#postwar — Public Fediverse posts

How Japan revolutionised art & photography in the ’60s and ’70s

But Mishima’s collaborations with Eikō Hosoe and Tadanori Yokoo on Barakei lived on as a requiem. ​“Eroticised male bodies, images of martyrdom, the …
#Japan #JP #JapanNews #angura #avantgarde #Chronicles #image #Japanese #Japanesenews #making #medium #news #Period #Photobook #Postwar #provoke #radical #remains #scene #shocking #subversion
https://www.alojapan.com/1465431/how-japan-revolutionised-art-photography-in-the-60s-and-70s/

https://www.alojapan.com/1465431/how-japan-revolutionised-art-photography-in-the-60s-and-70s/ How Japan revolutionised art & photography in the ’60s and ’70s #angura #AvantGarde #Chronicles #image #Japan #JapanNews #Japanese #JapaneseNews #making #medium #news #Period #Photobook #Postwar #provoke #radical #remains #scene #shocking #subversion But Mishima’s collaborations with Eikō Hosoe and Tadanori Yokoo on Barakei lived on as a requiem. ​“Eroticised male bodies, images of martyrdom, the aesthetics of sacrifice and noble death –

Bit of a long shot, but does anyone here know anything about the female British typists who went to Germany in 1945 to type up the peace treaty? My grandmother was one of them!

#wwii #worldwarii #potsdam #peacetreaty #postwar #Germanhistory #britishhistory #history #europeanhistory #militaryhistory

Friday, September 5, 2025

https://activitypub.writeworks.uk/2025/09/friday-september-5-2025/

AT | 1170 Wien | Besatzungszone 1945-1955 | Kulturschutt der US Army

https://www.schlot.at/2025/07/10/at-1170-wien-besatzungszone-1945-1955-kulturschutt-der-us-army/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Looking for some fun reading for this weekend? Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America is currently 57% off at Amazon! #comics #herblock #politicalcartoons #comicsstudies #postwar #editorialillustration #editorialcartoon #editorialcartooning #americanstudies #journalismhistory

Looking for some fun reading for this weekend? Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America is currently 57% off at Amazon! #comics #herblock #politicalcartoons #comicsstudies #postwar #editorialillustration #editorialcartoon #editorialcartooning #americanstudies #journalismhistory

Looking for some fun reading for this weekend? Drawing Liberalism: Herblock's Political Cartoons in Postwar America is currently 57% off at Amazon! #comics #herblock #politicalcartoons #comicsstudies #postwar #editorialillustration #editorialcartoon #editorialcartooning #americanstudies #journalismhistory

Northwick Park Hospital

1969-75

Llewelyn-Davies Weeks Forestier-Walker & Bor

#modernism #metroland #postwar #concrete #brutalism #harrow #brent #nhs75 #hospital #London #architecture

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

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

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

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

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

20. Weir Paragon House

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

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

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

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

1. Department of Health for Scotland Timber Economy Houses

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

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

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

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

3. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Flats

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

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

4. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Cottages

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

5. Weir Timber Houses

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

6. SSHA Bellrock House & 7. Orlit Bellrock House

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

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

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

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

11. Miller-O’Sullivan House

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

12. Atholl Steel House

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

13. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Foamslag Block House

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

14. Canadian Timber House

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

15. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Poured Foamslag House

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

16. Orlit Frameless House

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

17. Orlit Framed House

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

18. Keyhouse Unibuilt House

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

19. SSHA No-Fines House

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

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

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