The Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon: the thread about James Tytler and the first manned aerial flight in the British Isles

This thread was originally written and published in August 2023.

Today is August 27th 2023. So what is special about this date? Well, it was today, 239 years ago, when the eccentric Edinburgh character of James Tytler ascended in his “Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon” and flew the 3,000 or so feet from Comely Gardens to Restalrig on the outskirts of the city, thus making the first, manned aerial flight in the British Isles, immortalising himself in the process as Balloon Tytler.

A rather optimistic engraving of Tytler’s balloon flight, from “The Literary World”, 25th July 1840. In reality the bird-like gondola and the stove was absent during his flight and he sat instead in a small, wicker basket

James Tytler hailed from Fearn in Forfarshire, the son of a minister of the Kirk of modest means, who had been sent to Edinburgh to pursue and education and make a better life for himself. He was many things, but he was mainly persistently skint and in debt. Had he not been so, he may have been remember as a polymath. He had failed as a preacher, as a doctor as an apothecary and as a poet, but succeeded in scraping a living and keeping his creditors at bay as a pen for hire; he wrote much of the 2nd edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. But we are interested in him here as an aviator.

James Tytler, engraving of him as author of Encyclopaedia Britannica

In September 1783, a “fire balloon1” constructed by France’s Montgolfier brothers successfully flew with a sheep, a duck and a rooster on board (the animals all survived!) In late November, Pilâtre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes were the first human passengers in one of the brothers’ machines. Tytler, reading of these endeavours in far away Edinburgh, was captivated and – like many of his contemporaries -caught the flying bug . Working on the second edition of the encyclopaedia at the time, he devoted a whole 8-page section of the Encyclopaedia to ballooning, writing “In future ages, it will be as usual to hear a man call for his wings, when he is going on a journey, as it is now for him to call for his boots“. “By this invention” he continued “the schemes of transporting people through the atmosphere, formerly thought chimerical, are realised”.

The first flight of a Montgolfier fire balloon from Versailles in September 1783, the passengers were a sheep, duck and rooster

1. At the time, hot air balloons were known as fire balloons and hydrogen balloons as inflammable air balloons ↩︎

It was around this time, late in 1783 or early 1784, that Tytler took the bold step of determining that he would not just read and write about ballooning, he would also build and fly one of his own. This whole scheme may have arisen as an after-dinner wager in one of the dining rooms of enlightenment Edinburgh, as a scrap of handwritten paper was kept by Professor Dugald Stewart, in the style of a newspaper advertisement, announcing the intention:

We have the authority to assure the Public that it is neither Mr Tytler of Woodhouselee nor Mr Frazer Tytler, Advocate and Professor of Civil History in the University of Edinburgh, that means to go up with the Air Balloon on the 7th of May, but Mr James Tytler an ingenious chemist and distant relation of the others, whose friends it is hoped will accept of this intimation of their having no intentions of going up with air balloons at present, what ever-malicious or interested persons may chuse (sic) to give out, or credulous people may believe.

Wager or not, Tytler certainly had the brains, the self-confidence and the ambition to see this project through, but there was a big stumbling block; he had not the money. Indeed, this lack of funding would plague the project from beginning to end and seriously compromised his results. But he pressed on with planning nevertheless. On June 19th he took out a front page advert in the Edinburgh Evening Courant newspaper announcing a public demonstration of a scale model hot air balloon, both for his own testing and to try and raise precious funds by charging an admission fee:

On Monday next, the 21st current, will be exhibited
AT COMELEY GARDEN
By JAMES TYTLER, CHEMIST
A FIRE BALLOON, of 13 Feet Circumference,
AS A MODEL OF
THE GRAND EDINBURGH FIRE BALLOON,
with which he intends to attempt the Navigation of the Atmosphere

Edinburgh Evening Courant, June 19th, 1784

Comely Gardens, if you didn’t know, was a Georgian pleasure garden between Holyrood and Abbeyhill, “a wretched imitation of Vauxhall“, where for a few pennies you could stroll the ornamental garden, take tea, and listen to whatever music or entertainment had been laid on. The gardens both offered shelter within their walls and trees, from (most of) the prevailing winds, and an ability to charge people for entry. This tethered exhibition was successful and enough money was raised to fund construction of the full-scale “Grand Edinburgh Fire Balloon“

1804 Edinburgh Town plan by John Ainslie, centred on Comely Gardens. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

James got to work at once. The basic machine was quite crude – unlike the gaily decorated French contemporaries – limited both by his funds and his skills. The design was basically a 30 feet wide by 40 feet tall linen cylinder, lined with paper to make it “leak proof” and surrounded by ropes to attach a basket for the occupant and a stove to heat the air. Unfortunately, many of those gentlemen who subscribed to the scheme refused to part with their money until after the machine had flown (or at the very least risen from the ground), so he was caught in a Catch 22 situation, between having to follow through to prove himself to his sponsors, but also lacking the money or credit to actually do so.

Engraving of Tytler’s balloon from his own promotional tickets. The characters in the balloon are well out of scale. The “wings” projecting from the car were intended to “row” and “steer” it through the air but were entirely useless.

There was also the threat of the Edinburgh Mob, there being rumblings that they would either destroy the balloon as some sort of affront to God before it could fly or destroy it in disappointment if it failed to fly. The authorities were nervous and made it be known they might forbid the scheme entirely on public order grounds. Somehow Tytler managed to scrape together enough funds to complete the basic balloon envelope and resolved to demonstrate a public inflation of it to try and confound his doubters and convince some of the sponsors to convert their paper promises into actual money. But he needed somewhere enclosed to trial the inflation of his fragile linen and paper balloon and there was only one building big enough in town; the incomplete shell of the Register House – “the largest pigeon house in Europe“, still incomplete after 10 years of stop-start construction and a lot of finance.

The Register House, partially complete, some time before 1787. Sketch by John Brown, Cc-by-NC National Galleries Scotland

And so an advert was placed in the Courant on July 17th 1784, requesting the presence of “the Gentlemen who have subscribed or intended to subscribe“. The reporters from that paper and its rival The Advertiser were also invited to help publicise the scheme. This demonstration was also a success – sort of… the balloon did inflate – but the stove was inefficient and smoky, it coated the inner walls of the envelope in soot and sent up sparks and cinders which burned holes in the paper and linen, causing it to leak like the metaphorical sieve and slowly deflate. Tytler put a brave face on things, but couldn’t afford to start from scratch or buy a better stove, so resolved to patch up the leaky balloon and go for broke. The week of the Leith Races commences on 2nd August and it would provide the crowds and occasion to launch a flight.

William Reed, the Leith Races, late 18th century or early 19th. © Edinburgh City Libraries

There was a further reason to pick race week for the demonstration; it gave Tytler the perfect cover if things went wrong and the Mob was stirred. In this event, he could say it was the fault of the races for whipping up any trouble and not his flying machine. So the day after the test inflation at Register House he took out adverts across the local papers. In these, he announced the Edinburgh Fire Balloon would fly (tethered) after the first race, and every day thereafter, and that on the Friday it would be unleashed and might “cross the Frith (sic) of Forth”. He made yet a further appeal for financial support and made sure to note that Major Masters, commanding officer of the garrison at Edinburgh castle, had offered up his men to guard the balloon and any “Ladies and Gentlemen that may attend the different exhibitions“, lest the Mob spoil the occassion.

Tytler’s announcement in the Caledonian Mercury, 31st July 1784

So in amongst the drinking, the gambling, the debauchery, the freak shows and the general chaotic merriment of the Leith Races, Tytler was going to fly across the Forth! He removed the balloon back to the Comely Garden and got to work at once. For the occasion, he had tickets printed up, which he signed and numbered by hand. He also scored out the printed line “Constructed by William Brodie“, being unable to afford to pay a subcontractor he would now be doing all the work for himself.

Ticket to the Edinburgh Fire Balloon, British Museum number C,2.11-28

With what remained of his scant funds, he had constructed a mast 50ft tall, with a 64ft long arm at the top, to hold the envelope of the balloon as it inflated. But his relentless scrimping meant it was built too weak, and the day before race week began, Sunday 1st August, it collapsed under test. The crowd that nevertheless assembled at Comely Garden the next day to see the tethered flight was therefore denied such a spectacle. On each of the subsequent 3 days the west wind did blow – a direction from which the site was not sheltered – so disappointment prevailed again and again. Things were getting desperate for Tytler, he needed a success, and so he moved the balloon and the repaired mast to the most sheltered corner of the garden and on Friday 6th August – the date he had promised to fly across the Forth – he lit the stove and started inflating. But the wind again started to blow as the envelope filled and it strained at its mooring ropes. Tytler’s helpers struggled to contain it and it was only the ripping of the envelope and partial deflation that probably saved it from being blown clean away. The crowds left angry and dismayed. The Courant was scathing: “The Edinburgh Fire Balloon has been struggling hard to make its public appearance during the race week. Masts and yards and scaffolds and furnaces had lent their aid, but to little purpose. Its gravity and affection for the earth cannot be overcome“.

But Tytler was irrepressible, the winds dropped and the next day he tried again. This time the balloon inflated, but as he was about to clamber aboard the basket “a gust of whirlwind, as if send by divine command to blast the hopes of this devoted projector, attacked the Balloon, drove it hither and thither and by compressing it on all sides, soon reduced it to a state of flaccidity” and it once more deflated. The Mob had finally had enough; angry scenes followed this failure and Tytler fled before he could be accosted for any refunds. When the crowd could not find him they turned instead on his balloon, detached its basket and paraded it around the local streets in triumph before throwing it on the still-glowing stove and burning it to ciders. Their anger thus sated, they drifted home. Tytler was at rock-bottom and wrote about his feelings at this time:

I was obliged to hear my name called out wherever I went, to hear the insults of every black-guard boy, to hear myself called Cheat, Rascal, Coward and Scoundrel by those who had neither courage, honesty nor honour. I was proscribed in the newspapers and pointed out by tow of the Edinburgh News-mongers as a public enemy

His name may have been mud with the Courant and the Advertiser, but the Caledonian Mercury was more sympathetic about the failure, giving him the benefit of the doubt – he could after all not control the weather. It also pointed out that if more of his claimed backers would pay up, he might have the funds needed to succeed.

Perhaps encouraged by that forgiving take on events, Tytler soon slunk back to Comely Garden to examine the remains of his machine. The main flaw of his design was that it lacked a neck, so the wind easily blew or sucked the hot air out. About this he could do nothing, but he could at least try patch it up and get a new basket. The fragile paper lining was now covered in soot and full of cinder-holes and tears, so he painstakingly removed it, and instead varnished the linen to try and make it airtight. He could not afford to build a proper basket, and so one used to carry crockery was sourced as a passenger compartment. But this meant that the stove could no longer be carried. In fact this was probably a good thing as it weighed 300lbs and had a habit of mainly burning holes in the balloon. So he had to settle to try and fly without it, using only whatever hot air he could fill it with on the ground (and keep captive within it) to provide the lift for flight. His reasoning was simple, if he could make any sort of flight in the repaired machine, he should be able to raise the money for a full rebuild. In his own words it was “the resolution of a madman and which nothing but my desperate situation could excuse“.

And so the word went out that he would try again for a flight within a fortnight. Fortunately at this time, the attention of the public and of the press was drawn to the election of a new MP for Edinburgh, giving him some breathing space from both (even if there was only one candidate and the only electors were the Town Council!) Not wanting to incur the attention of the Mob again, the next attempted inflation on Wednesday August 25th had no crowd invited. The balloon was filled for over an hour to help dry out the varnish. At about 630AM, the fire was put out and Tytler climbed into his basket. The restraining ropes were cast away, the balloon floated, and then… nothing happened! Perhaps there was not enough hot air, or the morning was too cold, but at least there had not been a disaster and he had demonstrated “the practicability of the scheme“. The previously sympathetic Caledonian Mercury was not convinced however and under the title of “The Rise and Fall of the Edinburgh Fire Balloon”, they took a satirical imagination of his first flight,with it ending with the balloon pierced by a church steeple and its occupant being cast into a duck pond.

But success was in Tytler’s grasp and after a final few tweaks and another coat of varnish, he was ready to go again. It was Friday 27th August, 1784, 239 years ago today, it was about 5AM and the stove was once again lit beneath the envelope. An uninvited crowd had formed, either to be sure to see success or to be amused by failure. The balloon slowly filled, straining at its mooring ropes. Maybe Tytler – a deeply religious but unaligned man – said a prayer for success or salvation first, but he soon climbed into his basket again and the ropes were once more undone. And this time, to everyone’s surprise, up he went, eliciting a great cheer from them. Ascending rapidly, a loose rope caught a tree and the mooring mast, but such was the lifting force it simply snapped free of both. A height of 350ft was reached, the length of that loose rope, the crowd tried to grab it but it tore free from their grasp too. Up, up, and quite literally away he went! Carried on the western breeze, he drifted slowly eastwards and away from the city. The crowd gave chase, Tytler recalling afterwards that he was much amused by “looking at the spectators running about in confusion below“.

With no stove to keep the balloon hot, it rapidly cooled and the intrepid aviator was soon drifting back to earth. He came down about half a mile distant in the village of Restalrig, possibly in the minister’s glebe (but neither in a dung heap or a duck pond as his detractors had forecast). And for once, Tytler, the crowd, his supporters, and the press were all jubilant. The downtrodden little man with a moth-eaten coat, whose shoes were falling apart and who had a hole in his hat had succeeded! The previously hostile Advertiser declared him “the first person in Great Britain to have navigated the air“. The Courant were “amazed at the boldness of the undertaking” and made something of a mealy-mouthed apology for their previous scepticism. The Caledonian Mercury called it “a decisive experiment” and that Scotland could at last “boast of its aerial navigator“.

Filled with the confidence of success a 2nd flight – well advertised to the public – was planned for the 31st, the day of the foregone conclusion of the election of Sir Adam Fergusson as the city’s new MP. After completing the requisite formalities, the newly elected member and the Council committee hastily made their way to Comely Garden to join the assembled spectators. Once again the balloon inflated. Once again Tytler climbed bravely aboard and once again it took off. But it had been under-inflated and this time it rose to only about a hundred feet, coming down not far over the garden boundary wall. But it had still flown and it was enough to convince some of his backers to finally follow through financially and he was able to raise enough money to rebuild his basket properly and to have a new stove built for it. The clock was now ticking in the “Balloon madness” capturing the country and on September 15th Italian Vincenzo Lunardi made a balloon flight from Moorfield Barracks, in London. In Perthshire, an enterprising but unknown gentleman sent up a model balloon, 22 feet in diameter, which was seen to travel as far away as Moulin, some 25 miles, before being blown back on the wind almost to where it had lifted off.

Lunardi makes his first balloon flight in London. Note the different balloon design to Tytler’s, but that he too carries the useless oars and rudders © The Trustees of the British Museum

The autumn weather delayed proceedings in Edinburgh, it rained or it was too windy, or both, for weeks for any inflation or flights. But on September 29th Tytler was ready to go again. And so the balloon was hoisted on the mast and the new stove was lit beneath. A huge crowd assembled, packing out St. Ann’s Yards (now part of Holyrood Park) and the slopes of the Calton Hill. The first attempt deflated and so it was hoisted and filled again. But once again a sudden and spiteful gust of wind caught it. This time the supporting mast broke, the balloon collapsed and the whole lot came crashing down. One helper on the mast leapt for his life and landed in a tree, another was badly injured in his fall. Tytler’s luck and popularity was now trickling rapidly away from his grasp, as was the support of the press, who once again took up their sceptical stances. But he was no stranger to this and refused to give up, and went back to his repairs and planning another attempt.

That day came on October 11th. Everything proceeded as before. When the balloon tugged at its ropes Tytler climbed aboard and cast off. Nothing happened. He climbed out again to see what was wrong and now it took off! The Courant described that the balloon “rolled about a short time like an overgrown porpoise“, reaching a height of about 300 feet before falling sideways back to the ground and landing heavily, destroying itself in the process. Excuses were made – the stove was too small, the calculations had been gotten wrong, but surely now it was all over? Indeed it was not – Tytler just would not give up. He tried to raise more money for repairs but by March 1785 he had fled to the debtors’ sanctuary of Holyroodhouse (to which he was no stranger). It may have been he was being sued by the proprietor of Comely Garden for damages caused. Amusingly, his entry in the Register of Protections in the sanctuary recorded him as “James Tytler, chemist and balloon maker“. In the sanctuary, he was safe from his creditors but could not work on his balloon, and he was not safe from the fever that incapacitated him for 6 weeks.

The Canongate looking towards the Abbey Sanctuary, by James Skene 1820. A debtor, his coat flying behind him, is chased by his creditors and their batten-wielding henchmen © Edinburgh City Libraries

By the time he was free of debt and fever however, ballooning had moved on and a simple half mile flight wouldn’t cut it. He would – in his own estimations – have to fly at least as far as Dundee! A date was set of July 26th. And so once more, Tytler lit his stove. And once again it began to inflate. An ominous rumble of thunder was heard in the distance, the wind suddenly got up, the balloon was torn from its moorings and upended, the stove smashed to pieces and the envelope totally destroyed. And that was that. Tytler finally admitted defeat and gave up. He was consoled by kind words in letters from none other than Vincenzo Lunardi, now a national hero. In reply, Tytler composed a sad poem, including the couplet: “Lost are my wishes, lost is all my care, And all my projects, flutter in the air“. While the two were rivals they were so on friendly terms, Tytler beat Lunardi into the air, but it was the latter who made a success of it. Edinburgh satirist John Kay captured the two of them in a caricature entitled “Fowls of a Feather, Flock Together“, Lunardi holding out a conciliatory hand.

Lunardi, centre, holds out his hand to Tytler, 3rd left, in John Kay’s caricature of 1785, “Fowls of a Feather Flock together”

Robert Burns corresponded with Tytler, and gives as a contemporary opinion of him:

An obscure, tippling, but extraordinary body known by the name of Tytler, commonly known by the name of Balloon Tytler, from his having projected a balloon – a mortal, who, though he trudges about Edinburgh as a common printer, with leaky shoes, a skylighted hat and knee buckles as unlike as “George-by-the-Grace-of-God and Solomon-the-Son-of-David”, yet that same unknown drunken mortal is author and complier of three-fourths of Elliott’s pompous ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’, which he composed at half a guinea a week.

Robert Burns, describing James Tytler

Tytler very soon had to flee Edinburgh, on the run yet again from his creditors, apparently a method he had devised for bleaching linen, which could have made him his fortune, had been stolen from him by unscrupulous dyers. His wife sued for divorce in 1788 on account of him having taken up with another woman with whom he fathered twins. He returned to the city in 1791 to work again on the third edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica but he did not stay long; in 1792 he wrote a seditious pamphlet calling the House of Commons “a vile junto of aristocrats” and was outlawed. In 1795 he left for America, writing a further radical pamphlet en route, “Rising the sun in the west, or the Origin and progress of liberty“. He lived out his last decade in Salem, scraping a living from his writing and selling medicines. Turning increasingly to drink as a counter his disappointments in life, he left his house one day in January 1804, inebriated, never to return. The sea washed his body up 2 days later.

James Tytler, an 1804 portrait by American artist Hannah Crowninshield. Copy of a missing watercolour supposedly held by the Peabody Essex Museum

James Tytler is long gone, but he’s not quite forgotten locally. On the 200th anniversary of his achievement, a hot air balloon meeting was held in Holyrood Park, over the wall from the location of Comeley Gardens, the largest balloon being decorated specially for the occassion

James Tytler bicentennial commemorative balloon in 1984

Two modern streets are named for him in the vicinity of where the Comeley Gardens were located, Tytler Gardens and Tytler Court and there are two murals dedicated to his aerial adventures in Abbeyhill, the most recent by the Abbeyhill Colony of Artists in 2021 at the top of Maryfield.

The Colony of Artists mural to James Tytler at Maryfield. Note the map marks Tytler Court and Tytler Gardens.

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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret

The thread about the Lochend Steel Houses; Edinburgh’s first – and controversial – steel suburb

There’s a quiet and well-kept little corner of the Lochend Housing Scheme that is a bit different from the rest. Its houses look distinctly municipal (although they were never “council”), but they are at a lower density than other parts of the scheme; there are bungalows and there are no tenements. You wouldn’t know it to look at it, but underneath the modern external insulation and pebbledash, all of these houses are steel houses. Lets find out how these houses came to be and what sort of houses they are.

Lochend steel houses at Findlay Gardens

In February 1926 the Scottish National Housing Company Ltd. (SNHC) formed a new subsidiary to provide 2,000 steel houses for Scotland; the imaginatively named Second Scottish National Housing Company (Housing Trust) Ltd., (SSNHCHT). The objective of this was to quickly build new housing in areas that needed it, without either making demands on the skilled labour market or the material supply of the traditional building trade; bricks, stone, plaster and cement. By producing the houses out of prefabricated steel components, idle engineering workers could be employed; unskilled workers could quickly erect the houses on prepared sites and there would not be a significant drain on building materials. A further consideration was that there was a deep recession in the Scottish shipbuilding industry, which was projected to last for some years further. By extension, this impacted the wider engineering, steel and coal industries, and Scotland’s industrialists and a number of politicians saw steel houses as a stimulus for these sectors.

The SNHC had been set up in September 1914 to built housing on land owned by the Admiralty adjacent to the new Rosyth Dockyard. Its stated objective was “to carry on the business of housing, town-planning and garden city making” i.e. to develop the Rosyth Garden City for let to dockyard workers. It was arranged along the lines of a public utility company, with dividend limited to 5% and a board stuffed with the worthies of local government of Scotland, including the Lord Provosts of Glasgow and Edinburgh. During the war, they would go on to build some 1,872 houses at Rosyth.

Rosyth Garden City, cottage houses, 1920

The capital for the SSNHCHT steel house programme of the was provided by the government – 50% from the Public Works Loan Board and 50% from the Scottish Board of Health (at a rate of 5% interest, this scheme had to pay itself back!). Its time-scales were ambitious, with only 2 years were allowed to complete and there a £40 penalty for each house that failed to meet its scheduled delivery date. To keep labour demands down, only 10% of the workforce could be from the skilled trades, with penalties for exceeding this proportion. Houses were allocated to the main centres of population, including 750 for Glasgow, 350 for Edinburgh and 300 for Dundee. Five approved types were ordered; 1,000 Weir Houses (in 3 variants), 500 Atholl Houses and 500 Cowieson Houses. The SSNHCHT had to abide by local building regulations and have their proposals approved by the Dean of Guild Courts (the equivalent then of a planning committee). Rents were set to local equivalents and factoring was handled by local agents – in Edinburgh this was Gumley & Davidson. All of the steel houses had coal fires as the only source of heating and hot water and were lit by gas; electricity was ruled out as an economy.

Weir steel houses at Garngad in Glasgow

Steel houses were not without controversy – indeed the government’s initial offer had been a £40 per house subsidy to local authorities that ordered and constructed their own such houses; none had taken it up, which was why they turned to the SNHC. The prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had to intervene due to the controversy and made the provision of steel houses something of a campaign promise. Mrs Baldwin offered to personally live in one for a month to demonstrate how satisfactory they were.

The socialist movement faced the question of whether to resist them on account of their perceived lack of quality and the labour practices involved in their manufacture versus accepting them as a cheap way to quickly provide modern new houses for slum clearance. This caused a substantial rift at the time; John Wheatley MP (who as Minister of Health had been behind the “Homes for Heroes” council houses of the 1919 programme) spoke unfavourably of them: “the people [do] not want steel houses. [I have] yet to learn that a single one of the thousands who had bought their own houses had ordered a steel house“. The building trades were unhappy that workers employed in fabrication at the factories undercut their rates and that only 10% of the labour could come from their members. Mr Hicks of the Building Trades Union condemned them as “shoddy and insanitary“. His union was in turn accused of protectionism and of trying to prevent underemployed engineering workers and casual labourers from getting steady work on fabricating the houses.

There was also official prejudice against steel houses within Edinburgh; Baillie Mancor of the Town Council said the council wanted “real houses” and not steel houses; Councillor Mrs Eltringham Miller said that these houses were “a gift, and they were not looking forward to what they would cost after they had them.” Councillor Hardie went further and said that these were “shoddy building substitutes” and that the state was adopting a “Mussolini attitude” in forcing steel houses upon local authorities. Nevertheless, the Housing and Planning Committee approved sites in Edinburgh for the scheme on land they had already laid out for municipal housing. 250 were to go to Lochend, where 23 acres were transferred to the SSNHCHT and 100 to the Wardie district; additional land was reserved at Saughton as the Corporation desired 500 steel houses in total and was keen to encourage the SSNHCHT in any way it could.

Work progressed quickly; in July 1926 it was reported that “satisfactory progress” was being made and that the new houses were proving popular with applicants. By August, groundworks were complete and houses were beginning to rise from the ground; many more applications for let were being received every day. Rents were set at £22 per annum for cottage flats, £28/10 for the bungalows and £34 for semi detached houses. In November 1926, The Scotsman reported that the Lochend steel houses were nearing completion, with “quite a batch of Weir houses ready now, and men at work on the gardens, shovelling a rich, dark soil, which augurs well for the gardens of the future.” The paper observed that the houses were “more than empty: they have never been inhabited” and that it was with the “coming of the people and the gardens that they will acquire a personality.”

Lochend was allocated all 5 available types under the scheme, laid out in typical garden city style, the streets taking the name “Findlay” from John R. Findlay, Bt., chairman of the SSNHCHT (the steel houses at Wardie were given the streetnames “Fraser” from Provost Fraser of Dunfermline, who was on the board of directors).

Housing types and distribution of the Lochend Steel Houses

Atholl Cottage Flat

These houses were produced by the Atholl Steel House Company and named after one of its founding partners, the Duke of Atholl, who had envisaged building a steel house in 1919 after touring the idle shipyards of the Clyde. He partnered with the industrialist William Beardmore, whose shipyard and locomotive works were desperate for work, with his steel foundry at Mossend in Lanarkshire ready to provide the plates. Also known as “4 in a block” houses, this style was very popular with the 1920s public housing schemes, offering a good balance between reducing building and population density, construction costs and giving each household its own entry door and garden.

The Atholl Cottage Flat. The house on the right has not been rec-lad, and the steel panel lines are visible. Like the Weir Lanefield, the upper flats were accessed through the side. The narrow central upstairs window is diagnostic when comparing it with the Weir Cottage Flats.

Atholl’s original house was to be a lodge for his own estate, and as such was designed and built to be permanent. The construction of the Atholl House was therefore more substantial than its competitors, requiring 3 to 4 times as much steel. These heavyweight steel walls were load bearing, providing rigidity to the steel framework to which they were attached and therefore no internal cross-bracing was required. The steel was coated on its inner face with granulated cork to prevent condensation and then lined with composite boards, which were painted or wallpapered, eliminating the need for plasterers. Atholl estimated the lifespan of his house to be 60 to 90 years, with that of the Weir and Cowieson being 40 years.

The Weir Houses were produced by G. & J. Weir, engineers to the shipbuilding industry at the Holm Foundry in Cathcart in Glasgow. Weir’s chairman, Viscount Weir, had a particular interest in the idea of prefabricated houses and they would be something the company returned to on numerous occasions. Those of the 1926 scheme were of three distinct types, but all used the same basic structure, of a load bearing timber frame and floors to which a relatively thin skin of steel plates was attached as an external cladding. Their lighter construction and lower labour costs than other steel houses meant that they were the cheapest, and Weirs therefore got 50% of the total order for the scheme. A feature of all Weir houses was exposed internal copper plumbing; it could not easily be buried within the walls or their thin insulation layer, and Lord Weir felt it was better to make it accessible for repairs, so was simply clipped along the inner partitions. The Weir Paragon House of 1944 inherited this design feature.

General construction diagram of the Weir Steel Houses; a wooden frame sitting on a concrete base, with lightweight steel panels cladding the outside.

In 1925, Weirs built a demonstration steel bungalow in Grosvenor Square in just 10 days:

10 days to complete a house. The Weir demonstration house in Grosvenor Square

The Weir Houses were the most controversial of the steel houses as Weirs paid their workers at the rates of the engineering trades from which they were drawn, which were lower than those of the building trades. Weirs were accused of building “steel houses of a very inferior kind by paying low wages under sweated conditions“. In an editorial, The Scotsman called them “a pig in a poke” (an unknown entity) but that people would want to live in them anyway and prevailed upon Weirs to improve their wages. Atholl avoided this scandal by paying building trades rates to their prefabrication workers in the factories.

Weir Eastwood Bungalow

The correspondent from The Scotsman who was sent to review the house noted that “the Living room is a good size, and the kitchenette or scullery is larger than that of many a modern brick house. The two bedrooms are a sensible shape“. The Eastwood, like its siblings, featured lots of built-in storage cupboards and a built-in coal bunker in the kitchen. The price, excluding groundworks, was set at £365 per house.

Weir Eastwood Bungalow at Lochend, this pair of houses were in a very original condition at the time this photograph was captured.

Weir Douglas Semi-Detached House

The Douglas was the largest of the Weir Houses and was a semi-detached, two-storey cottage house. The ground floor contained a sitting room with “handsome fireplace”, kitchen, larder, bathroom and – something of a novelty for the time – a large under-stairs cupboard. Upstairs were the three bedrooms, with the master bedroom running the full width of the house and having an unusually wide casement window to the front. This was the only house of the programme that had 3 bedrooms; all the other having 2. The price, excluding groundworks, was £390 per house.

Weir Douglas Semi. The house on the right is in a very original condition, that on the left has modern windows, roof, external insulation and cladding and porch. Note the five-pane first floor window.

Weir Blanefield Cottage Flat

This was the cottage flat in the in the Weir range. It was basically a 2-storeyed version of the Eastwood Bungalow with the upper flats accessed by internal staircases accessed from the side. The upstairs kitchens had floors strengthened with timber laid on a damp-proof layer to protect the steel beneath from “the vigorous scrubbings” of the housewife. The price, excluding ground works, was set at £357 per house.

Weir Blanefield Cottage Flat. In a relatively original condition excepting the modern UPVC windows in 3 of the 4 flats. The easiest way to discern this from the Atholl cottage flat is the lack of the narrow central upstairs window to the front, and the upstairs outer window is offset somewhat from that on the ground floor

Cowieson Terraced House

F. D. Cowieson had trained as an architect, but found success in prefabricated wood and iron buildings, with the company based in St. Rollox in Glasgow. Initially these were simple agricultural structures such as barns and sheds, but soon the company was offering halls and huts, pavilions and even cinemas. During WW1 the company turned to building bus and lorry bodies – particularly ambulances – and they would later become much better known for this side of the business. They also experimented with “brieze block” houses, a single pair of which were trialled in Edinburgh at the Riversdale Demonstration Site.

1920s advert for Cowiesons, describing the range of prefabricated structures that the company offered.

The Cowieson Houses built in the programme were of a four-in-a-block terrace and like the Weir Houses, used a load bearing wooden structure to which a steel cladding was applied. The roof was originally asbestos tiles.

Cowieson Houses at Lochend the three houses on the left have been re-roofed, externally insulated and pebbledashed; that on the right has not and looks to have its original roof also.Cowieson Houses in Dundee, built under the 1926-7 scheme by the SSNHCHT. This photo has been included as the exterior is in its original condition and the light paint shows up the steel panel lines to good effect.

In July 1927, Lochend was proudly exhibited to King George V and Queen Mary, who made a royal visit on 11th of that month. Before proceeding to Lochend, the visitors stopped at the Corporation’s newest housing scheme at Prestonfield, where the King and Queen each planted a tree to inaugurate the development. They then headed to Lochend through the Holyrood Park, with 35,000 school children turned out to line the route. Further crowds greeted them at Lochend and they made a slow drive through the new neighbourhood, guided by Lord Provost Stevenson and two councillors.

Their majesties expressed pleasure at the fine layout of this garden city and were greatly interested in the many types of construction in evidence as well as the openness of the place and tasteful arrangement of the gardens.

Edinburgh Evening News, 11th July 1927

The Royal Party at Lochend Drive. The Queen is leading the King onto the pathway, lined with a neat picket fence.

A halt was made at 49 Findlay Gardens, a Weir bungalow, where an inspection was made of the house occupied by the Hill family and their two young children. Mr Hill’s occupation was given as the manager of an egg merchant, T. Howden & Co., in Leith, which gives an idea of the sort of persons who were living in the houses. The residents were asked if the house had been cold in winter; yes it had been, but it was not now (it was July!). The next house to be inspected was the Atholl House of Mrs Wilson at 7 Findlay Medway, where they remarked on the sensible layout of the interior and were intrigued by a bed settee in the living room, the Queen sat on it and plumped up the cushions.

The householders were apparently not informed in advance that they were about to receive their guests and the first thing they knew was the knock on the door from the police. One of the housewives was reputedly peeling potatoes when they arrived and said of the Queen: “She’s a verra hamely lady” and that “Ye hav’na much crack for folk o’ that kind, and ye’re a bit tongue-tacket, but she was that kind and natural, and said everything was very nice“.

The King and Queen leaving 58 Lochend Avenue, an Airey tenement flat

On leaving the steel houses, the royal party then proceeded to some of the Airey Duo-slab houses; Mr & Mrs Galloway at 58 Lochend Avenue and Mrs Dickson at 34 Lochend Drive.

In the end, an additional 500 steel houses were erected by the SSNHCHT above and beyond its original target, taking the total to 2,252. All were completed by the end of 1928 and the stock, along with those at Lochend, was passed to the ownership and management of the Scottish Special Housing Agency in 1963 when it took over the assets of the Scottish National Housing companies. Although they were only given a 40-60 year lifespan by their builders, most were first refurbished between 1978 and 1983 and in 3 years time they will have their centenary. Nearly all are still standing and most have been substantially upgraded with external insulation and rendering, double glazing, central heating, new roofs etc. A handful remain in an earlier state, usually those that had been bought very early under “right to buy” legislation. The tenants of those that were not bought early campaigned to have them upgraded rather than demolished, and most of those were subsequently bought (it was not possible to buy a defective house).

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#CouncilHousing #Edinburgh #GardenCity #Lochend #prefabrication #prefabs #publicHousing #Restalrig #SNHC #SSHA #SteelHouse

The thread about the East Foul Burn; profiting from sewage in the 18th century

This thread is part one of a series; the link to the next part can be found at the bottom.

We begin our story with the wonderfully verbose cover of a Victorian pamphlet;

FOUL BURN AGITATION!
STATEMENT
Explaining
NATURE AND HISTORY OF THE AGRICULTURAL IRRIGATION NEAR EDINBURGH;
Containing
A REFUTATION OF THE UNFOUNDED AND CALUMNIOUS MISREPRESENTATIONS ON THAT SUBJECT,
In
A PAMPHLET PUBLISHED IN THE NAME OF A COMMITTEE OF THE COMMISSIONERS OF POLICE, IN WHICH THE ANCIENT AND BEAUTIFUL CAPITAL OF SCOTLAND IS FALSELY DESCRIBED AS A RESIDENCE UNSAFE TO THE HEALTH OF ITS INHABITANTS!

I say pamphlet, the thing is actually 166 pages long and I spent quite some time reading it (skimming much of it) so that you don’t have to. It is Victorian local politics at its best and wors, and much of it is indeed pure agitation. But it was worth ploughing my way through it as it happens to contain a complete and detailed description of Edinburgh’s largely forgotten East Foul Burn and the Irrigated Meadow systems of Craigentinny and Restalrig, their history and their method of operation.

Anyway, what is this East Foul Burn of which I speak? Well it’s the principal watercourse that in olden times drained most of the Old Town, the Nor’ Loch and the small suburbs south of the city into the sea; rainfall, sewage and all. We can see it on the below map of 1750 by William Roy. It is the stream which flows from bottom left to top right – the stream originating in Lochend Loch in the centre left is the tail burn of that body of water.

The East Foul Burn’s natural route to the sea via Restalrig and Fillyside (North Mains of Craigentinny). William Roy’s Lowland Map of c. 1750. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

If you examine a old map of the Old Town and consider the topography, it’s obvious that gravity will carry anything liquid downhill. John Slezer’s remarkably accurate 17th century sketches of the city help us to visualise this from a contemporary point of view; any waste discharged on the north side of the ridge on which the Old Town of the city was built is obviously going to drain itself into the Nor’ Loch.

Prospect of the Castle and City of Edinburgh from the Nor’ Loch. John Slezer, 1673, arrows indicate the steep northern slopes of the “tail” of the crag and tail geological formation on which Edinburgh’s Old Town sits

That loch could only drain eastwards, in the direction of the sea. James Gordon of Rothiemay’s remarkable 1647 bird’s eye view of Edinburgh shows it clearly. After irrigating the pleasant-looking Physic Garden by the Trinity College Kirk, it ran off down the North Back of Canongate (what we now call Calton Road) where it was joined by any runoff from the community nestled below the crags of the Calton Hill and from the streets and closes of the north side of the Canongate itself. The stream (in reality an open sewer) passes a number of round structures; these were wells and water cistern – one of the reasons so many breweries would congregate here. 100 years later, Edgar’s map of 1765 still shows that this open sewer still ran here.

Bird’s Eye View of Edinburgh, James Gordon of Rothiemay, 1647. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Stuart Harris, the late local historian and custodian of Edinburgh place names, refers to the wells here as being along the Tummel Burn (and you will also see it given as Tumble) which is an alternative name for the East Foul Burn, this refers to the water flow, although one imagines it wasn’t so much a pleasant babbling brook as a bubbling cauldron of filth.

The burn worked its way down the North Back of Canongate to the Wateryett (a Scots placename meaning water gate; the word for a gate was commonly port but can occasionally be yett; the word gate or gait meant a roadway e.g. Canongate). The water part of the name refereed as much to this being the route into the Canongate for drinking water from the wells as it was from being alongside a watercourse. The yett part refers to the area at the foot of the Canongate where there was a physical gateway; not a defensive structure, but a civic boundary and customs barrier. This is confirmed by a reference from a title deed in 1635 which describes the Foul Burn as being in a gutter known as the Strand. This latter term is an old Scots word for “an artificial water-channel or gutter, a street gutter” – the Abbey Strand is the name of the old building that stands to this day at the foot of the Canongate, just before you enter the grounds of the Holyroodhouse.

The Wateryett in 1818, a drawing by James Skene. By this time the physical gate had been replaced by a symbolic one for the toll house. © Edinburgh City Libraries

After the Water Yett, Edgar’s 1765 map shows that the burn ran in a culvert here, but we can infer its route. This map is the extent of 18th century town plans so to follow the burn we move onto an 1804 plan by John Ainslie to pick up the trail once more. It re-surfaces around Croftangry (corrupted in modern times to the Gaelic-sounding Croft-an-Righ) before disappearing underground again in the property of the Lord Chief Baron (Sir James Montgomery, 1st Baronet Stanhope) only to re-appearing on the property boundary between him and Mr Clerk. Comley Gardens and Clock Mill on Ainslie’s map are old placenames here still recalled by modern street names. The burn here now contains almost the entirety of the effluent of the city of Edinburgh, the Canongate, the burgh of Calton and the village of Abbeyhill.

Ainslie’s Town Plan of 1804, Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. Orange lines show the course of the Foul Burn east

The Comely Gardens referred to on the map above were a Tivoli Garden, a sort of Georgian amusement park where – for a fee – one could stroll the gardens and admire the roses, could take tea or coffee or fruits and entertainment such as dances and musicians may be laid on. Comely Gardens is to be forever remembered as the starting point of the Great Edinburgh Fire Balloon, the first manned aerial flight in the British Isles. In August 1784, James Tytler rode a Montgolfier-style balloon all the way to a crash-landing in Restalrig and his name is recalled in a couple of the modern street names in this area. But back to the matter in hand, following the burn east we have reached the Clock Mill, an old house named for a mill that was driven by the burn. The name came from Clokisrwne Mylne or Clocksorrow; clock is a corruption of the Scots clack, being a specific type of mill, an onomatopoeia based on the noise its mechanism made. Sorrow refers to some form of hollow in various old tongues.

Clockmill House in 1780, from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant. Notice the naval telegraph mast on top of Calton Hill

In the vicinity of Clock Mill, two further open sewers joined the burn, adding yet more effluent. The came from the Pleasance (and by extension much of the Southside) and from the Cowgate to its payload. Both of these first drained into a myre just south of Holyroodhouse, marked on Kincaid’s map of 1784 as Common Sewer Kept Stagnate for Manure, i.e. the sewage solids would settle out of the slow moving water and could be collected to fertilise the city’s gardens and orchards. There was good money to be made in such “soil” or “dung”. Before the advent of early industrial fertilisers or the Kelp Boom it was one of the few copious and economical sources of fertiliser for fields and was much in demand – all you had to do was collect it (or pay someone to do this)!

Kincaid’s Map of 1784, showing the “Common Serwer Kept Stagnate for Manure”. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

After Clockmill House, which was demolished in 1859 to landscape its grounds as a military parade ground, the burn passed beneath the main road east out of the city (the London Road would not be built until 1819). The bridge here was known as the Clockmill Bridge. It is the presence of the burn that explains why significant culverts were built here under both the North British Railway and the London Road when each was constructed. Robert “Lighthouse” Stevenson, the engineer of the London Road, produced beautiful drawings for the culvert here under his road;

Stevenson’s drawings for the London Road culvert. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland (MS.5849, No.54 – 57)

By the time the burn passed under this culvert, it was carrying the daily sewage of about 60-80,000 people, not to mention their animals. The Foul Burn Agitation! pamphlet describes it as “a rapid and copious stream… to which [is] added the impure waters that proceed from the houses, streets and lanes of the city“. From there, the effluent of the city should have been a relatively straightforward journey down the broad, shallow natural valley in which Restalrig sits to the sea, at Fillyside (roughly where the Matalan store now is).

The East Foul Burn at Restalrig village, flowing along the foreground and passing under the road in a culvert. From an old post card, early 20th century.

However it could not take this natural procession to the sea as its process was interrupted; it was industriously turned over into a series of irrigated meadows, “irrigated by the waters from the City” at Restalrig, Craigentinny and Fillyside.

Kirkwood’s Plan of 1817 showing the irrigated meadows along the Foul Burn. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

In the irrigated meadows, the Foul Burn was intersected by “principal feeders“, ditches cut along the topographic gradient. Water could be admitted to the feeders by means of sluices or damming the outflow. These feeders in turn fed further side-ditches into individual plots. The plots would be subject to controlled flooding from April to November, the fodder growing season. For two or three days a plot would be flooded, saturating the ground with sewage which would settle. The water was then allowed to run off and the plot was given three to five weeks for the grass to grow. It could then be cropped and the process could begin again. The process of flooding and cropping plots was rotated so that there were always fields ready to crop, and there was always a good supply of sewage with which to flood it. The whole object of this exercise was to provide a steady supply of food for the city’s dairy herds – this was a time when milk could not be preserved or transported any great distance, so the cattle had to be kept in and around the immediate vicinity. The system also had dedicated settling ponds where the soil could be collected and sold off by the cartload.

Craigentinny Meadows, James Steuart, 1885. Note the sluice and ditch and the ample crops. © Edinburgh City Libraries

The Restalrig Meadows were at the turn of the 19th century the property of the forementioned Sir James Montgomery Bt. and extended to around 30 acres. The Craigentinny and Fillyside Meadows were owned by William Henry Miller of Craigentinny and were the largest at c. 120 acres.

Craigentinny Meadows, photograph by David Sclater, 1895. On the horizon are the “Craigentinny Marbles” (tomb of William Henry Miller) and Wheatfield House on the present day Portobello Road. © Edinburgh City Libraries

There were further such irrigated meadows at the foot of Salisbury Crags, about 14 acres – the property of the Earl of Haddington – and near Coltbridge (modern Murrayfield) to the west, some 40-50 acres owned by Russell of Roseburn. This latter ground was fed by a much smaller foul burn – the West Foul Burn – which drained the portion of the city around Tollcross, West Port and Lauriston and the west end of the Boroughloch, making its way west via Dalry to Roseburn and then into the Water of Leith.

While the soil of the city had been collected since time immemorial, it’s not clear when this industrial-scale meadow system evolved. The Foul Burn Agitation! recounts testimony of elderly farm workers of Restalrig that they had been in place since at least 1750. However a document from 1561 when the lands of Restalrig Kirk were confiscated during the Reformation records “of certain prebendaries yardis, in Restalrig and Chalmeris pertening to the saidis prebendaris, callit their Mansis and pece of suard Meadow” – the suard here referring to a piece of marshy or boggy ground. The pamphlet states the “practice existed from time immemorial of flooding the Meadow grounds by means of the Foul Burn“. So we can say with some certainty that it was an old and established practice, and indeed the courts agreed with this when Alexander Duncan WS of Restalrig House tried to sue his neighbouring sewage barons, Miller and Montgomery, on account of the smell from the meadows spoiling his quality of life.

Restlarig House, c. 1883

Indeed the legal action ended up backfiring on Duncan because in 1833 the Burgh Police Act protected the proprietors from any act “to divert or alter any stream or watercourse, or diminish the ancient and accustomed quantity of rain or other water or soil flowing therein“, guaranteeing their right to operate the meadows and collect the profits. (Side note, this was included in a Police Act because at that time in Scotland the Police had the powers and responsibilities for cleansing the burgh, distributing water and preventing disease).

The East Foul Burn at Craigentinny, WS Reid, 1860. Looking towards Miller’s Craigentinny House. Notice the bridge across the river and that the bank is reinforced – evidence of the extensive river management. Notice that the crops on the left of the picture seem long and those on the right are short, evidence of the constant rotation of cropping in the plots. © Edinburgh City Libraries

The other aspect of the system was the settling ponds. These are recorded as far back as 1738 when Mr Baird of Clockmill was irrigating his fields and “collecting dung“, but by the late 18th century they were beginning to be infilled and had vanished by the 1820s. These are clearly shown on Kirkwood’s 1817 town plan. Appropriately enough parts of it look like a bit like a drawing of the human digestive system! The reason for abandoning the ponds because of two problems; firstly, there was too much sandy sediment washed off the city streets into the burn, and the customers – market gardeners mainly – were loathe to pour sand onto their plots and orchards. More importantly however the sediment was found increasingly to be full of seeds. Without putrefaction (fermentation), these seeds could not be killed, and when the seed-rich manure was spread it was an instant recipe for spreading weeds.

The soil settling ponds around Restalrig and Craigentinny. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

And so the system concentrated around the production of grass for animal forage; a very productive and profitable system it was. 400 labourers were employed seasonally, and some 3,300 cattle in Edinburgh and 600 in Leith depended on it, mainly pen-fed dairy animals. Most dairies were small concerns, run by the occupation of a “cow feeder“, with 20-40 milk cows each.

The Holyrood Dairy, c. 1830-40. Painting by William Stewart Watson. © Edinburgh Museums & Galleries

The meadows were estimated to turn a profit for their proprietors of £5,000 per annum (about £600,000 in 2022), with William Henry Miller estimating he made £30,000 (c. £3.4 million) over 2 years. Rents were 20-30/s per acre, or up to double that for the better pasture or during times of food scarcity. Preparing a meadow cost £20-25 per acre and was a sound investment. Miller in 1821 spent £1,000 turning over 40 acres of “sandy wasteland” – the lands of Fillyside were ancient raised beaches – to meadow use. Each acre could provide up to 6 full crops per year.

A Map of Miller’s estate at Craigentinny showing the huge network of feeders and ditches that supported the Irrigated Meadow system. This map was surveyed for Miller in 1847. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

All-in-all, this was a very productive and profitable concern, so much so that in 1834 the Police Commissioners tried to extend the burgh boundary to include the irrigated meadows and to give themselves rights over them. They spent 4,000 of the city’s pounds on the scheme, which the Foul Burn Agitation! describes as “Dung Speculation“. They were unsuccessful though as the proprietors and their one-time adversary Mr Duncan fought the Commissioners off. William Henry Miller (a former MP by this point, wealthy and influential) was quick to defend his profitable scheme. In 1843 when the North British Railway proposed running their line across his meadows, Miller had them shift it about 100 feet west so that it instead skirted around his lands. He then exchanged parcels of his land on the south of the new line with his neighbours – the Dukes of Abercorn – who had parcels trapped by the railway on the north, so each could maintain a contiguous field system. Miller also made thinds hard enough for the NBR that they never built their proposed shorter branch to Leith across his land.

The survey of Miller’s lands in 1847 show the main and sub-feeders, and the direction of flow of the water of the Foul Burn through them. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

But the whole system had a number of problems facing it. Firstly, the woeful sanitation of the Old Town needed resolving – it was recognised by now that waste needed to be piped under the ground, not just run in an open sewer for the benefit of a couple of wealthy landowners. And secondly, in 1817 the Edinburgh & Leith Gas Light Company began building a gas works at New Street, crowned by its great chimney that dominated the Canongate.

The gasworks and its chimney, with the Canongate Kirk on the left for scale.

At this point, coal gas works had yet to begin extracting their by-products for industrial use, so you can guess where the gas works were dumping all the highly toxic waste chemicals. Coal tar, sulphur and ammonia as well as any other numbers and varieties of hydrocarbons went into the Foul Burn from New Street. The gas works “give forth an abundant stream, the odour of which is no doubt extremely offensive, being the most nauseous of all compounds… …This flows into a principal feeder of the old foul burn at the South Back of the Canongate“. To put it simply, the gas works was poisoning the burn. This was not the first time that the foul burns had been polluted by industry. In 1791, Russell of Roseburn attempted to use the courts to stop the Haig’s distillery at Lochrin from polluting his irrigated meadows at Coltbridge.

The proprietors of the eastern irrigated meadows managed to get fines applied to the gas works, £200 per instance of pollution and £20 per day – this seemed to have the intended effect. Or perhaps the gas works just found it more profitable to begin capturing its by products for commercial gain rather than letting them run away. Whatever the reason, the Foul Burn was “cleared up” and the eastern meadows managed to carry on; the 1888 OS 6 inch Survey shows they still occupy their main extent. In 1901, an attempt was made to bury the entirety of the burn underground as a sere, but this was unsuccessful. The scheme finally commenced in 1921 as a work programme for unemployed men; a £60,000 government grant being secured to provide employment for 400 men for six months. This “draining of the swap” opened up the lands of Lochend, Restalrig and Craigentinny for public housing schemes in the 1920s and 1930s. Some of the land of the Fillyside Meadow had already been set aside as Craigentinny Golf Couse, which had been undertaken by Leith Corporation to clear golfing off of the Links. A railway yard was later also laid adjacent, appropriately it was called the Meadows Yard.

Craigentinny Meadows, looking towards Edinburgh, 1930, in the vicinity of what is now the golf course. The dark building in the mid ground is Craigentinny House. An amazingly pastoral scene, unchanged for about 200 years, so late on. © Edinburgh City Libraries

And what of the East Foul Burn? Well I can tell you it’s still there but just like many of Edinburgh’s old burns it’s hiding under the ground in its culvert. Very few people who live above it probably know it’s there. We get other reminders of its presence from local place names; the area name Meadowbank? that’s lifted directly off a house known as Meadow Bank, built on the southern of the meadows. And Sunnyside Bank off of Lower London Road? that’s the south-facing (therefore sunnier) bank.

The old house of Meadowbank. An 1854 sketch by William Channing. © Edinburgh City Libraries

This thread continues with part 2 – The thread about the problem of sewage disposal in 19th century Edinburgh and Leith; and how something ended up being done about it.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur.

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#craigentinny #Fillyside #IrrigatedMeadows #Millers #Restalrig #River #Seafield #Sewage

The thread about Smokey Brae; how it got its name and how it made a showpiece public housing scheme “unfit for human occupation”

This thread was originally written and published in April 2023.

Smokey Brae. An evocative name which conjures up all sorts of nostalgia, commemorating a time gone by when Auld Reekie lived up to her nickname – but also a major public health saga that took 30 years to resolve. So why was Smokey Brae so smoky? And how did it come to be such an issue at a time when the smoke and soot from a hundred thousand open fires was an accepted part of everyday life?

Smokey Brae street sign in 2023. Photo © Self

The answer to that first question is simple. Smokey Brae is immediately adjacent to and downwind of what was Scotland’s largest railway motive power depot – St. Margarets (64A for a certain type of anorak!) – where over 220 steam locomotives were based for over 100 years on a very cramped site.

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

But it wasn’t always known as Smokey Brae, formally it was – and remains – Restalrig Road South – and it wasn’t always such an issue. It wasn’t until the Corporation built its showpiece Piershill Housing Scheme next door from 1936-38 that the problems began to be noticed.

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

Before the City purchased this site in 1935, it was the site of Piershill Cavalry Barracks, and the relatively low buildings and open site seemed not to suffer from its railway neighbour, St. Margaret’s Depot. The 1893 OS Town Plan shows just how close the two were.

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

On this site the City Architect, Ebenezer James Macrae, was balancing a client brief that desired the latest, modern, European, urban planning ideas with his own penchant for the best traditions and concepts of Scottish tenement buildings.

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

As such, the site plan was heavily influenced by contemporary European design, but the form and finish was unmistakably Scottish vernacular in style. Macrae successfully lobbied to use traditional 3 and 4 storey tenements against a reluctant Department for Health (who oversaw such schemes). This allowed 342 modern flats to be incorporated onto the plot of the barracks, but retain a lot of open space and not be overly packed together. But it also meant that the tall, U-shaped blocks of Piershill Square East and West form something of a wall and obstacle to the prevailing winds. Somewhat ironically, despite being the last word in municipal housing in Scotland at the time, heating and hot water still came from coal fires and back boilers, the forest of chimney stacks required further adding to the traditional appearance of such modern houses.

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

As early as 1937, the Musselburgh News reported the Lord Dean of Guild (the head of what was akin to a council planning committee in those days) as saying “the houses at Piershill had only been up a year, but one could imagine that they had been erected for the last 50 years“. The development was not even complete then, and already the pollution from St. Margaret’s Depot was posing a problem requiring official remark.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097886334/

In May 1938, as the scheme was barely completed, the Public Health Committee of the Town Council discussed the question of the smoke emitted from St. Margaret’s with respect to Piershill. The committee heard from the Town Clerk that 40 of the houses at Piershill closest to the depot had been “rendered unfit for human occupation” on account of the soot and smoke plaguing them. A deputation was therefore sent to the London & North Eastern Railway. It was found that at the cramped, overpopulated and antiquated depot there were sheds sufficient for barely 50% of the 220+ engines stabled there: as such there was no way to contain much of the smoke and soot while the boilers were lit and it blew straight across the road to the adjacent new houses.

The Town Clerk told the committee, “I think your hands will be forced in this matter. You will have to do something“. Answering a question from the committee, he told them that the Smoke Abatement Act could force the railway to “take the best practical means” to curtail emissions. If the means weren’t practical, the railway didn’t have to take them. So nothing was done and less than a year later the Evening News and Scotsman both reported – in May 1939 – that the Public Health Committee would once again ask the railway to provide sheds for all engines. The Committee was now being directly lobbied by residents; mothers from Piershill had joined the Women’s Section of the East Edinburgh Labour Party to complain about the issue.

The problem rumbled on in 1939. The Public Health Committee again discussed it in July, and the outbreak of war saw the metaphor of a the blackout being used by the housewives lobby group. They claimed that their health was being “seriously affected” by the smoke and soot. They wrote: “We do not know what it is to have fresh air because as soon as the windows are opened, they have to be closed again to keep out the smoke and soot. Clothing hung out to dry is black when taken in.” A reporter was shown the houses closest to the depot, barely 18 months old, which were stained black, in sharp contrast to those at the other end of the scheme.

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

Another resident showed the reporter her house. She drew her finger over the window sill. “Look at that!” as she demonstrated a filthy finger tip. She showed the kitchen walls, the paint scrubbed back to the plaster from trying to keep the walls clean. “The soot is actually into the walls” she said: the Council had told her not to paper the walls for this reason. The smoke “ruins everything, even the blankets on the bed. You can wash them as often as you like but you cannot get the smell off them“. The reporter took a picture from her window, showing the depot breakdown crane barely yards away across Smokey Brae.

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

Another neighbour – who suffered from asthma – complained she was tired of scrubbing the woodwork clean and that her curtains were washed barely days before and already soot stained. Referring to the back green, “If the shrubs were to be green, they would have to be painted“. Another neighbour complained that her little girl was having trouble with her chest, causing doctors bills. The doctor had said they would have to move away but they could not get another house. This was October 1939 however, and when the realities of the war hit, people were expected to keep calm, carry on, to make do and just grin and bear it. “There’s a war on, don’t you know.”

So what were the specific problems that made St. Margaret’s so bad for smoke and soot? The obvious ones – alluded to already – were its cramped size, its huge allocation of engines, the topography and prevailing winds and also the lack of cover for engines.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/holycorner/8097877667/

But there were other issues. A kiln used for drying the sand for the locomotive’s adhesion sand boxes was coal fired. The travelling crane? Coal fired. Steam around the site was provided by condemned locos, with the fires left running as static boilers, burning anything that was handy and perpetually belching out thick black smoke.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/paulkearley/51880896786/

In winter, the water columns, water tanks and boiler injectors of locomotives were prone to icing up, so endless braziers of coal were lit in the sidings to prevent this happening. Every shift, some 50-60 locomotives would come in to have their fireboxes and smokeboxes cleared. This was a filthy task, where the hot ash and clinker was dropped or scraped and shovelled out the firebox into a pit between the tracks, where it cooled and smouldered. At St. Margaret’s, the ash pit sidings were as close to the Piershill houses as it was possible to get. The wind whipped up the dropped soot and ash, blowing it across the road to the houses. Firebox cleaning scraped tarry “char” out the front end. It was black and abrasive.

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

With the fireboxes and smokeboxes scraped clean, the fires were re-stoked and left smouldering to keep the boilers simmering, burning inefficiently and producing a lot of smoke (a steam engine running at speed and burning efficiently produces relatively little visible smoke). Worse still was that St. Margarets was the parent shed to a myriad network of 14 stabling points and 20 shunting yards and sidings around the district. At the end of the week, all these locos came back to the shed in a filthy condition to have their innards emptied and cleaned. Worst of all was Sundays, when the “firing up” process took place for the week. 40 engines at a time would have their fireboxes lit, using the hot embers from that smoky sand kiln. These fires too burned inefficiently, until the locos left in groups of five to wait for shifts at Craigentinny sidings. This cycle of clearing and re-firing the 220+ locos, not to mention the countless visiting engines coming up from the north east of England went on week in, week out, all of it in the open, and most of it as close to the Piershill Houses as possible.

It was the Great Smog of 1952 that kindled a widespread public awareness and alarm at the health hazards of the smoke that had hitherto just been accepted by most as a part of city life.

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

Government Committees now sat up and began to take action, and in April 1954 they arrived in Edinburgh on their fact-finding mission, and the City’s Public Health Committee marched them straight down to Piershill to see for themselves.

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

The Evening News report of this visit is the first written reference to “Smoky Brae“. The residents had spotted the committee – headed by Sir Hugh Beaver (no sniggering at the back) – arriving and had sought out the following reporters to make their voices heard. The residents told the reporters the same stories they had done 15 years ago, they showed them the same soot and smoke stained walls, furniture, curtains and windows, and heard the same complaints of perpetually smelling of smoke, difficulty washing clothes and health worries. Mrs Jane Gray, who resided on the ground floor at no. 2, said:

I see that they’re going to take a mobile mass X-ray machine round Pilton. They want to bring it here and X-ray every man, woman and child. What bairn can be healthy living down here? And we can’t open our windows at night

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

The Public Health Committee once again agreed to lobby the railway authorities. But by this time of course, the railway was nationalised, so it was the British Transport Commission’s Railway Executive to whom they went. The BTC was quick to point the blame at another nationalised industry – the National Coal Board. It was the low quality of post-war coal that was the problem they said, not the depot itself or its practices. There is a grain of truth that the crisis that the coal industry found itself in – and tried to dig itself out of before long term projects could start producing – caused the quality of coal to drop, but to suggest that was the problem at St. Margaret’s was pure buck passing and Mr George Hardie of New Restalrig Church was quick to denounce the BTC’s reply.

Edinburgh Evening News, 23rd September 1954

It was accepted that the solution Smokey Brae needed was long term, to totally phase out steam on the railways altogether. Diesel or electric were the future – and indeed the Railway’s own Modernisation Plan intended this. Mr Jamieson, of the Scottish National Congress (a socialist splinter party of the SNP) wrote to the papers to say the problem was that Scotland was getting an unfair allocation of the diesel locomotives which had already been produced by British Railways. He had calculated a Goschen Ratio (a government formula for allocating spending in Scotland compared to other parts of the UK) himself, he said, and Scotland could claim 37 diesel locomotives already, and Edinburgh at least 10 of those, and that this would improve the atmosphere at St. Margarets.

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

The modernisation plan actually made things at St. Margaret’s worse – not better. This is because the depot was so antiquated and run down, it could not seriously handle any new diesel locomotives or multiple units, so all steam in the district was concentrated there. Haymarket would become the primary diesel depot, and Leith Central would become the depot for diesel multiple units, and the former’s steam allocation and those from other smaller sheds began to concentrate at St. Margarets. The latter’s workload concentrated on the remaining local steam services: large numbers of 0-6-0 J-type tank engines to work the docks, still plentiful traffic of the Lothians coalfields, and the steam for Waverley Route goods services.

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

The writing was on the wall for the depot: as its engines were replaced with diesels they would go to either Haymarket, Leith Central or the new yard at Millerhill. But the residents of Piershill had to suffer a further 13 years of smoke, soot, ash and grime. By 1965 only a handful of steam locos remained, but it was not until May 1st 1967, some 30 years after Piershill residents first started experiencing the effects of living on “Smoky Brae” that St. Margarets finally drew out the last firebox and shut its doors for good.

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

And in all that time, despite all the representations to the City authorities, and by them to the Railway authorities, what had actually been done about it? Nothing. It was purely the inevitability of modernisation that posed a solution.

The houses of Smokey Brae had the carbonation sandblasted off of them in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and at some point around this time, somebody thought it would be good to informally rename the road in a manner reminiscent of an Oor Wullie cartoon. Nostalgic, yes, but also a reminder that the residents of this street probably had years shaved off their lives as a result of their proximity to unrestricted emissions of coal smoke, soot and ash.

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

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

The thread about the Lochend Corolite Houses; a one-off Dutch construction experiment for Edinburgh

Another day. Following on from the thread about the Riversdale Demonstration Houses, here’s another bunch of inconspicuous-looking municipal houses in Edinburgh which once again pose the question of “well, what makes these so special then?”. This post will endeavour to answer that.

Houses at Restalrig Square in Lochend

This is just one little corner of the large Lochend housing scheme, which was developed in the mid-1920s as a big showpiece by the Edinburgh Corporation. The Corporation purchased the 170 acre Lochend estate from Morton Gray Stuart, 17th Earl of Moray, in 1923 for £37,500 (£2.9M today). Central government subsidies in place at the time encouraged the use of “non traditional construction” techniques, to try and deal with post-war shortages of skilled trades labour and an economic downturn that put many men employed on labouring out of work. Edinburgh Corporation was quick to embrace both the money and the new techniques required to access it.

The first houses that went up at Lochend were of the Airey Duo-Slab type, a mix of pre-cast concrete slabs (which apparently made use of waste rubble from the construction of Portobello Power Station) and poured concrete.

Airey Duo-Slab cottage flat house at Lochend.

At a ceremony officiated over by Lord Provost Sleigh, Labour MP for South Ayrshire and Lord High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland, James Brown MP, laid a foundation stone at a Duo-Slab house on May 27th 1924 (although construction had actually started in January).

Lord Provost Sleigh (balding, with moustache and chains of office) and James Brown MP (balding, with moustache and no chains of office) at the Lochend stone-laying ceremony in 1924

Edinburgh Corporation ended up being very pleased with these houses and they would go on to become the prevalent type at Lochend, with something like 1,000 built (I haven’t counted them all!) There are Duo-Slab cottage flats at Restalrig Square, but those aren’t what this thread is about, there’s something else too. So if these other houses aren’t Duo-slabs then what are they? Well, one of them is a slight give-away as it’s different from the rest; strikingly so. This house is strikingly modern, with a flat roof, overhanging eaves, no ornamentation and chimney flues running up the façade.

The unique and incongruously modernist flat-roofed Corolite house at Restalrig Square

This house is very conspicuous – Edinburgh’s City Architects were rarely radical when it came to style and even the thoroughly modern (in construction terms) Duo-slab houses were conservatively traditional in style; they had a mock-classical porch (pre-cast concrete of course), 4-over-2 sash windows, tiled hipped roofs and traditional placement of the chimneys. No, what we are looking at here is a different, radical new construction technique, one imported from the continent. This is a Corolite House and is basically a copy of the Dutch Korrelbeton houses of the early 1920s.

The flat-roofed Corolite House, an alternative angle

Korrelbeton translates from Dutch as – approximately – “granular concrete”. It was a “no-fines” technique (i.e. no fine sand or ash to fill in the gaps between the aggregate) but instead of gravel as an aggregate it used crushed waste brick, clinker or slag. This made it lightweight – it was 25-50% air pockets. It was also cheap, as it was mixed in the very lean ration of 1 part Portland Cement to 9 parts aggregate (which was recycled waste materials). The end result was both well insulated and breathable, so it didn’t suffer from two of poured concrete’s biggest drawbacks when it came to house building.

The Dutch developed Korrelbeton around 1919 and had been using it for 5 years when a visit was made by the British Housing Commission. Suitably impressed and interested, a British company was set up – the Corolite Construction Co. – in London to import this technique for housebuilding. Edinburgh’s City Architect, Adam Horsburgh Campbell, took a particular interest in what was going on in the continent regards housing and was either part of that delegation, or made a follow up visit of his own. In Jan. 1925, the Corporation accepted an offer from the Corolite Co. to built 52 experimental houses at Lochend to demonstrate the technique.

Early Dutch Korrelbeton houses, c. 1925, note the overhanging eaves and flat roofs.

Thirteen blocks of 4-house cottage flats (mid-density, 4-in-a-block houses, with 2 flats upstairs and 2 downstairs, all with their own external entrance doors) were to be built. Six were of the “Dutch” style, with poured Corolite flat roofs, at £420 per house. Seven were of a more traditional style with a pitched, tiled roof, costing £440 each. These houses were eligible for £9/house rent subsidy, so saved the Corporation money.

The Lochend Corolite Houses at Restalrig Square

The flat-roof type have overhanging eaves and the distinctive external chimney flues running up the facade. All except one of the 6 were re-roofed and reclad during the 1990s or 2000s, when rather odd-looking porticos were added. I’m not sure how one survived in its original form.

The flat roofed Corolite House next to a modernised house of the same type (right)

The other seven blocks were built with pitched roofs that had a reduced overhang and did not have the external flues or the central 3 windows recessed. They also got those same porticos during modernisation, so are visually quite similar – but not identical to – the refurbished flat roof houses.

Pitched roof Corolite House, also modernised

These were amongst the first Corolite houses completed in Britain (they may be the first completed scheme) and were certainly the first in Scotland. On a visit to Scotland in June 1926, Prime Minister Baldwin said he thought them “quite agreeable to the eye“, “quite reasonable” and “wished [we] had more of them“. Baldwin’s government had announced a £40 per-house (about 10% construction costs) subsidy for the use of Non-Traditional construction, for the first 4,000 such houses built by local authorities in Scotland. While many authorities resisted this temptation as they did not like the terms, or care for non-traditional construction, others such as Edinburgh raced to try and build such council housing under subsidy.

In December 1925, the Edinburgh Town Council’s Housing and Town Planning Committee made a recommendation to the council that 500 further Corolite houses should be built at Lochend to capitalise on the subsidy. The Council however voted to turn down the recommendation by 35 votes to 20, after deputations from the building trade associations made representations. The £40 subsidy meant that only 10% of labour employed could be from skilled trades and the trades said it had been almost impossible to erect the Corolite houses with this workforce and keep to timescales. They also said that official figures for the number of men in the building trade that were out of work were wrong; they contended that they had better information as men out of work from one job to the next would sign on with their Union when in need of work, rather than with the Labour Exchange. Rather than being fully employed, the trades said that many men were unemployed; Edinburgh bricklayers were off working in England on public housing schemes due to the lack of work for them at home. Councillors asked about the shortage of plasterers; the plasterers’ trade representative pointed the finger at the building contractors. The trades said that building to more traditional construction practices would employ more men in the short term and the investment and would pay for itself in the long run by providing a better quality of house.

Dundee’s Housing Committee had also been unimpressed with the progress of Corolite houses, and had made that known in the papers. The Corolite Construciton Company were aggrieved at this and made their defence known in the papers too. L. J. Pond, their general manager in Edinburgh, defended the use of wallpaper on bare concrete (rather than plaster) as being the result of the 10% skilled labour cap and having to use an unskilled wall finish. He said that it was a “sanitary, durable and pleasing finish” and should not reflect on the house itself. Corolite also said that they could build good houses faster, and cheaper, and that if Edinburgh didn’t take them up on it then someone else would get the £40 per house subsidy instead and unemployed general labourers lost the chance of steady work.

In the end, neither Lochend nor Edinburgh (nor I believe, anywhere in Scotland) got any more Corolite houses. Airey won the contract to build lots more of their Duo-slabs at Lochend and the Second Scottish National Housing Company would build 350 steel houses for Edinburgh on Corporation land, before a return to more traditional construction for later phases. The Corolite Construction Company tried to flog their system to various other local authorities – Willesden Council in London built some at Brentfield and Manchester Corporation built a number that may total a few hundred – but overall they seem to have never found favour. The company moved on to other things and were last heard of in “Metroland”, advertising an estate of traditionally-built bungalows outside Berkhamstead in 1938.

A 1938-built Corolite Construction Company house at Berkhamstead.

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These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur.

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

#Corolite #CouncilHousing #Housing #Lochend #NonStandardHousing #Restalrig