#slums — Public Fediverse posts

Das sieht richtig hübsch aus, oder?
So niedlich sieht es in den Hinterhöfen in Lübeck aus. Kleine historische Häuschen. Aber: die #Geschichte dieser #Hinterhöfe ist gar nicht so idyllisch - ursprünglich wahren hier in den Hinterhöfen der #Hanse nämlich die #Armenviertel angesiedelt. Und das waren richtige #Slums des Mittelalters und der frühen #Neuzeit.
Ein Blick nach #Lübeck:
https://buff.ly/4af6LVH

देहरादून नगर निगम सोती रही और अवैध बस्तियां बनती रही!

https://aliyesha.com/sub/articles/news/display/uk_illegal_slums_no_action_government_so_long

#uttarakhand #dehradun #india #press #news #illegal #slums #slum #illicit #poor #rainscoming #homeless #noshelter #demolition #muncipality #bjp #government #governance

Enjoy tracker free news reading with us. #privacy #privacymatters

On #PopulationDensity leading to #slums in #Mumbai due to bad #BuildingLaws:

“The Ruin Of Mumbai”, Asterisk (https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/the-ruin-of-mumbai).

Via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39639903

#FAR #UrbanPlanning #India #FloorAreaRatio #Policies #Cities #RentControl #Bombay #Dharavi

On #PopulationDensity leading to #slums in #Mumbai due to bad #BuildingLaws:

“The Ruin Of Mumbai”, Asterisk (https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/the-ruin-of-mumbai).

Via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39639903

#FAR #UrbanPlanning #India #FloorAreaRatio #Policies #Cities #RentControl #Bombay #Dharavi

On #PopulationDensity leading to #slums in #Mumbai due to bad #BuildingLaws:

“The Ruin Of Mumbai”, Asterisk (https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/the-ruin-of-mumbai).

Via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39639903

#FAR #UrbanPlanning #India #FloorAreaRatio #Policies #Cities #RentControl #Bombay #Dharavi

On #PopulationDensity leading to #slums in #Mumbai due to bad #BuildingLaws:

“The Ruin Of Mumbai”, Asterisk (https://asteriskmag.com/issues/05/the-ruin-of-mumbai).

Via HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39639903

#FAR #UrbanPlanning #India #FloorAreaRatio #Policies #Cities #RentControl #Bombay #Dharavi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It started to rain.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Iconic Designs — Ebenezer Howard [Garden Cities]
--
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/blueprintforliving/colin-bisset-iconic-designs-ebenezer-howard-garden-city/103057280 <-- shared media podcast
--
#GIS #spatial #mapping #urbanplanning #urban #demographics #EbenezerHoward #GardenCities #neighbourhoods #planning #plannedcities #history #design #urbanplanner #socialreform #industry #housing #qualityoflife #slums #gardens #vegetation #facilities #democraticsociety #workers #Letchworth #proximity #15minutecity #access #infrastructure

#MariaConceicao
Age 40
Broke #10GuinnessWorldRecords of #humanendurance
Honoured a promise made to a stranger
Wanted to provide for #600kids in the #slums of #Bangladesh
A #reallife #inspiration

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/05/poverty-in-america-book-matthew-desmond-interview/674058/.

#poverty #wealth #exploitation #america #war #economics #billionairesUSA #poor #children #PovertyisaPolicyChoice #ShameOnUs #slums #slumlords #gop #democrats #socialists

Escaping “a gulf of sin and misery”: the thread about the Edinburgh Emigration Home for Destitute Children

This thread was originally written and published in August 2020. It has been edited and corrected as applicable for this post.

Looking up something else in a Post Office Directory, my eye was caught by a rather sad sounding listing for the Canadian Home for Friendless Girls in Lauriston Lane, Edinburgh; a street long since built over. The Home was formed at a public meeting in December 1871 in Queen Street Hall which was organised by the Reverend and Mrs Blaikie. Its goal was establishing a mission to send “poor homeless and destitute girls” to the “rescue homes” in Canada of a Miss Macpherson. Annie Macpherson was an evangelical Scottish Quaker who, moved by the poverty she saw in the East End of London in the late 1860s, had set up the Home of Industry in Spitalfield. She organised a scheme of assisted emigration for destitute children from London to new and better lives in Canada. After education and training they would be placed with a suitably Christian host family as a domestic servant. To this end she set up “reception” and “distribution” homes in Canada and made arrangements with a network of children’s homes back in Britain and Ireland who would provide the “recruits“.

Annie Macpherson addressed the meeting in Edinburgh to testify to the success of the scheme; 800 children had already sent abroad to Canada. The Reverend William Garden Blaikie stated that premises had already been secured for the new venture in Edinburgh and a matron – Miss Tait – appointed. Margaret Blaikie, the minister’s wife, was to be secretary of the society and it was she who was the driving force behind the Home in Edinburgh. A Temperance advocate and long-time president of the Scottish Christian Union (a women’s Temperance society), it was during a visit to Canada in 1870 that she had met Annie. She was so impressed with the work that she resolved to get involved when she returned home. Finding that there was no existing organisation in Edinburgh to become involved through, she decided to set one up of her own and invited Annie back to Scotland to speak in public at its formation.

The Home in Edinburgh took in “young women who have fallen from virtue and desire to redeem their character” or “young girls who have lost one or both parents or have living parents… of loose character.” (Boys were sent to Mr. Muir’s homes in either Yardheads in Leith or Musselburgh). Those girls admitted to the Home would be “clothed and taught and cared for” and “brought up in the ways of godliness and industry“. Ultimately they would be sent, suitably reformed and trained, to be placed in domestic service in Canada.

We are therefore as thoroughly convinced as ever that our scheme presents a merciful opening for many destitute children who would not otherwise escape the gulf of sin and misery on whose borders they have been born and reared.

Margaret Blaikie, writing to the North British Agriculturalist, May 1875

The name of the Home had quickly been changed to the Edinburgh Emigration Home for Destitute Children. In 1874 it reported that it had 16 girls resident, awaiting the journey to Canada. In 1875 it was 31. It was run by voluntary donation and fund-raising; Margaret Blaikie made it a point of founding principle to never make public appeal for funds. It obviously prospered as in 1880 the Home bought its premises at Lauriston Lane, and briefly closed them to refurbish and enlarge them, adding an additional wing with 4 extra bedrooms. It reopened in November 1881.

In its 20-or-so years of existence, some 700 children were removed from the homes of destitute and drunken families, and some 300 were “assisted” to emigrate, others were adopted or found relatives or positions in Scotland. Most of the girls sent from Edinburgh went to Annie Macpherson’s Marchmont Distribution Home in Belleville, Ontario,

An 1892 publication noted that of the girls sent to Canada from Edinburgh, “at least ninety five percent have done well, and less than five percent have been unsatisfactory“. Its success was put down to distributing the girls widely over the country in family homes, rather than keeping them massed together in a central institution. The expansion of the Royal Infirmary in 1889 saw a compulsory purchase impending for the Home; advancing in age and noting that there were now larger organisations in Scotland carrying out work such as her own (in particular Quarrier’s Orphan Homes of Scotland), she decided it best to wind up her institution and retire. The proceeds of the sale and the remaining funds of the Home were gifted to the Society for the Protection of Children.

It was while minister of the Pilrig congregation of the Free Kirk that the Rev. Blaikie had commissioned both the original church building (the second purpose-built church for that Kirk) and its replacement by a more lavish and permanent building on the opposite corner. It remains a landmark to this day on Leith Walk, even though it has long since been within the established Church of Scotland.

Margaret publicly wrote that she and her husband had become “total abstainers” in the 1870s and “always worked in conjunction with [eachother].” As well as sharing a zeal for Temperance with his wife the Rev. Blaikie was also a prolific writer and pamphleteer and advocate of improving conditions for working people. He formed a society which commissioned the Pilrig Model Buildings to provide model workers housing, one of the first such instances in Edinburgh. They are now known as Shaw’s Buildings or Shaw’s Street / Terrace / Place and were a sort of progenitor of the later Colonies housing.

Around the same time that Mrs Blaikie stepped back from her work with the Home, the Reverend resigned as minister at Pilrig and took up a chair in theology with the Free Church’s New College, rising to become Professor of Divinity. He resigned in 1897, aged 77, and the couple retired to North Berwick where he would die in 1899 and Margaret in 1915, aged 92. Annie Macpherson died in 1904.

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

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

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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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Coinyiehouse: the thread about the Royal Mint of Scotland’s long and continuing service to the city’s poor and marginalised

Why buy one, small, cheaply-finished, semi-basement, 1 bed flat for £290k when you can buy 2? Have a look at this not atypical Edinburgh property listing.

But let’s not just be cynical here. It’s an interesting placename is Coinyiehouse (not Coinyie House, or Coinyie-House as given on the street signs, those are modern aberrations); from the Scots coinyie (coinage), from the French cuigne. In even older times it would have been spelled with the letter yogh (ȝ) as cunȝie. Interestingly, in Scots the word not only means coinage, but also the corner of a building – from where we also get the word quoins. These words all come from the same Old French cuigne, which originally meant a wedge or keystone. It was the wedge-shaped die used for striking coins that saw the word come to be applied to monetary tokens.

The placename is both ancient, as this was the site of the Royal Scottish Mint from 1574 to 1707 (in earlier buildings, demolished around 1871) – but is also quite recent – it was only so name Coinyie-House Close as recently as 1981, when the square was redeveloped. For this reason the yogh has been replaced with a “y” rather than the traditional “z”, to avoid mispronouncing it as Coinzie.

Prior to 1574, the Mint had been in Edinburgh Castle, but that was destroyed by the English during the Lang Siege of the Marian civil wars, which was ironic as it had been moved there from outside Holyrood Abbey in 1559 for its own safety! The rebuilt Mint reputedly had extremely thick walls and the reason for the courtyard in the middle was so that it could be lit by windows from within, and not the street, to provide additional security. There is a single photograph of the original building of the “new” Mint, attributed to 1887 but these buildings were demolished 16 years before that date. Above the door is the inscription “Be Mercyfull to Me, O God, 1574“, which places this building as one being the property of George Heriot which was intended by him to form his hospital. On its first floor was the meeting chamber of the Mint, where metals would be assayed, and its upper storeys were residences and chambers for its officials.

The pictures below show coins of the £ Scots currency from the reign of James VI which would have been struck here; any earlier coins struck in Edinburgh pre-date the Mint being in this location. A Merk was 2/3 of a pound. The reason a coin of a value as high as £20 was needed was because the Scots pound was considerably weaker than the English; on the Act of Union in 1707 there were 12 Scottish pennies to the English. It is for this reason that the Gaelic word for penny is Sgillin, which is the same as the Gaelic word for Shilling. When the currencies were re-valued, the old word for a (Scottish) Shilling was applied to the (New, English) Penny, as they had the same value. The word survived decimalisation and is in use to this day.

When James VI moved to England to taken up that Crown as James I, the Scottish Mint continued in operation. Although it would be closed down after the Act of Union, it did continue to operate for a while to assist with the re-coinage scheme of silver (Sterling) coins post-1707. This process was overseen by an exacting man of the name Sir Isaac Newon, Master of the (English) Royal Mint. The new coins used Troy ounces (12 per £) rather than Scots ounces (16 per £). Under the watchful eye of officials from the London, 103,346 Troy pounds in Crowns, half-Crowns, Shillings, and Sixpences were minted in Edinburgh with a value of £320,372 between 1707-1709. These coins struck in Edinburgh can be identified by the small letter E under Queen Anne’s likeness on the head side and were the last coins which were minted in the country.

The modern Coinyie-House Close actually does not lie on the site of the Mint at all, it is slightly to the north. The Victorian school building which later became the Panmure St. Ann’s Centre occupies the southern range; the former school playground, now a car park, occupies the rest of the footprint.

The Ordnance Survey town plan of the 19th century fortunately put the location of the Mint in the correct place, which should have been easy as the buildings were still there! The comparison maps below show in this time the widening of Blackfriar’s Wynd into Blackfriar’s Street in this period, which cause the demolition of the ancient Cardinal Beaton’s House and an entire street of decrepit old tenements. It was this same improvement scheme of 1867 which saw the south range of the block on the Cowgate demolished to widen that street, along with all the buildings on the opposite side of the street too.

Fortunately, before the Mint was demolished a number of artists paid the square a visit to paint and sketch it. The word Mint puts in mind a grand structure but the reality was more plain and surrounded by a ramshackle collection of late medieval and Stuart period buildings and tenements.

A very similar view is shown below in an earlier watercolour by James Skene.

From a Post Office Directory from Skene’s time, we can see that the Mint was home to a whole range of different crafts and trades:

• Peter Begbie, Last Maker
• James Burn, Lacemaker (In Skene’s lower Sketch he has “W. Burn” on the sign above the 1st floor windows)
• John Foster, Chimney-piece Maker (In Skene’s upper sketch he has “J. Forest” above the door)
• John Kettle, Grocer
• James Murray, Wright
• J. Peterkin, Japanner (Japanning is a black lacquering process to protect wood and metal)
• Andrew Wilson, Smith

Skene also gives us an alternative view of the courtyard, looking north in the direction of the High Street.

An 1873 watercolour by John le Conte shows the same view in portrait, we can see the Arms of King Charles II above the distant door in the centre above “God Save Ye King” and a date of 1675, and on the pediment to the right is a further date stone for 1674.

Our modern Coinyie-House Close is not built on the Mint at all, but on the the former United Industrial School for Boys, itself in a 17th century structure. This was inspired by Dr Thomas Guthrie’s “Ragged School” – a mixture of education, feeding and training in basic but practical skills for work – but offering an education that was not strictly Presbyterian in nature. Part of the founding ethos of the school, and the reason it used the word united in its name, was a reflection of its cross-denominational status. It was open to Catholic and Protestant children and its foundation was partly in response to what its founders saw as an imaginary problem of “religious difficulty” which was being used to justify denominational segregation in Scottish education. This marked it out as fairly unique for the time; it pre-dated city’s nominally non-denominational School Board Public Schools.

This non-denominational status only went so far however, the religious education of the school was denominational, being conducted in separate rooms by separate Catholic and Protestant teachers. To satisfy the bodies which provided the School’s funding, the religious teachers were paid out of their own separate funds and not the revenues of the school. The founders had recognised the burgeoning Catholic population of the Cowgate was poorly served by educational institutions and what we might now term social services. This area was Edinburgh’s Little Ireland, where an Irish immigrant community made its home. The Roman Catholic Church of St Patrick was (and is) nearby, just to the east on the other side of South Gray’s Close, housed in an 18th century building that started out life as an (English) Episcopal Chapel before passing to the Relief Church and then the United Presbyterians.

In 1875, the attendance of the United Industrial School was 120 boys and 28 girls. Of its pupils, a majority of boys went on to enter the trades of shoemakers and tailors, and of girls, most when into domestic service. The school attempted to teach its pupils specific trades rather than just monotonous skills such as net making and basket weaving; this was to try and give the children a practical outcome at the end of their education and an incentive to attend. The second-most frequent career path for both boy and girl pupils was emigration, mainly to America.

A typical day in the life of a school child is given below. Note that each denomination is taken separately for prayer, catechism and bible class and on Sunday to their respective church services and Sunday schools:

The school opened in 1848, just a year after Dr. Guthrie’s school and was housed in a building known as the Skinner’s Hall just to the north of the Mint, a 17th century L-plan hall which had been the meeting house of the Incorporated Trade of that name and more recently an Anglican Chapel.

As time progressed, the school roll became increasingly Catholic (a reflection of the demographic changes in the district) and pupils were increasingly placed there “under detention“, i.e. by the courts for reformatory purposes. In the 1860s and 70s the school was improved and new workshops were provided. It came to expand into the wings to its the south and west. To keep the costs down all the joinery work, and much of the other labouring, was carried out by the older boy pupils, superintended by their headmaster.

The school became boys-only due to a declining intake of girls but continued to expand and provide a more wholesome range of activities including swimming and school bands. Despite the best efforts to continue its improvement, the Scotch Education Department (as it was then known) withdrew its funding in 1900 on account of them deeming the environs of the Cowgate an unfit situation into which to send boys under detention. It closed at the end of that term and was sold, the trustees passing the remaining funds to Dr Guthrie’s Original Ragged Industrial School which migrated south out of the city to Gilmerton. The closure caused an capacity crisis in the city for the “ragged” boys, doubly so for the Catholic boys “under detention” as the next nearest industrial school certified to take them was St. Joseph’s, outside Tranent, to where twenty three of them were packed off to be reformed.

The buildings did not go to waste however and were purchased by the Roman Catholic church for incorporation into the neighbouring St. Ann’s R.C. School for Girls. At this time (and until 1918), the Catholic church remained opted-out of the School Board system and maintained responsibility for the education of the young of its denomination. This was on account of a (not misplaced) opinion that the School Boards established by the Education (Scotland) Act 1872 were fundamentally Presbyterian in their religious outlook, despite being Non-Denominational on paper. The Catholic Church also maintained segregation of the sexes in different schools; the School Board did so but only within a common building.

The Roman Catholic Church had arrived in the Cowgate in 1856 when it consecrated the former United Presbyterian church as St. Patrick’s. In the church hall they opened St. Patrick’s School for boys and in an old building on Niddry Street was St. Anne’s School for girls (note at this time, Anne seems to be spelled with an e. After 1872 however the Education Department repeatedly threatened to withdraw its subsidy unless better premises could be found. The boys of St. Patrick’s were eventually moved to St. John’s Hill into a former Industrial school there and a new St. Ann’s would be built on the Cowgate, in the south portion of the old Mint site. This location was perhaps somewhat appropriate given the last coins minted here were in the reign of Queen Anne – even if she was a committed Anglican herself. These schools were only brought fully into the state system by the Education (Scotland) Act 1918, but remained single sex.

The new St. Ann’s was opened in May 1880 to designs by the Edinburgh City Architect, Robert Morham. Its cost of £3,000 was met by the selling of the old buildings, the balance coming from Father Edward. J. Hannan, priest of St Patrick’s. Morham gave the school the in vogue Collegiate Gothic styling, but given he was not the School Board architect, the building is visually distinctive from its city contemporaries. It had a capacity for 300 infants and 300 older girls however in 1884 it is noted it had only 180 infants and 190 senior pupils, under the charge of Sister Evangelist and Sister Mary Gertrude, respectively.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/davids_leicas/36560577360

St. Ann’s was expanded in 1931, a matching west range added to take the façade all the way to Blackfriar’s Street. A plan of 1939 intended that the school would be modernised and expanded to become a single co-educational Catholic primary school for the entire centre of the city. This was part of a rationalisation of R. C. schooling in the Old Town and Southside, both of which had undergone rapid depopulation in the previous two decades due to slum clearances. However the war intervened and this plan was never put into action. The relentless demographic pressure on the school roll meant it was soon surplus to requirements, and it was closed by 1955 and merged into nearby St. Patrick’s, which would close in turn in 1981 for the same reasons.

After closure, St Ann’s lay vacant for almost twenty years until being converted into a community centre in 1975. Three decades later the community centre was closed and the building would be returned to educational use as Panmure St. Ann’s, a small, specialist unit for children “who experience social, emotional and behavioural difficulties“. Panmure comes from Panmure House on Panmure Close, which you may have heard was once the home of one Adam Smith in the 18th Century. Smith lived there from 1778 until his death in 1790. After WW2 the semi-derelict building was bought by the Canadian media magnate and owner of The Scotsman newspaper, Roy Thomson, Lord Thomson of Fleet. He had it refurbished and converted into the Canongate Boys Club, which opened in 1957.

In 1970 Panmure House was listed and had been passed to the “care” of the Corporation of Edinburgh. They merged its community services into that of St. Ann’s on the Cowgate and closed it. Like many old buildings passed into Council stewardship, this would lead to it being left to rot and finding itself on the buildings at risk register! By the early 21st century Panmure house was falling down, but was saved by a restoration for the Edinburgh Business School, a fitting home given the Smith connection.

Panmure St. Ann’s was granted full school status in 2013 but was closed again, for good, in 2017 due to budget cuts and a declining roll. It recently re-opened as a centre for homelessness services, taking it back to its roots as a place for the poorest and marginalised of the city.

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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.

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