre Street to reduce their maintenance burden.

The 1975 path scheme saw the opportunity to purchase the route from British Rail before they proceeded with demolition and proposed to replace these large, expensive structures with lightweight footbridges and to retain the smaller bridge over Halmyre Street. This would give an elevated walkway from Pilrig Park, across the arches of the viaducts at Jane Street, Manderston Street and Gordon Street and from there along the embankments and cuttings all the way to Seafield.

The bridges at Easter Road and Manderston Street would be removed in early 1980, with that over Leith Walk following in September that year.

It have assumed that because the bridge over Halmyre Street was to be retained that the viaduct between there and Easter Road, which cut its way rudely through the back greens between Gordon Street and Thorntree Street would have been kept too.

This ambitious urban realm scheme of course never came to pass. By the time an updated version of the Final Plan was published in 1980 it had been quietly dropped. One assumes this was because of the disruption caused to local government when the old unitary Corporation of the City of Edinburgh was replaced in 1975 and split up into the two-tier system of Edinburgh District Council and a combined Lothian Regional Council. Instead there was a cut back scheme to purchase the trackbed between Seafield and Easter Road and to landscape it as a pathway with funding from the Scottish Development Agency (SDA). While this at least did come to pass, the word “landscape” is doing a lot of heavy lifting and in reality this path was really just a strip of compressed dirt covered in dog mess and rubbish, with obstructive barriers to try and stop you cycling it without getting off and pushing. This would not be remedied until around 2010 when it was properly surface, the barriers were removed, new access points were added and lighting was provided.

Item 26 on the above list, the railway embankment through Pilrig Park, did also ended up being achieved although the link through to Leith Walk never happened. The viaduct from Pilrig Park to Leith Walk remains fence off, although recent redevelopment on the site of the former Leith Walk West goods yard means there is now a rather roundabout connection some 45 years later through an access road.

Item 27, the second walkway which was planned in both 1975 and 1980, along the old North British Railway trackbed alongside the Water of Leith, from Coburg Street to Warriston, would come to pass. This opened in June 1982, making it the first old railway track to formally be converted to a foot and cycle path in Edinburgh, and the first of many more miles to come.

The opportunity to do something between Pilrig Park and Easter Road is one that has never been properly grasped. In more recent times (although over 10 years ago now!) there was a semi-serious attempt to drum up interest in reviving the idea, with a connection between Pilrig Park and Halmyre Street achieved by building a show-piece timber and cable bridge across Leith Walk. How serious this actually was I do not know, I don’t recall any funding ever being in place even for planning, and providing level access to street level at the Thorntree Street end remains a difficult proposition. Even if it had been approved, like other schemes such as the section of Railway between Powderhall and Meadowbank, there’s a very good chance that it would still find itself in development limbo.

But if you happen to find yourself walking along past the garages which occupy the Manderston and Gordon Street arches, it’s easy to forget that there’s actually a railway station platform up there above your head, one which was built over 120 years ago but never actually opened. Although some lucky souls in the path have at least had the chance to get off a train there and head down its stairs to street level…

https://www.flickr.com/photos/127340508@N05/20376697129/in/photolist-boJLaJ-fcWT7Y-x3BU9i-2dg6Nwb-2cYnzaH

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

A Failed Filling-In: the thread about the loch at Lochend

Lochend Loch, in the district of that name, is a natural loch fed from its own springs. The name comes from the fact this was one end of the Barony of Restalrig; the opposite end was the community of the Calton which was therefore sometimes known as the Craigend (Craig being Scots for a rock or cliff). As such the name Lochend Loch is a self-referential tautology. It long had utility as an area for wildfowling, fishing and collecting reeds for thatch and when it froze over it was a popular skating rink. Historically it was fed by a stream called the Strype which drained the lands to its west into it. From the 18th century onwards it was also the water supply for the Port of Leith, but the quality was poor and so much of it leaked out of wood and leather pipes that it could never slake the thirst of that town.

The loch was formerly bigger and deeper than it is now, a combination of water extraction and improved drainage having lowered the surface. In 1876 the surface is recorded by the Ordnance Survey at 83.4 feet above sea level. In 1894 it was 78.54 feet and in 1944 it was 77.99 feet. That’s a drop of 5.4 feet or 1.64m.

It can be seen on the map below that in 1817 the loch edge is near to the old dovecot – the round building at the top of the map. The water pumping house, just next to the fold in the page, is well within the loch. Both of these structures are now some distance from the loch edge, so the shoreline has retreated significantly since then.

The 1817 survey gives the depth as 23.75 feet at its maximum. Local legend held that it was bottomless, and that a horse and card had been driven in never to be seen again. This may be influence somewhat by the tail of an accused witch, Bessie Dunlop, who was burned at the stake in 1576. Bessie was convicted on the grounds that she had consorted with a man named Tam Reid, who had died at the battle of Pinkie 30 years previous. Tam had conferred healing powers on her. On one occasion, while riding near Lochend Loch she had stopped to water her horse and with Tam had watched an apparition of a company of fairy horse riders charge into the loch to disappear.

When the Corporation built large housing estates in the area; at Lochend, Craigentinny and Restalrig, in the 1920s and 30s, the loch and surrounding grounds was purchased from its historic owners – the Earls of Moray – and formed into a new civic park to serve the neighbourhood. Between 1928-30 the park had been shut and 3,000 lorryloads of spoil from excavating the foundations of the housing schemes had been tipped in around the edges to form pathways. The loch and its grounds were tidied up and became the central feature of the park as a duck pond.

By 1958 the loch was unfenced except for a section kept partitioned off as a bird sanctuary. On Aug 19th, John French, 10, from Piershill was playing with 2 friends, took off his socks and shoes and waded a few yards in. He slipped, fell below the surface and his friends never saw him again. It took 4 days for his body to be found; volunteer members of the Scottish Sub-Aqua Club Search & Rescue team had worked around the clock to try and find him, but he was finally recovered just a few yards from where he had disappeared from view, 10 yards from shore. The Corporation immediately formed a sub-committee headed by the Superintendent of Parks and the City Engineer to come up with proposals to make the park safer. They reported back the following month, their preferred option was infilling the loch to a safe depth of 2.5 feet. The Civic Amenity Committee approved this course of action, which they were told would take 3 years, with “complete drainage rejected”. At this point there were not too many dissenting voices as the tragedy of young John’s death was still fresh in peoples minds.

The Corporation got to work and lorryloads of demolition rubble from the city’s slum clearances began to arrive. But they soon ran into problems as land reclamation at Leith Docks was paying a premium for rubble and most of it was being diverted there. In 1961, they made the decision to declare the loch a general landfill site for “clean waste“. But the lack of infill material wasn’t the only problem; the City Engineer reported they were “finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the water level“. The loch was fighting back. Once people saw what was happening to it, there was increasingly vocal local outrage at what was being done. “Official Vandalism” wrote one to the Evening News. “The ruination of one of the best bird sanctuaries in Edinburgh… What once was a delight to the eye is today a very sad sight” wrote another. In June 1961 it was reported that the landfill tipping into the loch had polluted it with oil, and the resident swans and cygnets covered. James Christison of Albert Street wrote to complain of the “stench of rotting weeds and freshwater shellfish” hanging over the water.

The City Engineer was called to account and now recommended complete infill and asked for 3 more years. Labour councillor for Craigentinny, Joe Mackaill, was having none of it “it is a beautiful park and a beautiful pond and I will fight all the way to keep it that way“. In July 1961, another letter to the Evening News observed “Lochend appears now to provide a convenient dumping ground for the debris from demolition sites and other waste materials which are possibly difficult to dispose of on account of lack of facilities“. Local residents complained from all the dust coating their washing and windows, and of the smoke cloud that hung over the neighbourhood as the site had a permanent bonfire to burn off wooden furniture and garden waste that could not be tipped in the loch. But the tipping continued, the Corporation countered that they were obliged to take any waste they were provided with now that the Loch was an official landfill site. It seemed that the “best” waste, rubble and soil, was sorted and diverted to Leith Docks while Lochend kept the worst.

The Evening News sent a photographer, who took a picture behind a rickety barbed wire fence showing the loch 3/4 full of “old tyres, empty tea chests, kitchen sinks and house doors… And an enormous quantity of builders’ rubbish“. The loch’s strongest defender in the Corporation, councillor Mackaill, died unexpectedly in March 1962. His cause was taken up by Councillor (later Baillie) Marion Alexander who noted the “disquiet, indignation and even disgust” at the situation

There was an increasing discontent now that the loch should never have been in-filled, and that course had been an over-reaction. Letters were sent to the Evening News that the safety of children was the responsibility of their parents, “not the ratepayers“. “It is time the councillors for South Leith woke up to the desecration of this beauty spot and did something about the matter” wrote Peter Robertson of Easter Road. The pressure paid off. In November 1962 Councillor A. D. Jameson (Progressive – Portobello), chair of the Civic Amenities Committee, announced that they were relenting and that the loch would now be restored to its original (surface) size once the infill was settled at the safe depth.

I’ve overlaid some snippets of aerial photographs through the ages on a modern image to show the rise and fall (or rather, the fall and rise again) of the Loch level. The papers now went quiet on the issue, but 3 years later in 1965 it was observed that “Edinburgh Corporation, at the [Scottish Wildlife Trust]’s suggestion, have successfully improved Lochend Loch.” These improvements had included planting an artificial island in the centre of the loch with trees. The island has been subsiding ever since, built up from unstable waste that has rotted and settled and decomposed over time. This explains why the park these days has a spooky, mangrove-like, sunken forest of half-dead trees in the middle.

The below animation shows the loch surface over time.

Sadly there was a further tragedy at Lochend in April 1997, when 13 year old Arron Duffus fell off a raft he and his pals had made from abandoned foam insulation and wood sheets. Arron lost his life and eleven others ended up in hospital who also fell in or had tried to save him. The fencing around the loch – which had broken down – was replaced and heightened. The park was also given a clear up to remove the various abandoned cabins and sheds that had once been used as pigeon lofts and greyhound kennels from where the raft materials were taken. A local “friends” group has been trying their best, with some success, to make sure the park and its loch is better maintained and cared for in more recent years..

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

Rectorial War in 1908: the thread about the vanished district of Society

I started the morning with a little animated “Now and Then” image transition of an image in the National Galleries Scotland collection. So where are we this morning?

We are on the Edinburgh street that was then called Lindsay Place, a southward extension of George IV Bridge in the neighbourhood of Society. Not heard that one before? Well it’s an extinct placename now, but at one time Society referred to the Fellowship and Society of Ale and Beer Brewers of the Burgh who were chartered in 1598 to have the supply monopoly for “good and sufficient ale” for the burgh. They were granted land on this site to do just that. Although The Society didn’t last particularly long, the placename did and we can see it below on an 1893 Town Plan of the city as a district name. If you move the slider you can compare the neighbourhood in 1893 with 1765. The major changes over that time is the new roads of Chambers Street running in from the right, the George IV bridge and Forrest Road running north-south and the demolition of much of the old City Walls here, which are the darker line in the 1765 map entering on the right, before turning downwards along the street marked Bristow (sic) Port.

Water was supplied to The Society from the Boroughloch (or South Loch, now drained and landscaped as the Meadows park) from where it was pumped by a windmill to a water cistern at Society. The presence of the windmill is still marked by the names of a number of rather unremarkable-looking lanes opposite the Appleton Tower and we can see the water cistern in the below 1649 birds eye map of the city. Although The Society only lasted about 20 years (in which time they significantly lowered the level of the loch through abstraction), brewing carried on in this neighbourhood until the late 1960s.

We can see what some of the older buildings of the area looked like in the below 1856 photograph.

The copper kettles of the Society were melted down in 1639 to be cast into artillery for the Covenanter Army during The Bishop’s War. The Scots at this time favoured curious, lightweight, copper cannons reinforced with outer layers of iron hoops, rope and leather. These were mounted on wheel-less frames and were inspired by their Swedish practice in the Thirty Years War in which many Scottish soldiers fought. It was found that these designs were suited to the local conditions where there were few roads passable by a gun carriage outside of the towns.

The streetline of Lindsay Place was built up in the 1840s after the formation of George IV Bridge but before the wide Victorian boulevard of Chambers Street was driven through the Georgian Brown and Argyle Squares from the direction of the Old College of the University. Stuart Harris suggests that the street was named for Thomas Lindsay, a shoemaker resident at the site.

By 1893, the Town Plan records that the Analytical Laboratory & School of Medicin was” on the site, handily located for the University medical school which had moved just down the road to Teviot Place in 1888. If we zoom right in on our photo from the National Gallery, we can see a sign corresponding to this:

The Post Office directory also records it as the Headquarters of the Scottish General Hospital, Royal Army Medical Corps., R.A.M.C T.F. That abbreviation stands for the Royal Army Medical Corps Territorial Force, i.e. a military reserve medical force. Again we can see this sign in the photograph:

The photo has all the usual fascinating details of an Edinburgh gone by. And as usual, the obligatory Paw Broon characters in bunnets make an appearance. The pair are exchanging news and gossip outside the weel kent Edinburgh institution that was James Thin’s bookshop.

Lawrie’s Tobacco Store on the street has a stocktaking sale on. Tobacco and its advertising always seem to be super prominent in old photos of Edinburgh neighbourhoods, a consumer luxury that nearly all could afford.

Next door at David Allan’s shop you can buy all the latest branded foodstuffs like Van Houten’s Cocoa, HP Sauce, Bovril and Splendo Margarine. Alongside tobacco, tea and chocolate usually occupy top spots for advertisements in these old photos. Again, little luxuries that could be bought for a few pence to take the edge off the fairly tough and frequently grinding living conditions in the city.

At No. 7 is Donald Mackay’s Territorial Bar, one assumes taking its name from the military establishment above and the Queen’s Edinburgh Rifles volunteer drill hall over the road on Forrest Hill.

The skyline is dominated by the usual ramshackle 17th and 18th century tenement rooflines and their arrays of chimneys of the Old Town. I’m not sure that the external chimney extension would be passed by a HETAS certified installer these days!

But that’s not what caught my eye about this photo or why I thought about sharing it in more depth. This photo has something far more intriguing – and rare – lurking in it, whether by design or by happy accident. Anyway, let’s zoom in a bit. Can you see what it is yet?

How about now if we up the contrast?

And what if we get the crayons out and highlight it a bit? Yes, that’s right, someone’s been up there on that parapet and daubed the building in rather cryptic graffiti!

I assume the perpetrators were wither cut off midway through the word “Suffrage” or ran out of paint.

Let’s keep looking! It appears like like it was “Down with something”, and perhaps the word “Movement” above OSL FOREVER?

And all the way to the end, it’s definitely OSL(ER) FOR EVER!

You can take my word for it when I say that I’ve looked hard at lots and lots of photos of Edinburgh from this period, and this is the first time I’ve seen anything like this. Chalked graffiti, yes, but only a name or lovers’ initials here and there scratched into a doorway. Nothing on this scale, nothing this apparently political and nothing on a government building too. Although this photograph is part of a series in the neighbourhood, I do wonder if the graffiti was a particular attraction to the photographer?

Looking back, I now think what we’ve got is at least 2 layers of graffiti that may have been partially washed off and/or painted on top of each other .

Don’t just take my word for these interpretations, you can zoom right in on the image on the National Galleries website here and look for yourself. What is more remarkable about this grafitti, and the paint that it was daubed in, is that it was still clearly legible 40 years later!

And looking the other way, Capital Collections also has a picture and again we can see the graffiti, this time as late as 1958.

I assumed that OSL might have been some sort of suffragette organisation until it became obvious it was the first three letters of OSLER. So I asked around and was quickly pointed me in the right direction OSLER was Sir William Osler, and the WO of WOMEN was actually his initials – W. O. – which somebody had altered. William Osler was a Canadian doctor, he created the first residency program for speciality training, was the first to bring medical students to the bedside for clinical training. He has been described as the Father of Modern Medicine and one of the greatest diagnosticians ever to wield a stethoscope“. Osler also just happened to be a rectorial candidate for the University shortly before this photograph was taken in 1908, having been invited to run by the medical students.

You see it turns out that Lindsay Place was the HQ for the Conservative1 rectorial candidate that year, the Rt. Hon. George Wyndham. Osler stood against him an independent and on the subject of allowing women into the university was “not in favour of mixed classes… under existing conditions“. A rectorial war between the different candidates’ supporters followed, common enough high jinks for the time, but particularly hard fought on this occasion. Osler supporters ransacked the HQ of the Liberal Candidate (some guy named Winston Churchill, maybe you’ve heard of him) but they were unable to breach the defences of the Conservative HQ and the police resorted to protecting it. And so some brave Oslerites resorted to daubing graffiti all over the outside instead; what we were actually reading was “Down with Wyndham. Osler forever“.

1. At this time, the ancient Scottish universities had a number of parliamentary constituencies and elected two MPs, one from the pair of Edinburgh and St. Andrews and another from Glasgow and Aberdeen. For this reason, rectorial candidates were politically aligned. ↩︎

On the night of Saturday 10th October, the Liberals decided to attack the Wyndamists too. After a fundraising concert on Princes Street, a 100 strong contingent bearing torches marched to Lindsay Place, intent on pelting the building with paint powder “and other missiles” (which included rotten tomatoes). But it was a ruse, as here they met the Wyndhamists and the two forces momentarily put their differences aside and quickly moved to Drummond Street Court to jointly attacked instead the Oslerite HQ. This was in revenge for the graffiti and the ransacking of the Liberal HQ. The police were summoned but stood back, content to let the students fight it out and just keep the general public out of it. The Oslerites HQ was in the loft of a paper store, and the bales of paper were used as a makeshift wall to barricade themselves in. From the loft windows they rained down soot and water on their attackers, who somehow procured a telephone pole to use as a battering ram. The wooden doors of the building were breached, but the paper walls held firm. The fighting petered out after midnight after it became clear that the leader of the Oslertite defence had been injured by the battering ram.

On voting day, Saturday 24th October, in the Old College quadrangle the university authorities took the sensible precaution of boarding up the windows, colonnades and the central fountain. Sensible because a predictable pitched battle ensued in the quadrangle between the three rival campaigns:

…the battle of paint and soot raged most fiercely. The Liberal citadel was first of all attacked by the Oslerites, but very soon the non-political candidate’s supporters had their flag torn from its stick, while even the stick itself was eventually captured. The Wyndham contingent, with their blue flag, were last to arrive at the quadrangle. With a chorus of cheers, they formed up for a grand assault on the Liberal stronghold. The Oslerites, however, intercepted them on the way, and an extraordinary scramble ensued.

Powder, paint and soot were flung about in clouds and the marvel was that any man escaped with his sight. As may be imagined, the figures presented a most grotesque spectacle… Eventually the Wyndham and Osler parties seemed to join forces in an attempt to drive the Churchill men from their stronghold. Even then, however, the Liberals continued steadfast and the battle was raged with undiminished fury.

Edinburgh Evening News, Saturday 24th October 1908

The Oslerites were confident of victory but their man was trumped by Wyndham the Conservative, with that Winston Churchill fellow coming in second and Osler trailing in third. By that evening, all the differences had been set aside and a good natured fancy-dress pageant and torchlight parade took place from the Old College quadrangle to the Castle Esplanade.

Now understanding the sequence of events which took place, my final analysis of the layers of graffiti we can see is thus:

• The Conservative HQ was daubed with pro-Osler, anti-Wyndham graffiti (Vote for Osler; Down with WO; Osler Forever)
• An attempt was made to washed it off, but despite the best efforts it was still clearly legible.
• To remedy this, some bright spark in the Conservative campaign takes a paintbrush themselves and alters the lettering to challenge William Osler (WO) for not being sufficiently vociferous in his anti-coeducation statement, enough by inserting a few extra letters. (Vote for Osler, Votes for Wom[e]n; Osler Votes for Suffrage)
• It is probable that this attack and counter-response happens at least twice, which explains the overlapping of the words.

They certainly made long-lasting paint back in 1908 given it survived the next 50 years in the wet and windy elements and relentless air pollution of Auld Reekie.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing and would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free) or to the book-buying budget, why not consider supporting me on ko-fi.