The thread about Hawkhill, its House and the marvellous things that once went on there

If old gate piers could talk, they could tell many a tale of who once passed through them, could they not?
There’s an old gate pier on Lochend Road. What would it tell us if it could? Would it have interesting tales to tell? Shall we find out?

So why is there a Georgian gate pier leading to 1980s housing? Well of course there used to be a Georgian house here before there were 1980s houses. Given this area is known as Hawkhill, the house was sensibly called Hawkhill House. The name Hawkhill is descriptive and literal – there was once a hill here were hawks must have dwelled. It’s mentioned as Halkehill in 1560, and shown as Halkhill in Adair’s map of 1682.

Once part of the Barony of Restalrig, these lands found their way into the possession of Lord Balmerino after the Logans were dispossessed of them. He in turn lost them – and his head – for his part in the Jacobite rising of 1745. The Crown gave (or sold) them on to Trinity College & Hospital, who feud a small estate of 20 acres off of them at Hawkhill in the 1750s.

The feuar was Andrew Pringle, Lord Alemoor, a judge, senator of the College of Justice, Solicitor General for Scotland and a Lord of Session. “He had an unrivalled reputation as a lawyer and pleader“. He was the son of John Pringle, Lord Haining of The Haining in Selkirkshire, who also was a respected judge and one time Senator of the College of Justice.

Alemoor had John Adam, son of William and older brother to Robert and James, build him a small but perfectly formed villa on the land. Overshadowed as an architect by his younger brothers, John was more involved in the business administration, but was nevertheless a fine and competent architect. Hawkhill was squat but perfectly formed, topped with two large and distinctive chimneys.

A later description from its sale notes:

“two lofty and finely-proportioned public rooms, library, five bedrooms, two dressing rooms, hot and cold baths, large kitchen, laundry, and other accommodation is supplied… There is a lodge for the gardener; stable, coach-house and other offices which are all ample; also a high-walled garden, well stocked and productive, and a large greenhouse. There is about 2 and a half acres of detached garden ground, bounded for 400 yards on the north side by a high wall planted with good fruit trees. The remainder of the property consists of a park of about 10 acres, and the shrubberies, in which there are some fine old trees.”

A description of Hawkhill in 1867

Alemoor was a man of letters. Sir Adam Ferguson took James Boswell to sup with him at Hawkhill. The latter was reportedly left impressed. He was “a very spirited and successful improver” and kept a fine garden, planted a good stock of trees and had a large parkland for sheep. But after the law, Alemoor’s main passion was science. He was supported in this by his factor, James Hoy. He had an observatory erected on the top of the Hawkhill to the latest designed by John Smeaton. We can see it and the house poking out in a late 18th century watercolour

Alemoor had Hoy take and keep regular, accurate temperature records for 7 years. Hoy kept this practice up at Castle Gordon where he went next to work and his data set was used to help calculate the first accurate, average temperature for Scotland. On June 4th 1769, Alemoor, Hoy and Dr James Lind (of investigations into scurvy and tropical medicine fame) observed the transit of Venus across the sun, each using a different telescope and each keeping time accurately. The Astronomer Royal commended their results as particularly accurate. This was an event of major world scientific importance – Captain James Cook had been sent all the way to Tahiti to observe it – and perhaps the first “crowd-sourced” scientific endeavour?

Alemoor died in 1776, the house passing to his brother who likely sold it to pay of their fathers’ debts on the home estate of The Haining. It came into the possession now of Captain Gideon Johnstone, RN. Gideon had been a captain at the Battle of Chesapeake Bay in 1781 but never got another command again after that. He retired to Hawkhill, dying there in 1788. The house passed to his brother John Johnstone of Alva, “a corrupt Nabob of the East India Company“.

Johnstone went to India as a clerk, avoided the “Black Hole of Calcutta” which claimed his brother and found himself as an artillery officer. He worked his way up to being a provincial governor but returned from India in a scandal, fired by his former friend General Clive on the subject of taking bribes from local princes. He therefore came back overshadowed but fabulously rich, so retired to a quiet life as a country gentleman of leisure on the estate of Alva.

Hawkhill was given to his niece, Elizabeth – Betty – Johnstone, on the left in the painting above. She was the youngest sister of Margaret Johnstone, Lady Ogilvy, who was sentenced to death after the ’45 for her part in encouraging her husband in his support of the rising. He fled to France and she did the same, escaping Edinburgh castle by swapping clothes with her washer woman and walking out the gate. Aunt Betty was unmarried but doted on by her nieces. They took Aaron Burr to visit her, who wrote in his diary “Pretty place. View of the Forth.” he noted he had a sumptuous meal and Madeira wine. This would be about 1808. Who was Aaron Burr? He was an America lawyer and politician, 3rd Vice President of the United States. He is noted for having “assassinated” Alexander Hamilton (former Secretary of the Treasury) in a duel in 1804. He was in Europe on a self-imposed exile.

Betty died of old age at Hawkhill in 1813. She passed away during a thunder storm, looking to the sky and remarking “Sirs, what a night for me to be fleeing through the air” before expiring. She is buried with the Fergusons of Pitfour, also of her family, in Greyfriars. Hawkhill went to her cousin, James Raymond Johnstone esg. of Alva, who had inherited John Johnstone’s estate and ill gotten fortune from India. He gave it in life rent to his sister Ann Elizabeth and her husband James Gordon of Craig, an Advocate.

Ann Elizabeth died at Hawkhill in 1851, at which point the whole estate was put up for sale. The advert noted that the lands had value in quarrying and felling the trees planted by Alemoor.

The lands were now split up. The hill of Hawkhill itself began to be quarried for its whinstone for use in street paving setts. Alemoor’s trees were felled and his sheep park was dug up for clay to feed a brickworks built on the site. Worse was to come when a tallow melting works was built in the eastern portion of the park land. The works belonged to Alexander Beveridge of Leith; “margarine manufacturer and tallow melter, employing 17 men and 13 women” and a member of The Incorporation of Candemakers of Edinburgh.

The reek from the tallow works and dust from the quarrying both ended up in court cases from disgruntled neighbours. The “Tallow Melting Case” found in favour of the works, and the works and the stench went on.

Thomas Field, “slate merchant, brick and tile maker and quarry master” lost his case and the brickworks was ordered to shut; quarrying went on however. In 1877, three boys were hospitalised in Leith after playing with blasting powder from the quarry. A young woman working in the Tallow Works lost an arm to machinery in 1877 in horrible circumstances.

The site of the closed brickworks was sold off and became the Hawkhill Recreation Fields, a commercial enterprise. It was used for amateur sports, professional football, dog racing, as a showground and fairground. Then on 1 October 1888 something quite incredible happened at Hawkhill…

At 5:15PM, the slight figure of “Professor” James Baldwin strode across the field, packed to capacity. In one hand he had a “parachute umbrella” in the other he took hold of a trapeze suspended from a hot air balloon. Then the balloon was let go…

The balloon rose quickly to 1,200 feet and Baldwin let go of the trapeze. He fell 300 feet before opening his “umbrella”. He fell to the ground, landing gently and exactly where he wanted to.

Baldwin was a circus acrobat, tightrope walker and all round daredevil with a keen interest in ballooning. This was a trick he had first performed the year before in the US and he had brought it to Europe. It was a sensation and he made a fortune.

Baldwin made the first ever parachute jump in the US in 1887. In 1888 he made the first in the UK. The Houses of Parliament were suspended in order that members could go see for themselves before deciding whether or not to ban his act as suicidal. On the 1st October 1888, he made the first parachute jump in Scotland at Hawkhill.

Such was the popularity of the act, that Hawkhill exceeded capacity. The proprietor of the next door farm at Lochend, Fanny Jackson, successfully sued Baldwin’s organisers for £30 for damages done to gates, fences and crops by the crowds who invaded her farmland. Ten years later on July 5th 1899, a balloon jumper act returned. This time it was Miss Alma Beaumont, “Lady Parachutist” who leapt from the skies as part of a huge show and fair put on at Hawkhill to coincide with the Highland Show.

In 1890, a balloon was flown from Edinburgh International Exhibition at Meggetland and came down safely at Hawkhill grounds.

From 1888 to about 1900, Hawkhill House itself was used as a residential boarding house, run by “Mrs Donaldson, late of Wooton Lodge, Cumin Place, the Grange“. By 1902 it was owned by Jonathan Newey & Sons, who ran a firelighter manufacturing business on the site. The quarry was worked out by about 1913, having completely consumed the Hawk Hill in the process (in case you’re wondering where it went as it’s quite clearly no longer there). In 1924, Leith bakers J. Smith & Sons built a modern, industrial bakery there. It later became part of the Sunblest empire.

The recreation grounds were bought after WW1 by the Leith Education Authority for use as school and public playing fields. Amateur football was allowed to continue, but professional sport and dog racing was banned. They continued to let the park out for sheep grazing. In 1920 they came into possession of the Edinburgh Education Authority, who tendered for “100 carts of good black soil” to be delivered to improve the playing fields. Many a local school, scouts and amateur sporting event would take place there over the next 70 years. When Leith Academy moved it its new site, it got on-site playing fields (“Academy Park”), and Hawkhill Fields were sold off for housing. Alemoor Crescent and Park were built, recalling the house’s first Laird, Andrew Pringle.

The tallow melting works closed in 1968, taking its stench with it, and was replaced by the council housing “multis” of Hawkhill Court and Nisbet Court (the Nisbets of Craigentinny were an old local landowning family, but never actually of Hawkhill.)

Hawkhill House by this point was unoccupied but remarkably much of its original John Adam Georgian interiors were still in place, if somewhat decrepit. The Georgian Society campaigned to preserve it.

But it deteriorated further and was soon bricked up not long after that photo study, it is looking very sad in the photo below taken in the early 1970s, not long before it was demolished in (I think) 1972. The site was added to the playing fields.

We can see 130 years of transition at Hawkhill in this animated overlay of maps.

Before finishing, I’d like to just say thanks to the ever helpful and knowledgeable Fergus Smith for the quick lesson (late) last night about how property could, or could not be, inherited in Scotland before 1868. It really helped me with this and saved a lot of time in working out some of the ownership. Thanks Fergus!

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"Red Smile"
Based on a painting by Yuko Tatsushima. 🥲

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

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

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

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

20. Weir Paragon House

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

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

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

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

1. Department of Health for Scotland Timber Economy Houses

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

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

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

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

3. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Flats

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

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

4. Department of Health for Scotland Space Saving Cottages

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

5. Weir Timber Houses

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

6. SSHA Bellrock House & 7. Orlit Bellrock House

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

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

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

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

11. Miller-O’Sullivan House

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

12. Atholl Steel House

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

13. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Foamslag Block House

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

14. Canadian Timber House

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

15. Holland, Hannen & Cubitts Poured Foamslag House

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

16. Orlit Frameless House

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

17. Orlit Framed House

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

18. Keyhouse Unibuilt House

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

19. SSHA No-Fines House

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

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

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https://threadinburgh.scot/2022/12/23/the-thread-about-sighthill-neuk-and-what-makes-this-quiet-and-leafy-post-war-suburban-street-so-very-special-and-unique/

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This thread is a bit of an A-to-Z of the different types of temporary, prefabricated, post-war housing built in Edinburgh immediately after WW2.

In 1944, the Government passed the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act, in anticipation of a post-war housing and house-building crisis. While the primary intention of the act was to replace the c. 450,000 homes lost due to aerial bombing, a secondary consideration was to pick up where there pre-war slum clearance projects had left off in trying to provide better mass-housing for people. 300,000 temporary homes were planned to be built in the first two years after the war, to rapidly increase housing supply while the construction of new, permanent housing (be it traditional or prefabricated) tried to catch up.

The Ministry of Works approved 4 (later more) standard designs of prefabricated, two-bedroom temporary bungalows which could be rapidly built and give a life span of 10-15 years. They made use of as little traditional housebuilding materials (brick, stone and timber) as possible and many made use of the skills and industrial capacity of wartime industries. All of the temporary houses were of almost identical dimensions of approximately 32.5ft x 21.5ft (9.75 x 6.5m), so were all had about a 60m2footprint and ceilings 7ft 6in high. This meant they could all be built on the same (standard) foundation panel, on the same sized plot, in the same densities. Estates were often built of a mix of types depending on what was available.

All the temporary houses came with standardised, prefabricated kitchen and bathrooms units to designs approved by the Ministry of Works, including the Prefabricated Plumbing Unit which combined the kitchen sinks, water tank and hot water cylinder and was connected to the back boiler of the living room heater. Manufacturers had no flexibility to alter these, and only a small amount of leeway on the size and positioning of the other rooms.

While central government provided the houses, local authorities were responsible for identifying, securing and planning the sites for the Temporary Housing schemes. They also had to do the groundworks for them; build the roads, sewers, and lay the electricity, gas (if used) and water supplies up to each house. Three standard foundation types were used to suit different ground conditions and the authority was responsible for surveying the site and specifying which should be used. They could also specify the colours of external paint to be used.

Four thousand temporary prefabs were built in Edinburgh post-war, the first arriving in June 1945. In that year the Corporation estimated it had 5,000 families on their waiting list for housing and had requested 7,500 of the houses from the government. There were delays, however and in July 1946 there had been little more progress than the first 100 houses. The three largest schemes accounted for over half of the provision and were at Moredun & Ferniehill, at West Pilton and Muirhouse and at “The Calders” in Sighthill. All were built on the fringes of the city, sometimes where there were few (or no) facilities for people and where public transport was poor. Innovations such as temporary schools and mobile shops were required. The Corporation’s libraries department deployed its first mobile “bookmobiles”.

Where they were largely used for slum clearance and so displaced people away from their communities and families, meaning they could be quite unpopular. On the other hand, when new the houses were good, clean and modern and came with generous gardens.

No temporary prefabs survive in Edinburgh (the ones you can still see were all built as permanent prefabs), all were demolished in a programme starting in 1964, after lifespans around twice what had been intended. Most were replaced by permanent council housing on the same sites, some of which in itself was prefabricated.

Four types of temporary houses were built in Edinburgh:

A is for AIROH. This name is an acronym of Air Industry Research Organisation for Housing, developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment, and to make use of a glut of scrap aluminium from surplus aircraft. One of the 4 aircraft companies involved in their production was the Blackburn Aircraft Company at Dumbarton. These were the most common temporary prefab in both Edinburgh and across the UK, with 1,792 and 54,000 built respectively. The walls were aluminium trays sprayed with bitumen and filled with aereated concrete and coated on the inside with plasterboard. The roofs were lightweight alumnium trusses with corrugated aluminium sheet covering.

These houses have been described as an “airplane in house form“; manufactured in sub-assemblies on an aircraft production line, combined into 4 sections (complete with roofs, floors, windows, doors and all standard interior fittings) that could be transported by road and quickly joined together on site by unskilled labour. This material has its advantages; it is light, strong, does not rust or readily corrode and – initially – was readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter aircraft like a Typhoon give you all the aluminium for a house. The problem for aluminium houses of all types was that the price of the material soon rebounded and they became very expensive to produce, much more so than other types, but they filled a gap and were not the worst of the temporary prefabs by any stretch.

Identification features are the corrugated roof, the three equally-sized windows (with 4 to the rear) and the curved canopy over the front door. Some of the first permanent prefab houses ordered for Edinburgh were of the Permanent Aluminium or Blackburn Mk.II design. Visually almost identical, it was to a generally more robust standard of insulation and weatherproofing and was designed to last 60 years instead of the AIROH‘s ten.

A is for ARCON. The ARCON name was a portmanteau of Architectural Consultants, was founded as a collaborative research body between architects and builders. The. It was based on the steel-clad Portal House prototype by Tailor Woodrow . It has a similar tubular steel frame (designed by renowned Anglo-Danish engineer Ove Arup) but is covered with a double layer of corrugated asbestos sheeting, with a curving roof built out of the same material.

ARCON was the second most-produced temporary prefab after the AIROH, 39,000 were built across the UK with 757 built in Edinburgh. Many were prefabricated in St. Boswellsi n Roxburghshire, now the Scottish Borders.For recognition, these were the only temporary prefabs built in Edinburgh with a curving roof and corrugated cladding. They had the usual steel windows and doors, with two large windows on either side of the front door, which itself was next to two smaller windows for the WC and bathroom.

T is for Tarran. The Tarran was named for its builders, Tarran Industries Ltd. of Hull. It was built of pre-cast, externally pebble-dashed, concrete panels with a timber floor and a lightweight steel truss roof covered in corrugated asbestos sheets.

19,000 Tarrans were ordered by the government, with 636 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition features are the distinct vertical, pebbled panels, two large windows to the front and a squat, tapering chimney with a large metal cowled ventilator on top. Sometimes they had the front door recessed to the side, creating a distinctive notch in the building and a small, covered porch area.

U is for Uni-SECO. The name stood for Unit and Selection Engineering Co. Ltd. – the company that had been formed London to design and built them. The design was based off of that for temporary wartime military offices. These were built from pre-fabricated plywood-framed panels filled with wood waste and cement insulation, with a roof of similar construction covered in asbestos sheets and roofing felt. They were sent to sites as a flat-pack kit to be assembled and it was amongst the cheapest of the temporary prefabs; the AIROH was 43% more expensive in 1947.

29,000 Uni-SECO houses were ordered, with 815 built in Edinburgh. The best recognition feature is the roof pitch, which was was so shallow as to appear flat. They had a small, tapered chimney and two large windows to the front; the door was either offset to the left or central (Mark III model), in which case the living room window wrapped-around to the side.

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https://threadinburgh.scot/2022/12/21/the-thread-about-airohs-arcons-tarrans-and-uni-secos-temporary-post-war-prefabricated-housing-in-edinburgh-and-where-it-was-built/

#CouncilHousing #Housing #prefabrication #prefabs #Suburbs #temporaryPrefabs #Written2022

The thread about Peat Loan; an old house in Trinity on the “wrong” orientation is “wrong”

Here is an interesting house which was recently for sale in Trinity. Whenever there is a building like this, it piques my interest. Why is it at an irregular angle to its regularly ordered Georgian and Victorian neighbours, all of which are in neat plots perpendicular to the road? Why does the boundary follow that line? Shall we find out?

We can quite easily answer these first 2 questions by a quick glance at an old map. Even in 1804 our building stands out like it does now. The boundary is at an angle because it follows a much older property boundary – in this case the stream of the Anchorfield Burn, and the property is at an angle because it pre-dates the others and has been aligned to the burn rather than its neighbours.

Our house of interest is Peat Loan: it’s fairly obvious to look at that it’s a 3 bay building that has been extended at either side with additional wings, then end result being rather barn-like. The entrance door has been narrowed, making it somewhat awkwardly offset from the window above it. The whole building seems quite a bit lower than the modern (actually Victorian) road surface over the tall wall to the left

William Roy doesn’t record any buildings on the Newhaven Road in the 1750s, neither does a map of 1759 or one of 1765, so Peat Loan must be built in the later third of the 18th century. It is therefore amongst the oldest surviving buildings in the neighbourhood of Trinity. You can see below that a road marked by Roy is missing in the 1804 map, it runs from Ferry Road, to the west of Leith Mount in a direct line to the houses of Laverockbank and Lilliputhall, intersecting the Newhaven Road at almost exactly where the house of Peat Loan is marked in 1804. Note that in 1755 the Ferry Road was slightly further south than its current alignment, running about 150m closer to the houses of Old Bonnington and East Warriston, being widened and straightened by 1759 when a feuing map shows that it has moved to its current position.

Peat Loan means Peat Lane, loan being the Scots name for a lane. There was a Peat Neuk (a corner for storing peat) in Leith near the Coalhill since the 17th century, suggesting that peat was being transported to the town and stored for fuel. If it was being gathered on the Wardie Muir it stands to reason that this route to Leith would cross the Newhaven Road here, as there would be a way across the Anchorfield Burn. It is also obvious why it would be known as the Peat Loan.This track was removed by 1804, as the lands of the Trinity House and Hospital of Leith were laid out in plots for building villas and gardens on, and the Ferry Road and Newhaven Road were widened and improved.

The house of Peat Loan sits on a plot that Ainslie puts in the ownership of Mr T. Williamson, alongside villas called St. Catharines Bank (possibly named for his daughter, Catherine) and Northfield. The latter had been a farm, unsurprisingly referring to a subdivision in the northern part of an older landholding. Thomas Williamson of Northfield (1756-1838) was a merchant who had premises on Quality Street and is listed in the 1804-5 Post Office directory. His wife was Elizabeth Ramsay, daughter of his business partner Robert Ramsay of Camno.

He became Thomas Williamson of Lixmount when he bought the villa of this name in 1812. Lixmount had been built in 1792 by a lawyer, George Andrew, whose wife had a family connection to Lix in Perthshire.

Thomas became Williamson-Ramsay of Lixmount and Maxton in 1832 when he succeeded to this estate and its title on the death of his wife; her father having died in 1814, it fell to Thomas who himself died in 1838. He left a substantial legacy to Leith Hospital, which funded a £25,000, 7 ward extension in 1871 that was called Williamson-Ramsay House. The titles and property were inherited by George Williamson-Ramsay, eldest son of Thomas and Elizabeth.

By 1817, St. Catherine’s is owned by a Dr. Ireland. Northfield remains in the posession of a Mr Williamson, who I think Thomas Williamson junior, son of William-Ramsay of Lixmount. By 1849 Peat Loan was known as Northfield Cottage and by 1857 was in the ownership of Mrs Barbara Notman, who had inherited it through an aunt, Susan Williamson, suggesting it had stayed in the Williamson family all this time. The resident is later Mr James Hume Notman, son of Barbara, he was a law agent and was still there in 1884. By 1891, James is resident in Edinburgh. His father, William Notman, died at Northfield Cottage in 1893 and his mother Barbara dies there in 1904.

William Notman was an architect and the house was used as both the family residence and his place of work and had apparently lived at Northfield Cottage since the age of 11. He was apprenticed to William Henry Playfair, the architect of Edinburgh’s Third or Calton New Town and many of its neoclassical monuments, at the age of 14. He was Playfair’s assistant before setting up his own practice, the work in his own name being mainly shops, farmhouses, domestic and alterations to existing buildings.

The house in the property listing is stripped back to a bare shell however photos taken by Canmore show the building before it was gutted in 2016. It largely looks untouched since the 1950s and 60s, but a few older features peek through, DSL suggests they are the work of Notman. Its new owners got in touch in 2023 to let me know that they had finished renovating and restoring it after much effort and were now enjoying living there.

And what of the Anchorfield Burn? Well, the little stream is still there, long since hidden underground within a culvert. You can still see it seeping out of this culvert and feeding a swamp alongside the cycle path on the old railway running through Trinity between the bridges which carry Clark Road and South Trinity Road across the path. The burn flowed out into the sea east of Newhaven, where there stood an early 18th century house – appropriately enough known as Anchorfield. It’s nice to think it’s a fancy name with a nautical connection. But… you’d be wrong. Anchor is a mis-spelling of an older word, Anker, which refers to a winding or hook-shaped stream. The –field part of the name was simply a common suffix with which to name a house at the time..

The Mr Morrison referred to on the map was Sir Alexander Morison (1779 – 1866) who was born here. Sir Alexander specialised in mental health and treating a wealthy clientele. He was one of the consulting doctors to the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London in 1835; from where the word Bedlam comes from. An image of Morrison at Anchorfield was painted by a patient in Bethlem, the artist Richard Dadd, in 1835. Dadd had never seen this scene but based it off of drawings and descriptions from Morison’s daughter.

Anchorfield now lends its name to a late Victorian tenement built on its site, which is in the news as of January 2024 as one side has had to be evacuated over severe structural concerns.

Footnote: Since this post was first written, the new owners of Peat Loan have been very hard at work renovating and restoring the house. They were kind enough to invite me around to see for myself and I am very pleased to say they have done a wonderful job and made the most amazing home.

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) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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#Anchorfield #House #Lixmount #Toponymy #Trinity #Written2022