#tollcross — Public Fediverse posts

A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park

Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.

The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.

In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.

For the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.

The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.

It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.

Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:

[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow

The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.

Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.

A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.

Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.

The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.

At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.

Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.

Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!

Ken Jones, writing to the Editor of the Scotsman, 19th January 1962

As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.

If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.

A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.

However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.

It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!

In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.

The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.

We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.

David Mowat, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, 7th November 1979, The Scotsman

Lothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!

NCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.

With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.

And if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

Fantastic #Parkrun turnout at #Tollcross this morning as several others were off due to slippy conditions. On volunteer duties today but back to running next week.

Gilmore Place Public School: the thread about the Rise, Fall and Renaissance of Darroch

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

Instalment seven of the series looking at “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” takes us to Gilmore Place Public School; a name likely to draw blank looks from most. That’s not unsurprising as it’s a building well hidden from passing view and a moniker that lasted but twenty years. But mention Darroch School and – despite the passage of over half a century since it last closed its doors as a standalone educational institution – you will get a flicker of recognition from a certain generation of Edinburgher. Darroch’s story is not a simple one, indeed it was never just a single school and in its time has housed more than ten different schools and any number of other council functions. But if we take the time to understand its travails it offers us a neatly encapsulated case study of the ebb and flow of secondary education in the city. It is also a happy story as it has bucked the trend of “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” and despite repeatedly being deemed surplus to requirements it has avoided the fate of many of its contemporaries – conversion into private flats – and is now enjoying an educational and cultural renaissance.

Our subject came to be as the solution to two urgent problems facing the Edinburgh School Board at the dawn of the 20th century. Firstly in 1903 West Fountainbridge Public School had been condemned as unfit by the Scotch Education Department for the third year running and it had been found impossible to bring it up to standard. Secondly all other schools in the locality, especially Bruntsfield, were over their capacities and there were 246 children in the district on a waiting list for places. The Board decided they could kill these two birds with a single stone and set upon building a large new school for the area.

It was settled on to purchase a one acre site at the end of Gillespie Street off Gilmore Place then occupied by an engineering works whose lease was approaching expiry. The owners however demanded “an extravagant price” due to complex servitudes1 upon the land. Undeterred, the Board petitioned for a compulsory purchase order in November 1903. This was the first occasion they had taken this drastic step to acquire a site but it would take over two years of legal wrangling and two rulings at the Court of Session to conclude it. The plot ended up costing £9,000, the majority of which was compensation and legal fees for neighbours, with a further £20,000 spent on the building, fittings and furnishings.

1. In Scots property law, a Servitude is a right befitting adjacent properties over their neighbour, e.g. a use of a path, a prohibition on building a certain distance from a boundary etc. ↩︎

The plans for a large, three-storey, T-plan building in a “simple adaptation of the English Renaissance style” were completed by the the Board’s architect, John A. Carfrae. The designed capacity was 1,500 pupils but it was planned that the two-storey side wings could easily be raised to three if an increase was required. There were twenty-six classrooms with an average capacity of 56 pupils. The infant department occupied the ground floor with juveniles on the first, each being arranged around a large central hall of 49 by 40 feet in size. There were mezzanine-level galleries around the halls so that children moving between classrooms did not disturb those in the hall (a common problem in earlier schools). The second floor contained practical teaching spaces for cookery and laundry and a workshop for manual crafts.

The school opened for business on Tuesday 3rd September 1907 with the staff and roll of the closed West Fountainbridge transferring here. The formal ceremony did not take place until Saturday 30th November with the Chairman of the School Board, W. H. Mill, presiding and the Secretary of State for Scotland, the Right Hon. John Sinclair MP, as guest of honour. After various self-congratulatory speeches the assembled dignitaries retreated to the Caledonian Hotel for a celebratory and well-oiled luncheon with numerous toasts.

From the very beginning, Gilmore Place was not one but actually two different schools. During the day the Public School provided elementary education for children up to the leaving age of fourteen. But the Board was keen to maximise the return on the “large amount of educational plant” that they had built at great expense and thought it wasteful to have buildings sitting idle after pupils emptied out their gates at three o’clock. Therefore by night it became Gilmore Place Continuation School, providing evening classes for adults. Evening classes were not new, but this was the first time the Board had opted to run a large, centralised school offering a full curriculum. For the first session, 1907-08, expectations were greatly surpassed with 750 students enrolling. Such was the demand – “so great as almost to be embarrassing” in the words of the Chairman of the Board – that additional courses had to be put on over the summer. Two of the courses, millinery and cookery, were reserved for those already working in those trades and accounted for almost half the intake. These were the first explicitly vocational further education courses run by the Board in Edinburgh and the Evening News reported the confectionery course “will be of an advanced nature, and it is expected that in a year or two it will be possible for Scotsmen to do high-class work now almost exclusively done by Frenchmen“.

Life as an elementary school was short and just two decades after opening it closed in 1928 in preparation for a metamorphosis into the city’s fourth Intermediate School. Such institutions were defined by the Scotch Education Department as providing “at least a three years’ course of instruction in languages, mathematics, science and such other subjects as may from time to time be deemed suitable for pupils who, on entering, have reached the stage of attainment in elementary subjects.” The purpose of this new class of school was to centralise teaching of post-elementary age pupils (from twelve to fifteen) in dedicated schools with a higher quality of staff and teaching. These were the children who had not passed the Qually – the qualification exam sat at the age of eleven which streamed their educational future – and would otherwise have remained in elementary schools in the Advanced Divisions, working towards a fairly generic leaving certificate. As well as the general curriculum the Intermediate schools would also offer dedicated Commercial or Technical courses aimed at improving the vocational skills of children fully expected to enter the blue-collar workforce as soon as they hit leaving age.

Edinburgh opened the first of this new class of school in 1912 at Tynecastle Technical School. The First World War delayed proceedings and so the next – the James Clark School – did not follow until 1918 at which juncture the School Board was merged with that of Leith and other surrounding parishes to create the Edinburgh Education Authority. Bellevue Intermediate (now Drummond Community High School) followed in 1926 but demand far outstripped supply and another was soon needed. The school at Gilmore Place was a perfect candidate; it was large, fairly central, relatively new and at that time relatively under-subscribed. It was altered at a cost of £6,000 with the number of classrooms reduced to eighteen and the capacity reduced to 720 children. A range of new facilities were provided, including dedicated classrooms for the specialist teaching of cookery, laundry, dressmaking, science, art and manual crafts. The nucleus of the new school was made by transferring the entire Advanced Division of Bruntsfield School as well as sending children coming of age from South Morningside, Tollcross, North Merchiston and Torphicen Street schools.

While the Evening News wanted the new school to be called Merchiston Intermediate the Authority instead renamed it the Darroch Intermediate and Technical School in honour of their late chair Professor Alexander Darroch (1862-1924). Darroch had held the Bell Chair of Education at the University for over twenty years and as chair of the Edinburgh Provincial Committee for the Training of Teachers he reorganised and modernised the training of educators. He believed his contemporaries “placed too much stress in examinations and on the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake” and was a champion of offering children instead the sort of practical skills that would prepare them for their working lives and taking their place in society.

In 1939 under a further reorganisation of education in Scotland a new name was given; Darroch Junior Secondary. This was in preparation for the leaving age being raised to fifteen and the “sentence” of students being extended as a result from three to four years. At this time a flat at 5 Leamington Terrace was purchased by the Education Committee for practical use of the girls taking the Domestic Studies courses which became known as the School Flat. This remained the exclusive domain of the girls until 1969 when – in a bold experiment which was a sign of changing times – groups of six boys at a time were sent for a fortnight course in bed-making, housekeeping, shopping, cooking and sewing.

Back in 1928 when the Intermediate School was formed, the Continuation School was reconstituted into the Darroch Institute for Adults to benefit from the new facilities on offer. This had 1,300 students aged from twenty to eighty-two on its roll and as well as a full curriculum of courses offered novel subjects such as lip reading for the deaf, speech therapy for stammerers and “Everyday Law and the Home” which taught the students the legal basics of topics such as marriage, parenting, pet-owning, pensions and renting. The Evening News praised the Institute as ranking “second to none among the modern schools devoted to adult education.” In 1967 there was a major reorganisation in further education in the city in preparation for the new colleges of Napier, Stevenson and Telford opening and it was rebranded as the Darroch Adult Education Centre with its courses pivoted to being largely recreational.

One course offered by the Institute was unique in the city; the Gaelic language. It was a subject that had been taught at the Supplementary School since way back in 1908 with Gilmore Place being home to the first public tuition in the language in the city. This class had its roots in 1901 when the Celtic Union had begun offering tuition on a private basis. In 1906 they had gotten permission from the Board to use a classroom at Lothian Road Public School with a tacit agreement that should they prove successful they would become part of the Evening School offering in the city.

The tutors were the Rev. G. R. Maclennan of St Oran’s Gaelic Church, Peter Thomson and J. White Maclean, secretary of the Gaelic Union in Edinburgh. In addition, specific classes in Gaelic singing and the theory of Gaelic music were given by Neil Orr, conductor of the Edinburgh Gaelic Choir. The Oban Times would write:

“It is to be hoped… that as many pupils will enrol as possible to ensure a continuation of Gaelic being recognised as worthy of a place in the curriculum of the Edinburgh evenings schools.”

Oban Times and Argyllshire Advertiser, 2nd October 1909

These classes were intended for the “interest of the Lowland Gaels in their mother tongue” and would later come under the tutilage of Calum Johnston. Johnston had come to Edinburgh aged 16 to train as a draughtsman with the firm of Bruce Peebles & Co. and for twenty-seven years would also teach his native language to the city. A lauded singer and piper he retired to his native Barra in 1956, the Stornoway Gazette writing that they were “sure that if any mortal is privileged in this Atomic Age to see the fabled isle of Roca Barraidh towards the setting sun, then Calum will be that one.” (In Gaelic mythology, Roca Barraidh is an island that will be visible to the west of the Hebrides only three times, the third and final heralding the end of the world.) In 1972, then aged eighty-two, Calum stood on the beach in his kilt in the December wind and rain to pipe ashore the body of Compton Mackenzie, author of Whisky Galore, which was being brought to the island where he lived for a decade for burial. He piped the procession up the 200 yard hill to the burial ground, stood to attention during the short ceremony before collapsing at the graveside and dying minutes afterwards.

On leaving Edinburgh, Johnston was replaced by Bh-uas Murdag Nic Choinnich (Miss Murdina Mackenzie) who became the only Gaelic teacher on the payroll of the city. The classes were in peril however and were withdrawn in 1958 following dwindling attendance; indeed they were suspended each session after Johnston retired due to a lack of students, thus ending a half-century association between the school at Gillespie Street and the Gaelic Language. (For now…)

Darroch remained open throughout World War two and a noted pupil at this time was one Thomas (Sean) Connery, who completed his time in education there between 1942-44. A reluctant pupil, his teachers branded him “very average – not at all brilliant” and he was apparently voted by his classmates as the boy “most unlikely to succeed“. Post-war it continued as a Junior Secondary with an average roll in 1945 of 550. Despite a long-term decline in Edinburgh’s urban population at this time its roll actually climbed beyond 600 due to the leaving age being raised to fifteen in 1947.

In 1960 it became one of the pilot schools ahead of the introduction of the new Modern Studies subject to Scottish secondary education in 1962. This gave pupils the opportunity to learn about TV, advertising, the press, citizenship and politics to equip them with “some knowledge of the complexities of the ever-changing contemporary world“. On Monday 22nd June 1970, the boys of Darroch set a world record for non-stop five-a-side football at the ground of North Merchiston Boy’s Club: they had passed the previous record of 13 hours and 7 minutes and at the time the story went to print were still playing.

But, new courses and football achievements aside, all was not well at Darroch. A letter to the Evening News in 1968 outlined the situation:

This conglomeration of old buildings is a disgrace to the town; and, to all appearance, a death-trap should an outbreak of fire take place on the ground floor.

The teachers are to be admired for their tolerance and consideration in taking a post in such a place because the pupils are not and cannot be expected to be proud of such a school

J.M. Morningside. A letter to the Evening News, 4th July 1968

In 1969 the school was publicly criticised by Councillor Robert Knox, chairman of the Education Committee, who acknowledged that its facilities were outdated and inadequate and that it required replacement. Knox, a Progressive, was criticised by his Labour Party opposite number for having presided over new schools for the fee paying all-boys Royal High School and James Gillespie’s School for Girls despite “in neither case was the need as great as Darroch“. The Scotsman printed a large investigative spread on the subject under the banner headline “The trouble with Darroch“.

Adjectives spring to mind – all derogatory. Bleak, barrack-like, looming. Inside, the school is no better: the corridors are furnished like a public lavatory, all white tiles and nasty green paint; the classrooms are unappealing, dingy and dark, with windows placed high up on the walls so that no pupil can be distracted by what is going on outside… Darroch Secondary School was built in the early 19000s and still has to suffer the educational norms of that time.

“The Trouble with Darroch”. Lindsay Mackie, investigation for the Scotsman, 8th march 1969

A teacher at this time at the school was the former Green MSP Robin Harper, who recalls his spell there from 1970 to 1972 in his autobiography “Dear Mr Harper: Britain’s First Green Parliamentarian.”

On my first day at Darroch a spokesman for a group of young teachers warned me: ‘Robin, this place is sheer hell. The kids never stop fighting. Any of them who show any academic ability are creamed off to Boroughmuir. Those who remain are an aggressive mix of children rejected by the system.

One school parent was the lawyer and author of contemporary history John G. Gray (seen alongside the headline of the Scotsman article). On learning his daughter was to be sent to Darroch due to a lack of capacity at nearby Boroughmuir, he was so taken aback by the state of the place that he wrote a pamphlet denouncing the condition of the place and the socially segregated state of secondary education in the capital in general.

As Edinburgh Citizens, we have allowed ourselves to become subject to a particularly vicious type of blackmail. Either our children secure a place at a top state school like Boroughmuir or we are offered a secondary course in such appalling conditions that sensitive parents prefer to educate their children privately at fees which many of them can ill afford.

John G. Gray, Focus on Darroch

Rather than simply pull his child out of the school and join his social peers in privately educating her, Gray instead took the Corporation to task; they did not care or “to put it vulgarly but accurately, give a damn“. He contended that they were happy with this state of affairs in the city whereby 45 percent of children went to a fee-paying secondary school. He noted that the conditions at school’s like Darroch were largely ignored by the authorities and the press until middle-class parents like himself began to complain. He publicly challenged the city’s Director of Education to produce a signed statement that the facilities at such Junior Secondaries were adequate: a call that did not elicit a response.

The list of charges against the school went on. Despite being built for 1,500 and having a declining roll of only around a third of that, it was cramped by modern standards, with numerous “temporary” wooden huts in the playground to provide additional teaching spaces. Its toilets were outside and “so revolting that children refuse to use them“, the gymnasium was tiny and had no changing or showering facilities, the playground was “minute” and it had no playing fields; children had to travel half an hour to Meggetland for games and sports. Its students tolerate a lot, but for them the straw that broke the camel’s back was the state of their school dinners. Matters came to a head in 1971 when the Head Boy, Andrew Ewing, wrote an angry letter to the editor of the Scotsman complaining about the state of affairs. As the school had no cooking facilities of its own, its meals had to be brought in by a lorry and were cold by the time they were served. It also had no dining facilities, instead students had to collect their lunch trays from a corridor floor and eat the unpalatable, cabbagey contents in classrooms. One such space was a science laboratory where the would pushed around escaped droplets of liquid mercury on the worktops with their cutlery in-between mouthfuls of cold custard.

With the increase in dining charges I hoped that the standard of dinners would improve. But the custard is cold. It is also watery, lumpy, lukewarm or inedible

Andrew Ewing, Letter to the Scotsman, May 1971

But rather than reprimand him for stepping out of line, Darroch’s headmaster – Dr William Gray – praised his student for putting into practice what he had learned in the new subject of Modern Studies. He confirmed to the Scotsman that the school had been serving dinner in this manner since 1946 but that a temporary dining hall would finally be opened later in the year to put an end to the practice. As John G. Gray put it, Darroch had “an excellent headmaster” in William Gray (no relation), one that did not believe that it was just the buildings that made a school “good” or “bad”. Writing in defence of his students, he cited a first year boy who when asked to write an essay on what he thought of his school wrote: “Darroch may be a slum, but when you are inside it is not half bad; I admit it is not fur-lined, but it is the teachers that count… Maybe it is a bit ragged, but it is the best school in Scotland“.

Headmaster Gray knew that the facilities at his school were badly lacking and that the authorities imagined his job was largely one of babysitting reluctant teenagers before they could enter “humdrum jobs” in the workforce as soon as they hit aged fifteen. But he was not content to accept this and made strenuous and praiseworthy efforts to provide better outcomes for his students. After taking up his position in 1964 he pushed for an early introduction of the new Ordinary Grade qualification into Darroch – something not all Junior Secondaries were afforded. He made sure the most successful students were allowed to stay on for a fifth year beyond the leaving age to sit the Higher Certificate – a privilege usually reserved for those streamed into the High Schools, which in Edinburgh charged fees. This gave students the chance to escape their planned futures in the rapidly disappearing “humdrum jobs” by opening up a wide range of employment and educational opportunities to them and also meant that students showing academic potential were not simply “creamed off” to other schools. His faith in his charges was well placed and by 1971 three-quarters of students of the age wanted to sit the O-Grade and there were 101 staying on beyond the age of fourteen, up 246% since Gray took charge.

Despite all these efforts, after 1970 the school’s roll began to sharply decline; dropping by almost 100 in a year. The Corporation saw an opportunity to dispose of the troublesome school on the cheap and made a proposal to merge Darroch with the James Clark School in St Leonard’s, which faced a similar issue of demographic pressures, a poor reputation and ageing facilities. But rather than spend any money on new facilities, they intended to simply move the combined school into an even older building, that of “Old” James Gillespie’s School, which had first been built in 1904. This rightly provoked anger amongst parents; if old Gillespie’s had superior facilities to Darroch then why had they prioritised a new building for the fee-paying, selective Gillespie’s High School for Girls to allow them to leave it. They knew their question was rhetorical.

These merger plans were put on hold until the outcome of the General Election that year was known and instead on December 14th 1970, the Education Committee voted to re-organise secondary education in Edinburgh to a fully comprehensive system “to end the unhappy segregation of children at the age of 12 into two distinct ability classes” and in preparation for the school leaving age being raised to sixteen in 1972. The end came swiftly for most of the old Junior Secondaries, dubbed as “dull, dingy, semi-slum schools” by the editor of the Scotsman, and in 1972 it was not just Darroch and James Clark but also Norton Park and David Kilpatrick in Leith that were unceremoniously closed. Darroch’s pupils merged into the newly co-educational, comprehensive James Gillespie’s High School at Marchmont in its brand new campus. Both the newly vacant Darroch building and – ironically Old Gillespie’s – became overspill annexes for Boroughmuir High which had rapidly expanded beyond the capacity of its building with the comprehensive move.

Concurrent with this the school’s adult education role was rapidly run down and by 1973 it was offering only ballroom dancing, dressmaking, embroidery and flower arranging. The deckchairs of secondary schooling in central Edinburgh continued to be shuffled around over the next few years as the comprehensive schools established themselves and the population continued to decline. By 1976 things had changed again and Darroch now become an annexe for James Gillespie’s, the school to which its former pupils had been moved to just 4 years previously!

Darroch remained occupied by Gillespie’s until 1989 after which a building programme at the main campus allowed it to be consolidated there and close its annexes. Once again it became a school without a purpose but this situation did not last long. In 1990 Lothain Regional Council sold the Dean Education Centre (previously the Dean Orphanage and later Dean College) and former St Bernard’s School in Stockbridge which made their Advisory Service – training for in-service teachers – homeless. They were therefore transferred to Darroch but couldn’t hope to fill such a large building and so it would become something of a dumping ground for various council departments including a base for teaching English as a second language, administrative offices for the city’s adult and vocational education programmes, storing excess classroom furniture and serving as a mail-order warehouse for souvenir merchandise for the centennial celebrations of the Forth Bridge!

The Local Government etc (Scotland) Act 1994 saw Lothian Region replaced by a new unitary authority – the City of Edinburgh Council – in 1996 and with the transfer of education functions from the old authority to its new successors, once again a big question mark was placed over Darroch’s purpose and future. Perhaps it too may have ended up being converted to expensive flats had a pressing need for its services not arisen just a few years later. In 1998 the collapse of a staircase at nearby St Thomas of Aquin’s R. C. High School at Lauriston highlighted the perilous state of repair of that school. It was quickly condemned and hurriedly decanted to Darroch until 2002 while it was demolished and completely rebuilt. Once again Darroch was the right building in the right place at the right time and once again its corridors resounded to the sound of children’s feet and its classrooms to the refrains of teaching. After another spell of vacancy, between 2013 and 2016 it was James Gillespie’s turn to decant back to Darroch while the “New Gillespie’s” school on Lauderdale Street in Marchmont was itself demolished and rebuilt.

Once again quiet and vacant, in an effort to save money the council then turned the heating off, leading to a rapid decline in the fabric of the building but typical of the short-sighted, disjointed thinking of local authorities they had also left the place partially furnished and so were paying over £40,000 per annum in Non-Domestic Rates! Fortunately positive plans were afoot for Darroch’s future as a second dedicated Gaelic Medium Education (GME) school for the city. This would follow on from the success of Bun-sgoil Taobh na Pàirce which had opened at the former Bonnington Road Public School in Leith in 2013 and which had quickly grown to capacity. Fittingly, in the early 1990s the office of the small team who brought the city’s first GME unit at Tollcross Primary to fruition had been based in Darroch. These plans would both return primary education to the school after a break of almost a century and also the teaching of the Gaelic language after a break of sixty years.

These plans fell through due to a combination of factors including the difficulty in recruiting and retaining sufficient Gaelic-fluent teachers to meet demand and the complete inability of the council to provide a satisfactory solution for GME secondary education – which was being delivered from Àrd-sgoil Sheumais Ghilleasbuig; James Gillespie’s. This setback however was perhaps a blessing in disguise as it allowed a quiet reset of the council’s GME secondary plans which were at the time being driven by a lack of capacity at Gillespie’s, the new showpiece school that completed in 2016 having been built too small. A ten million pound investment brought the schools facilities and accessibility into the 21st century – many of these changes directly addressed the shortcoming first highlighted back in the late 1960s, such as an accessible new entrance, bright and modern interiors and a dedicated dining hall.

The school re-opened in 2022 as Ath-Thaigh Darroch – Darroch Annexe – housing much of Gillespie’s GME teaching as well as providing dedicated study spaces for older students preparing for exams. The building also houses a number of Gaelic language cultural institutions in the city and has “has quickly become the heart of the Gaelic-speaking community in the city.”

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

Waiting on the night bus to Dreamland...

https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/54753334365

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #EdinburghByNight #NightPhotography #photography #photographie #Tollcross #Fountainbridge #LochrinQuay #BusStop

Nice evening with chums, taking our temporary French intern to a proper #Edinburgh pub after work, then amble homeward past the Tollcross fire station.

#Edimbourg #EdinburghByNight #NightPhotography #photography #photographie #architecture #FireStation #Tollcross

Union Canal this December evening https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/54213325381/in/dateposted/

#Fountainbridge looking towards #Tollcross end of the canal

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #EdinburghByNight #NightPhotography #photography #photographie #architecture #UnionCanal #UrbanNight

Taken this day, 2021, cinematic nocture https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/51719487242/

Tollcross and the Cameo Cinema at night

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #EdinburghByNight #NightPhotography #photography #photographie #Tollcross #Cinema #CameoCinema #marquee #BlackAndWhitePhotography

I'm Late, I'm Late.

Reminded of this oldie as I visited our good pals this morning - they have a print of it on their wall as they used to live nearby.

More in our Street Vignettes web gallery here - https://www.henni.photo/Edinburgh/Street-Vignettes

#Edinburgh #Photography #Tollcross

Photo by Paul.

The thread about Bread Street and whether its name has anything to do with bread or baking

This thread was originally written and published in October 2021.

In October 2021, a certain celebrity chef opened a high-end chain restaurant in Edinburgh called “Bread Street”. Confusingly, it’s on St. Andrew Square, and nowhere near Edinburgh’s Bread Street.

The real Bread Street is on the other side of the city centre, between the West Port and Fountainbridge. But why was it called Bread Street? Let’s see if we can find out more. But first let’s understand some of the history of the street and the area… The West Port was the old western gateway to the city of Edinburgh and lends its name to the current road here, the principal route into the city from the west and southwest before the middle of the 18th century. On either side of the road lay the small burgh of Wester Portsburgh – no prizes for guessing how it got its name! This settlement was an partially independent jurisdiction which grew up right outside the city walls.

Looking at a map of the early 19th century we can see the “Three Great Roads” into the city; from Falkirk, Stirling and Linlithgow in yellow, known as Orchardfield; from Lanark, Glasgow and Mid Calder in Green, Fountainbridge; and from Penicuik, Peebles and Biggar in Blue, Cowfeeder Row. In Orange is the high street of Portsburgh and in pink is the West Port itself, where the gate once stood.

It is Orchardfield that would become Bread Street, but not until 1824, when it begins to be mentioned in newspapers. The old name is one of some antiquity, recorded as far back as a charter of King David I in 1120 where it is referred to as the King’s Garden. It’s a fairly simple etymology, when taken with the nearby King’s Barns, these were Royal orchards and market gardens for Edinburgh Castle, and barns for the storage of produce. A map of 1784 by Alexander Kincaid shows that the although there were a buildings lining these roads at the end of the 18th century, the areas was still largely pastoral in character, covered in orchards, fields and market gardens. Ainslie’s map of 1804, as seen above, again shows much of the land remains undeveloped. But by now the city is beginning to creep more visibly westwards along the roads..

The town plans from 1804 to 1831 show a range of development proposals for this area. This latter map, by John Wood, shows that Bread Street has now acquired its name and a blocks of new tenements have been completed (in grey shading) along Lothian Road and the south side of Bread Street, and further blocks are planned (red shading). This plan would never be fully realised; the buildings along Lothian Road were completed, the space for “Brunswick Place” was left, but the public square never really materialised, and only the block between Grindlay Street, Bread Street and Lothian Road would be completed, and to a different and less formal layout.

By the time of the first detailed Ordnance Survey town plan, in 1849, Bread Street is formed more or less as it is to this day, although to its eastern end it is called Orchardfield Street – so we can suppose that whatever Bread Street is named for is centred around its western end. Note too that the individual blocks of Lothian Road still have their earlier names, the part here being Downie Place; the Road referred to the whole length, a common Edinburgh practice.

But why Bread Street? Well, there is perhaps a clue in the name of the confluence of the “Three Great Roads” at Portsburgh, an area known traditionally as the Main Point; or to a different sort of person (invariably a tourist) as the pubic triangle (on account of the triangular portion of land, aptly called a gushet in Scots, and the sort of entertainment offered at the bars on the corers of the street here).

You see, in the very olden days, Main was the name given to the best bread (that’s Main, not Plain breid!). This is from the French Paindemain, which in Scots became Maine.

It is … ordanit that na baxter baik na mayne breid to sell fra hine furthwart, saiffing allenarly at Witsounday1

Edinburgh Burgh Records, 1443

1. English – It is ordained that no baker bakes any main bread to sell from henceforth, except only at Whitsunda) ↩︎

Was this an area where bread was once baked? It’s a nice idea – although we have no specific record that this is the case. It would not have been where the city of Edinburgh baked its bread, given it was outside the city walls and therefore the restrictions of its trades incorporations. The area name is recorded in a post-office directory of 1775, and by the end of the 18th century a baker was established here and apparently too a “bread society”. It may be all to convenient however, as I think by this time the word main for the best bread had fallen out of favour for the best part of a century and had been replaced by the concepts of plain and fancy bread to distinguish between cheaper and more expensive loafs.

Whether or not the bread theory holds any weight, it should be noted that the Main Point was the name of the building, not a reference to it being at the point of the two gushets (Gushet. n. Scots. “A triangular piece of land, esp. one lying between two adjacent properties“) formed by Bread Street, East Fountainbridge and Cowfeeder Row. This spot was long the location of a toll house known as the Tupenny Custom. This toll has nothing to do with the local placename of Tollcross. It also has nothing to do with even a cross or a cross roads. It’s an 18th century corruption of the much older name Tollcors, a Brythonic toponym meaning a boggy hollow. It’s written as Tolcors in the 15th century and Towcroce and Tolcroce in the 16th.

Anyway even if it is fanciful that Bread Street and the Main Point are named after baking, it’s somewhat appropriate, as much of the block on the south side of Bread Street would from the late 19th century onwards, and well into the 20th, be acquired by and rebuilt for the St. Cuthbert’s Cooperative Society as a showpiece department store.

Fountainbridge is the spiritual home of the St. Cuthbert’s, named for the parish to the west of the city in which it was founded. Its original store was here, and later its administrative offices, its main bakery, its dairy, its transport department and its workshops. The litmus test of a real Edinburgher of a certain generation is to mention St. Cuthberts; if their eyes glaze over and they drift off into pleasant reminiscences for at least a few hours about getting taken there for school shoes and can still tell you their Divvy number, then you know they are the real deal. (Leithers went to Leith Provident Co-op of course.)

I’m afraid I can’t find many decent photos of Bread Street and St. Cuthberts that have appropriate permission to share, but there are loads on Scran, here (top tip, use your library card option in logon and see them all in high res) or some on Canmore, here. And the seemingly endless collection on Flickr of Mike Ashworth has this lovely promotional cover with a coloured illustration of the store (before the 1930s additions)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/36844288@N00/3552162236/in/photolist-mipbgh-mio4Hi-mio6Jx-mio6ZH-aFev4c-2kWTNSz-kWJ9Se-6pTL5u-moR6zG-FJhwEU

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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

The thread about the coming of the Union Canal, what became of its “Ports” and why its bridges moved around

This thread was originally written and published in October 2021.

A nice set of three pictures was tweeted by the City of Edinburgh Council today (October 17th 2021).

The first shows the familiar “Leamington” Lift Bridge, but not at Leamington – instead it is in its original location on Fountainbridge. Pictures two and three show the original lifting drawbridge that existed at Leamington and the Lochrin Basin with the lum of the Tollcross Tramway Depot winding engines towering over the scene, respectively. Not long after these pictures were taken, in 1922 the Union Canal was cut back to its current terminus. The hydraulically powered lifting bridge that carried the Fountainbridge roadway across the water was surplus to requirements and so was relocated to its current home. Here it replaced a diminutive wooden drawbridge and has long been a familiar landmark, known since as the Leamington Lift Bridge.

The below photograph shows the lift bridge in its original location – the street of Fountainbridge runs left to right along it. The photographer would have been standing where the modern office block which in recent memory contained the AKVA bar is. The baronial style block on the right was the headquarters building of the St. Cuthbert’s Co-operative Association and still stands in this location. In front of the bridge we can see a canal barge and the small building to its right housed the machinery for lifting the bridge deck and the weighbridge office.

The lift bridge had a relatively short life here, it was opened only in 1908 in a ceremony performed by Councillor William Fraser of St. Bernard’s Ward, convenor of the Streets and Buildings Committee. A feature of the structure is the raised steps to one side that allowed pedestrians to cross it when the deck was lifted (and still do, to this day). Prior to this, a much simpler drawbridge crossed the canal and was long a bottleneck to traffic and a danger to pedestrians. The newspapers are full of stories of drownings in this locality and in 1906, the father of Gordon Crawford, age 6, sued the City for £250 on account of injuries the boy received when the bridge was lowered on his toes while closing it, resulting in the loss of three toes.

If you are in this neighbourhood these days, and go along the landlocked street called Port Hamilton to the rear of number 90-98 Fountainbridge, you will see that it has a distinctive and unusual curving rear wall.

Such unusual features in a building are usually explained by a property boundary, which in this case is where this plot meets the former route of the Union Canal, where it turns right (east) after passing under Fountainbridge to its terminal basins. These were called Port Hamilton and Port Hopetoun and the former obviously explains the source of this modern street name.

Well before there was a canal here, around which soon grew the densely packed 19th century industrial district of Fountainbridge, the scene here would have been far more pastoral, starkly illustrated by this 18th century scene painted by Patrick Nasmyth.

But the illusion here is of course (deliberately) spoiled by the clouds of smoke and steam emanating from the Haig’s Lochrin Distillery. This facility operated on and off in the boom-bust cycles of the grain distillation industry from the 1760s through to the 1860s. The steam engine shown on the map below was likely the first one in Edinburgh, probably a Newcomen-type “atmospheric engine” for pumping water (thanks to Mark Watson for this information). The Cameo cinema is now the approximate location of the site. The wiggly line of running through the middle of the map and distillery is the burn / ditch / drain variously known as either the Dalry Burn or the Lochrin. This historically drained the Boroughloch (to the east, or right, of the map) west towards the Water of Leith at Roseburn. The name Lochrin, which lent itself to the neighbourhood, streets and later canal basin, a Rin (the Scots form of the English Run) being a “small stream, a rivulet, a water-channel“.

The workers had been digging for over 4 years when the 28 mile long Union Canal opened in its entirety from the Forth and Clyde Canal at Falkirk to its terminus at the basin of Port Hopetoun in May 1822. This is pre-emptively shown in Kirkwood’s town plans of 1817 and 1821, below – you can slide the handle in the middle of the maps to compare the overlay. The town maps or “plans” of this time had a habit of mixing what was built with what was intended to be built (as we can see from the pink washed planned buildings along Lothian Road). Note that the final route of the canal was more direct and curvaceous than that sketched out in 1817 – it simply cut straight through existing properties of Mr Robert Blair, Mr Hunter, Miss Grin(d)lay and Messrs Miller, Morison and Durie into the Inner Basin, which would be named Port Hopetoun. That land marked “Chisholm of Chisholm“, refers to William Chisholm, 24th Chief of Clan Chisholm, and was an area of open ground known as Grindlay’s Park. Notice at this time, Morrison Street isn’t named as such at the east, instead it’s Tobago Street and then the ancient Castle Barns.

The Grindlay’s Park land was aquired by the Union Canal Company to build the basin. In John Wood’s town plan of 1831, published 10 years after Kirkwood’s later map above, we can see that their portion of land to the east (right) has been developed into the gushet1 block defined by Fountainbridge to its south, Bread Street to its north and Downie Place to its west. The latter street was so named in for the first director of the Union Canal Company, Robert Downie of Appin, and lasted as the street name until Lothian Road took over in 1886.

1. Gushet, a Scots term for a triangular portion of land. ↩︎

Compared to the modern streetscape, it can be hard to get your head around where the ends of the Union Canal were at this time. The below map of 1848 shows the two terminal basins – the original Port Hopetoun to the east (right) and the slightly later Port Hamilton to its west (left). These sit between the elegant curve of Gardener’s Crescent on the left, Morrison Street to the top and Downie Place on the right. This end of the town was in a period of flux at this time, rapidly changing from the medieval suburb to the west of the old city limits to the new Victorian. Even in 1849 the place had changed enormously since the canal arriving just under 30 years previously as Georgian suburbs gave way to Victorian industry.

Port Hopetoun was named for the John Hope, 4th Earl of Hopetoun (that stately looking fellow on the plinth in the Royal Bank of Scotland’s garden at 36 St. Andrew Square). Coal was the reason that the canal was built, it was estimated the city residents and industries (including Leith) needed 214,000 tons of coal a year, and that the canal could capture at least 2/3 of this market. And thus it was coal that was the reason John Hope invested: he stood to profit heavily by getting coal from his collieries in West Lothian directly to the city.

Such was the initial success of the canal, Port Hopetoun was at capacity in a few years so Port Hamilton followed in 1826. Again it was named after an aristocratic coal master and investor; Alexander Hamilton, 10th Duke of Hamilton. Prior to the opening of the canal, the Scots Magazine gives the price of coal in Edinburgh at either 15-18s per ton if it was brought by cart from the Lothians or 18-21s per ton for the better quality coal that came by sea from Fife, Alloa or Northumbria. The canal brought this down to 11s 6d per ton and from its opening until the arrival of the railways from Midlothian into the city, these men enjoyed a near monopoly on the transport of coal into the city along their canal.

I don’t have a more authoritative source other than the master of one of the local canal boats, but it is my understanding that the current colour scheme of the canal bridges in Edinburgh is symbolic;

• blue for water
• black for the coal it brought
• gold for the prosperity it was to bring
• red for the blood (metaphorical and literal) shed building it

We know what things looked when the canal arrived in the city thanks to a wonderful Lizar’s engraving of a John Wilson Ewbank drawing of 1825 for Picturesque Views of Edinburgh, reproduced in watercolour by Dukinfield Swarbeck in 1827. This view, looking east towards the Castle, shows the bridge that defined the entrance to Port Hopetoun basin. The trees on the left are the remains of the gardens of Miss Grindlay and others that were cut through by the canal.

We can see the steeple of the High Kirk of St. Giles in the distance and to its right the prominent, tall tenement of Downie Place. This was just one building, the first, in what is now a seemingly nondescript corner to a much larger block.

The basin of Port Hopetoun was quite sophisticated, with a grand, 3-storey warehouse with rather spectacular cantilevered wooden overhangings on each side from where loads could be lifted directly out of (or dropped directly in to) boats sitting beneath. The building seen on the left of the image was an old house dating from at least 1780, which latterly became known as Hopetoun House. In 1898 this was one of the sites suggested for the location of what would become the Usher Hall, but nothing further came of this.

The later Port Hamilton was a simpler affair, just a long basin with a quayside and quite basic sheds around it for the coal merchants’ use. Notice in the distance the lum of the Dewar Place electric power station – dating this to after 1895.

A further photo by Francis Chrystal shows Port Hamilton from the other side of the basin, looking south. If you look closely at the quayside on the right you can see stacks of coal sacks; even by 1920 obviously someone was able to scrape some sort of profit by bringing coal into the city by canal. The modern brick building under construction is a motor engineering works for Alexander Brothers.

When these Ports closed in 1922 they were infilled to create new development land. Progress was not rapid however and Port Hopetoun was a sorry void in the city centre before eventually being selected in 1935 to be the site of a new block of offices by the Ministry of Works for the Inland Revenue. This grand Art Deco development included shops and houses, and in the basement was located a swimming pool and the auditorium of the Regal cinema (later the ABC and now a sorry excuse for an Odeon). Much controversy was caused in the newspapers in June 1935 when the name of Somerset House was unveiled. The outraged letters to the editor clearly had the intended effect as this was completed as the more appropriately named Lothian House.

The façade of this fine building is decorated with cast iron reliefs of figures representing industry and nature. If you look up you can also find a memorial carving to Port Hopetoun in the form of a canal boat and tow horse, with the civic crests of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the cities linked by this waterway.

The site of Port Hamilton was acquired by the St. Cuthbert’s Co-op and became a modern industrial dairy, bakery and transport workshops. In 1943, aged 13, one Thomas Sean Connery took up a job on a milk float for St. Cuthbert’s from here. He would later go on to make something of a name for himself in cinema. There are lots more great photos on the Edinburgh Libraries and Museum website – Capital Collections of Port Hamilton and Port Hopetoun if you follow these links. All of them are high resolution and so you can zoom right in to all the wonderful details.

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

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

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

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