Craigmillar and Niddrie: A Prehistory

Craigmillar and Niddrie are, today, two housing schemes joined at the hip, inseparable from each other physically, existing almost as one continual unit of suburban housing. The two communities are defined primarily by their ex-council housing stock, the oldest of which was built in 1930 in Niddrie in the form of three-storey tenements and cottage-flats but which grew to encompass developments of post-war flats, semi-detached housing and tower blocks. In recent years, new-built social housing has appeared as Niddrie and Craigmillar undergo redevelopment in gap-sites created by the demolition of some of the schemes’ original council housing. In spite of locals’ protestations to the contrary, the two communities have experienced a similar phenomenon to ‘Greater Pollok’ in Glasgow in which distinct schemes are rolled into one in the public’s consciousness. However, residents’ insistence in differentiating Niddrie and Craigmillar is in keeping with the area’s history; long before the construction of social housing, the area east of Edinburgh was far from uniform and was host to multiple landed estates, small villages, rural agriculture and industrial mining works. In this blog post I will cover the history of the area on which these two schemes stand before the construction of council housing in the nineteenth century and how the differences in employment, social status and lifestyle were expressed in the housing of the people there.

What is now the cohesive community units of Craigmillar and Niddrie was, in the nineteenth century, a collection of distinct areas defined by rural industries and agriculture, situated within the estates of the Baronetcies of Niddrie Marischal and Craigmillar. If we consult Robert Scott’s 1820 map of the area, we can see that there is no settlement noted as Craigmillar – though the ruins of Craigmillar Castle are clearly marked – rather there is a single village, Cairntows, where the modern housing estate lies today. Similarly, there is no single, cohesive town or village named Niddrie. Instead, a collection of settlements bearing that name appear on the site of the present-day community.

“Niddery” and “Niddry” appear multiple times in Robert Scott’s 1820 Map of the country adjacent to the City of Edinburgh comprehending nearly the whole of the county and parts of adjacent counties.

Examining art of the period can also allow for a glimpse at the character of this area of northern Liberton Parish of the 1800s. David Robert’s 1846 watercolour landscape painting of the Craigmillar ruins and the land surrounding it shows a vast swathe of arable land dotted only with a few country houses and cottages; in the right foreground two men are at work with cattle. Not visible here, however, are the collieries at Niddrie and Newcraighall.

David Robert’s Craigmillar Castle (1846) depicts a large swathe of countryside on which Craigmillar and Niddrie now stand. Typical of the period and romantic style, it depicts the area as rugged, agricultural and natural. Omitted here are the mines and quarries of the area, the former of which were investigated for their poor working conditions and use of child labour only four years earlier.

Robert’s painting is a prime example of the romantic style that had been developing in Edinburgh from the latter half of the previous century, an art style which rose in tandem with the bourgeoisie and acted as a cultural mode of expression for that ascendant class. This style emphasised the rugged and picturesque, evoking the wild and accidental beauty of the country in its portrayals of the countryside; in poetry and literature, personal emotion and a sense of subjectivity in reaction to natural beauty were central themes.[1] The ruins of Craigmillar Castle were subject to both visual and literal romantic interpretations in the nineteenth century. Robert Gibb’s Craigmillar Castle from Dalkeith Road (c.1826) situates the castle in the background of a rural scene, populated by cattle, their gallant farming owner on horseback and two of his servants as they drive the livestock across a picturesque stream. A similar scene is portrayed in Anne Gibson Nasmyth’s View through the Gateway of Craigmillar Castle, Edinburgh, with Shephard and Animals. Both paintings fixate on the natural beauty in their depictions of the area, placing the splendour of the castle ruins within a traditional agricultural context.

  • Anne Gibson Nasmyth’s View Through the Gateway of Craigmillar Castle, Edinburgh, with Shephard and Animals
  • Robert Gibb’s Craigmillar Castle from Dalkeith Road (1826)

Poetry also subjected Craigmillar Castle to the notions of the Romantics; To Craigmillar Castle by ‘J.G.S’ in which the author mourns “how scenes of yore have long since passed away” and imagines the older way of life there before the times of improvement:

“Then I would picture, how on summers eve
The peasants round thy trusty walls would meet
How passing time they sweetly would deceive
How rig’rous youth would try th’ athletic feat
Not only these have seen thy happy days
But royal pomp beneath thy roof has dwelt”[2]

The loss of beauty and grandeur of this royal home was a recurring theme in Scottish poetry of the early nineteenth century. An elegy written by ‘an invalid in town’, in which Craigmillar Castle, Duddingston and the surrounding countryside are mentioned, appeared in an 1825 edition of The Scots Magazine. It read:

“Majestically rising, Arthur’s seat
     In giant bulk uprears his lofty head;
Sees Royal Holyrood beneath his feet
     Her glory gone, her ancient splendour fled!

And close beside, a cliff with front sublime,
    Twin-born of Nature, like a sister stands
Whose venerable head, unhurt by Time
    Is doom’d to fall by sacrilegious hands

Green shady woodlands wave on every side,
    Where peeping forth gay rural villas shine;
Craigmillar, grey in age and ruin’d pride
     Erewhile the theme of softer lays than mine:”

The author goes on to sentimentalise the “yellow harvest-clad” fields “ripening in the fruitful vale” along with “garden beauties beneath [their] feet”.[3] It is evident, then, that besides a longing for the past and mournfulness, the ruined castle and its grounds also inspired positive emotions, just as it did for James Hadden in his Scots language poem Bonny Craigmillar:

“By bonny Craigmillar wi’ Maggie
      Fu’ faet flees the minutes awa’;
Tho wild be the scenery an’ craggie
     Her love maks delight o’t a’
An’ tho we’re na lassie an’ laddie
      To frisk like twa lammies in spring
An’ look for being mammie an’ daddie
      We think nae o’ ony sic hing

‘Tis just to be happy thegither
     An comfort to tak an’ to gi’e
That maks us so fond o’ ilk ither
    An lichts up the lowe o’ our e’e
There’s nane o’s that can brag o’ our siller
    But love needs nae eik tae it’s fire
The wild, healthy banks o’ Craigmillar
     Wi’ Maggie is a’ I desire

Then come to my bosie, my dearie
     And lat our minutes employ
We canna be poor nor be drearie
     For love’s baith a treasure and joy
I look on Craigmillar’s fair palace
     And thy humble cot on the muir
Wherein to my heart lives a solace
    Yon castle can never procure.”[4]

These emotional responses provide us with important information about how the area was conceived by Scots in the earlier nineteenth century, to the sense of ‘place’ it held at the time. Artists and poets alike construed the area surrounding Craigmillar Castle as rugged, beautiful and virtuously rural in character. It is perhaps in part due to these romantic portrayals that the castle ruins attracted the attention of several notable visitors throughout the century. During a royal visit to Edinburgh in August of 1856, after lunching at Holyrood Palace, Queen Victoria and the rest of the Royal Family took a trip to visit Craigmillar.[5] Royal interest in the castle would persist throughout the century: Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, led a procession of Dukes, Earls and other nobles to the site during a trip to Edinburgh in 1899.[6] Its grandeur appealed also to the ranks of professionals; seventy members of the Edinburgh Architectural Association studied the castle’s interior and construction during an 1884 survey of the area’s architectural heritage, along with Peffermill and Prestonfield Houses.[7]

The castle ruins, however, were not simply an ornate embellishment to the Lothians’ natural landscape; throughout the nineteenth century, Craigmillar Castle and its grounds were used for myriad social and economic activities. Its purpose as a defensive keep was revived in 1804, when the First Regiment and Second Battalion, Second Regiment of the Royal Edinburgh Volunteers staged a “sham fight” in the medieval complex as a demonstration for the benefit of the public and for their commanders.[8] Newspaper advertisements also shows that the grounds of the castle were a popular site for the breeding and sale of horses.[9] Later in the century, the surrounding area was also home to deer nurseries.[10] However, its secluded location on a large country estate, surrounded by woodlands also made it attractive to criminals. The presence of deer and other animals belonging to the Gilmours, the landowners of the Craigmillar estate, inevitably attracted poachers to the castle, such as the chimney-sweepers William Lang and Colin Reid who were found hiding with a rifle on the estate in 1877 and fined £1 11s 6d.[11]

The castle was also the site of several cardsharping operations, whereby confidence tricksters would entice their victims into parting with their money via a rigged card game. It appears that this was a common occurrence throughout the mid-to-late nineteenth century: an 1858 newspaper article bemoaned the fact that “scarcely a week passes in which we do not hear that someone has been decoyed out to Craigmillar Castle, and there induced to part with some money, a watch or something valuable”, stating that the perpetrators often found their marks in Princes Street.[12] A detailed case of this scam was given in an 1869 edition of the Renfrewshire Independent. In Princes Street, a visiting Highlander was approached by a man calling himself MacFarlane, who invited the traveller for a carriage ride to Craigmillar Castle. Upon arrival, they met two men playing a game of cards and on MacFarlane’s insistence the young Highlander bet £2 of his own money and lost. MacFarlane, however, won £10 and encouraged the man to bet further. When it was revealed that the man had no more money to bet, and so no more money could be robbed from him by the fraudsters, he was sent back into town ostensibly to collect money from MacFarlane’s hotel room. Upon asking for his room at the hotel, the Highlander was arrested, being mistaken as a member of the gang. The police surmised that he was a victim and, after travelling around the Southside of the city, they were able to find and identify MacFarlane as a noted cardsharp by the name of “Church”. The article notes that no laws existed to punish the man, and so he was let go and the Highlander remained without his lost money.[13]

Notable and sometimes notorious, then, was the land surrounding Craigmillar Castle. However, the Craigmillar estate encompassed much more than the castle ruins, and the area which would make up the modern scheme also includes the estate of Niddrie Marischal. From newspaper advertisements of property being let on these lands, we can surmise the true size of the lots owned and fue’d out by the landed classes in these times. An 1821 notice shows four farms on the estate of Craigmillar ranging in size from 15 acres to 109 acres, and in location from the northern bounds of Liberton Parish to the villiage of Liberton itself.[14]  A similar notice shows farms as large as 230 acres on the lands of Niddrie Marischal, grouped around the main manor house.[15] While I will be touching on the tenantry and farm servants living in the area in this post, I would like to turn first to the gentry. In my last blog post on Pilton little is mentioned of the landed classes there beyond the presence of their mansions; they appeared very much to be absentee landlords. In contrast, the gentry to the east of Edinburgh appeared to have involved themselves much more in the local social life there and were often mentioned in the newspapers as attendees at various gatherings of high society in the city.

For example, the Gilmours of Craigmillar and the Wauchopes of Niddrie Marischal were attendees of the “drawing room”, a ball in which notable women from around Edinburgh were presented, held by King George IV on his visit to Edinburgh in 1822. If their invitation to this exclusive gathering is not evidence enough of their status in Scottish society, then the details of what the women wore to the ball, published in the newspapers, might be. Mrs Little Gilmour is said to have worn a white tulle dress with satin, ornaments and pearls; Mrs Wauchope wore a dress decorated with feathers and diamonds.[16] The Gilmours also rubbed shoulders with Scotland’s other nobles: Walter James Little Gilmour attended the 1827 Edinburgh Races with the Earl of Caithness and Sir Walter Elliot.[17] This closeness to royalty was reciprocated by the landed families in the area; for Queen Victoria’s visit north in 1842, following a trail which would lead the royal party through the lands of Niddrie, Andrew Wauchope contracted a local joinery firm to build a “splendidly decorated triumphal arch” through which their carriages would pass.[18]

The wealth and elite social position of the gentry was reflected in the grand homes in which they inhabited. The splendour of their grounds is perhaps embodied most by Niddrie House, the Wauchope’s manor home. An engraving of the building and its setting appears in Tom Speedy’s 1892 work, Craigmillar and its Environs with Notes on the Topography, Natural History and Antiquities of the District. Speedy deems the grounds in which the home is set “beautifully and tastefully laid out”, and the design of the manor house itself seems designed purposefully to suggest a royal residence. Castle-like, the house is made up of several wings, one of which includes a large tower; visitors to the home had to pass through a large arching gate, presumably operated by a groundsman or guard, whose residence may have been the building in the far right of the engraving.[19]

On the left, the engraving of Niddrie House as it appears in Tom Speedy’s Craigmillar and It’s Environs. On the right, a plan of the ground and first floor of Niddrie House, dated 1725. The power of the gentry was being superseded by the ascendant bourgeoisie in this period, but their wealth and social position afforded them luxury unattainable to most. The spacious manor homes speak for themselves and when compared to the cramped, incommodious lodgings of the workers they are worlds apart in comfort.

The Wauchopes and Gilmours stood at the top of a paternal rural class structure. Directly below them were the renting farmers: rural businessmen who operated agricultural enterprises on the leased land from the gentry. Tenant farmers were men of status and wealth, deriving their existence from the money made by using the labour of agricultural workers to farm the plots of land they rented from the gentry. This powerful and economically fruitful social position as the middle-classes in the countryside was a relatively new phenomenon in Scottish history. While renting farmers had existed as a class in rural Scotland for centuries, holding land in exchange for the production of crops and labouring on behalf of their landlords, their transformation into rural businessmen had only begun in latter half of the eighteenth century. At that time, the desire of the landed classes to tap into the growing money economy saw the introduction of money rents, forcing renting farmers into the market economy and placing the onus of profitability onto their farms. What followed was a restructuring of the rural class system, decimating the cottars, the landless class eking out an existence in subsistence farming, and enclosing sections of arable land into large farms. The renting class were rewarded, however, for their support of these measures: the large farmhouses they came to live in were often newly-built for them by the gentry in return for their backing of these ‘improvement’ measures.[20] There existed, then, some economic collaboration between the gentry, the traditionally dominant class, and the new rural middle-classes whose economic power often outstripped that of their social superiors.

Despite this newfound economic power, social inferiority seems to have been accepted by the tenantry of Niddrie and Craigmaillar. In fact, much evidence from this group seems to support Antonio Gramsci’s notion that the British bourgeoisie, in stark contrast to the French, saw the gentry and aristocracy not as competition for hegemony but rather as the cultural and intellectual counterpart to their economically dominant class position.[21] The Niddrie and Craigmillar farmers often paid tribute to their landlords and their landlord’s peers. For example, names of the tenant farmers at Niddrie Mains and Niddrie Mill, for example, appear on the list of stewards for an honorary dinner thrown in February 1835 for the Duke of Buccluech in the Assembly Rooms on George Street in Edinburgh.[22] The tenantry also appeared to emulate the gentry in their social and cultural pursuits. For example, Bentham Douglas, the tenant farmer in Cairntows became a member of the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society in 1858, whose membership included the gentry at Craigmillar, in a ceremony overseen by the Duke of Buccleuch.[23] Further, in a list of contributors to the Royal Patriotic Fund – a charity set up to assist the widows and orphans of fighters in the Crimean War – appear the names of several tenant farmers from the Niddrie and Craigmillar areas, along with Walter James Little Gilmour.[24]

Much like the tenantry in Pilton, the farmers in Craigmillar and Niddrie also organised to protect their own class interests. During an 1865 outbreak of Rinderpest, a disease which causes necrosis and eventual death in cattle, the Edinburgh Dairymen’s Mutual Protection Association was established to ensure its members against any loss of cattle to the virus and to co-ordinate preventative action with the town council. Among its founders were Bentham Douglas of Cairntows, also elected Treasurer, and John Mylne of Niddrie Mains farm.[25] Six months later, these men were also present when the Association decided to wind down its operations due to their inability to prevent the spread of the disease, voting instead to destroy the infected cattle and butcher the healthy specimens in order to sell their meat.[26] Also akin to their counterparts in Pilton, the farmers to the east of Edinburgh also shored up their class position through involvement in politics; William Harper of Cairntows was listed as one of William Ramsay’s, Conservative Member for Midlothian, ‘loyal servants’ (as much a display of class collaboration as it was a sign of independent class action).[27] Similarly, Robert Young, of South Niddrie Farm and Niddrie Miln, signalled his intention to support a Conservative candidate in Linlithgowshire, where he was an elector.[28] Middle-class political actions were also evident later in the century, with the establishment of a branch of the Conservative Party-aligned Primrose League in Craigmillar.[29] Members of the renting farming class, alongside delegates from the Ploughman’s Union, were present at a meeting of the Midlothian Liberal Association in Niddrie Mains schoolhouse in May 1893.[30]

The involvement of the middle-classes in political behaviour appears to have instilled in them a sense of parliamentary procedure which was extended even to, ostensibly, non-political groups. For example, at a meeting of the Niddrie Bowling Club in October 1897, attended by several local councillors and middle-class professionals residing in the area, the membership paid respect to both the Colonel Andrew Wauchope and to the Niddrie and Benhar Coal Company. The proceedings were superficially legislative, revolving around the reception of reports and votes on the approval of measures.[31] This political culture would endure in middle-class communities even in wildly different contexts. For example, similar behaviour is found in Glasgow’s elite Mosspark council estate, populated in the main by urban professionals and businessmen, in the 1920s and 1930s with regard to community organisations such as the local tenant’s association.[32]

As mentioned, the homes of these renting farmers were substantial in size and offered the rural middle classes a living space with rooms of specialised function. That is to say that each room served a differing function of home life. This is common to modern homes, with separate kitchens, bedrooms, living rooms and toilets, but this was far from guaranteed for most people living in the nineteenth century. Farmer’s homes often had enough space for considerable decoration and were often furnished with expensive dining tables and other fashionable commodities that signalled the wealth of this ascendant social group. The renting class homes of Craigmillar and Niddrie were certainly large; the house at Niddrie Mill, beyond the rooms in the house, possessed a granary, bakehouse, shop, stable and attached garden.[33] An engraving of the farmhouse at Bridgend, now an incorporated part of the Craigmillar scheme, appears in Tom Speedy’s account of Craigmillar. In it we can see the housing for the middle-class and working-class workers side-by-side. The row-cottages reserved for labourers are fairly uniform, each containing only one floor, one door and apparently no windows. This is contrasted with the large, two storey farmhouse which possessed multiple windows and chimneys, signalling a diverse set of rooms of differing function, along with a large and walled-off garden to the rear.[34] It was possible, then, for the middle-classes to enjoy not only a great deal more indoor space, but also a significant amount of outdoor recreational space as well.

The houses at Bridgend are an example of the gap in housing standards between the owners and workers of farms.

However, again as with Pilton, the middle classes in the area were not exclusively farmers. In the village of Duddingston, to the north of Craigmillar, several houses were let exclusively to middle-class people. For example, an 1804 advertisement for property being fued out by the Marquess of Abercorn, lists the schoolmaster’s willingness to teach children of a “better rank” privately and so “keeping them unmixed with the children of the labouring people”, alongside a view of a local manor house, the situation of the property near to Arthur’s Seat and the access to the farmer’s market in the village, as benefits of living there.[35] Another, from 1813, for a three-storey house in the settlement, complete with office space and a garden, declares the property to be fit for a “genteel family”.[36] Further, later in the century, a letter to the editor of the Daily Review arguing in favour of expansion the road from Cairntows to Duddingston “will soon be studded with fine villas”, a common period style of detached home for the well-off middle classes.[37] These examples of spacious housing, within easy reach of the city but set in the picturesque countryside, were likely occupied by commuting professionals.

The nineteenth-century working classes of Niddrie and Craigmillar were, similarly, not a monolithic bunch. Whereas in some areas, like Pilton, where agriculture appeared to be the dominant form of business and production, Craigmillar and Niddrie hosted several sites of both primary and secondary industries alongside farming. Varying modes of production, in turn, meant a varying social life and conditions. For the farm labourers at Pilton, though their families were often large and their houses composed of two rooms at most, evidence was found that their earning power may have been stronger and more stable than in other industries of the period. What was absent, however, was an account of the consequences faced by the workers and their families if this earning power was lost. An instance of this can be found among newspaper evidence regarding a worker from the Craigmillar area. Cairntows, like many of the other farms surrounding Edinburgh and indeed other cities and towns across Scotland, specialised in growing turnips, grass and other produce destined for the city markets as fuel for both industrial worker and workhorse.[38] In 1844, Alexander Robertson having finished his duties as a ‘servant’ to William Harper, then the proprietor, came off his horse in a riding accident on his way home from the farm. His horse appeared at his cottage without him, and his wife later found her husband lying dead from his injuries. He left behind not only his wife, but also an offspring of nine children.[39] The consequences of the loss of the breadwinner for this family were severe. Suddenly, the family of ten were now reliant on the goodwill of strangers; calls for donations to the deceased’s family were published in local papers.[40] This story underlines the precarity at which most families existed, dependant on the sole income source of the male breadwinner. The loss of a father or husband, given the size of families at the time, was often the beginning of a fall into destitution for working-class people.

Like their counterparts in Pilton, agricultural workers were subjected to a paternalistic oversight by their social superiors. In the case of Pilton, competitions were held in which both the workers’ skill in their trade and the conditions in which they kept their small gardens were scrutinised by a team of judges made up of the renting class bosses. In Niddrie and Craigmillar, similar processes of social conditioning were at hand. One David Stewart, a gardener for the Gilmour’s of Craigmillar, won several prizes for his skill in producing specimens of fruit and vegetable, including a first place for his Savoy Cabbages at an October 1829 meeting of the North British Agricultural Society.[41] Bentham Douglas, the above mentioned proprietor of Cairntows, acted as a judge for a competition held by the Currie Ploughing Society in January 1866. At this particular competition, awards were given to the man who produced the best ploughing job, but a special prize was reserved for the man who had stayed with his “master” the longest.[42] This tacit reinforcement of class power and the expansion of work into leisure time demonstrates the extent to which job and social life were intermixed for nineteenth century agricultural workers, reinforcing their identity primarily as an extension of their economic function.

Housing for these agricultural workers was often provided for them as a part of their employment and, in the Lothians, often came in the form of a cottage or, for the unmarried, of a communal bothy. A discussion on the conditions and relations of these agricultural dwellings can be found in my previous blog, but an example of these houses in the Craigmillar and Niddrie areas can also be found above, in the engraving of Birdgend farm. However, an example of the conditions suffered by those in other industries is offered in the form of an engraving and description of the village of Gilmerton, again in Tom Speedy’s book. Though Gilmerton is not within our area of study, it certainly was linked to the area both through occupying space on the Craigmillar estate and through connections to the extensive mining works at Niddrie. From the engraving we can see, much like the farming communities in the Lothians, that the cottage appears to be the prevailing form of housing for those employed in other industries.

Gilmerton, much maligned by locals in the area, is depicted here with signs of work and the working-classes. The inclusion of a workhorse and rider was also common in depictions of urban Edinburgh’s poorer districts and can be considered an indicator of class character.

Speedy notes that the inhabitants of Gilmerton were understood to be lower-class and carried with them a reputation for violence and disorder. The inhabitants of Gilmerton were closely connected to the local mining industry, working in the majority as carters of goods from the mines through to the city. Some were also miners themselves; Speedy mentions that Gilmerton House, the local manor, was “rapidly losing its ancient character” due to its use then as housing for pit workers.[43] Ascribing a deleterious effect to these people betrays a certain disregard for the mining employees in the author, one which appears almost universal in accounts of the area at the time. Class discrimination was as present in the countryside as it was in the cities; for example, when in 1878 the farm in Little France caught fire and burned much of the master’s produce, suspicions immediately fell to local vagrants.[44] Discrimination was also practised through the erasure of working-class experience. In the above-mentioned characterisations of the Niddrie and Craigmillar area there is scant mention of the rural industries and the employees that worked them. This is despite a large stone quarry being located on the grounds of the Craigmillar estate, having existing from at least the first decade of the nineteenth century.[45] Another example can be found in a newspaper account of a writer’s walk through the Midlothian countryside, in which they emphasised the local manorial houses, fields and natural landmarks. Small mentions are made of railways and breweries, but in the main working-class activity and labour are ignored in these characterisations.[46]

Coal mining, however, appears more often in historical literature from the area. Like those working on farms in the region, many of the miners in the collieries of the Lothians had their houses provided for them by their employer. Even further, the social control mechanisms at work in the farms appear to have been present also in the mining communities; an 1875 article discussing the conditions of miner’s homes described the workers there as “a pacific, strike-disliking class of men” whose “employers exercise the paternal rather than the autocratic rule” of which the provision of houses was central. The article detailed the conditions of these houses, being generally of a cottage with a room and kitchen with sanded or stone floors and, in some cases decorated with plants, prints, engravings and cultivated flowers. The keeping of pet birds appears to have been popular with the miners, the author attesting to finding one home with as many as six cages in its ‘sitting room’. The author assessed these houses as having a “a certain air of cleanliness and almost of warmth” in character. Not all employees, however, were provided with homes. Many of the two thousand miners in the Niddrie area resided in separately rented houses, which could vary drastically in their qualities. Of miner’s houses in Adam’s Row, near to the main village of Niddrie, the following was said:

“… no ashpit is erected and the village is in a very dirty state, the roadway in front and the garden ground behind being alike untidy. There is not a closet in the place, but a deposit of bricks near the end of the long row is the forerunner, I am told, of such outhouses. For small room and kitchen houses the rent is 5s a month, and for single apartments 3s 4d a month. They are poor houses, but not positively unhealthy. Two wells give a never-failing supply of good spring water.”

Miners and those whose employment was linked to the collieries at Niddrie and Newcraighall, such as workers for the North British Railway, occupied houses in the village of Millerhill, where the landlord was a member of the Wauchope family. The houses here were of poor condition, older construction and were liable to dampness. Again, these houses were cottages of one or two rooms, the inclusion of the second room raising the rent from 6d to 10d per week. Two wells supplied the drinking and cleaning water for the two rows of cottages; there were only ‘closets’, outhouses, for one of the rows.[47]

The Niddrie & Benhar Coal Company were the “masters” over many of the men resident in the Niddrie area. While not included here due to concerns over lengths, newspaper and archival evidence includes the use of child labour in the mid-century and a large pit disaster in the 1880s in the pits at Niddrie and Newcraighall.

Housing was often not only tied to work through its provision by the coal masters and landlords, but also physically close to work sites as well. Several of the houses in the village of Niddrie were close to the ‘Joppa’ seam which ran through the settlement and which had been worked up until the late nineteenth century.[48] The closeness of dwellings to workplaces was perhaps not accidental and ostensibly was a matter of convenience for both the workers and employers. Living as a miner in a mining village, socialising with other miners or those connected to the trade and watching the mine being worked, breathing in coal dust and listening to the operations go on even while off shift must have had a profound effect on the way the miners saw themselves and each other. This building of an identity around labour which was dangerous, difficult, and unrewarding (a quality perhaps best shown by the paltry houses provided by the company) no doubt was a significant force in the process of unionisation. Recent oral history work by Ewan Gibbs has demonstrated that these deep connections between mining as an employment form and the settlements which grew around pits continued to strongly influence the identity and social life of the residents of these settlements up to and beyond large-scale pit closures in the 1980s.[49] The shared suffering of the community was strong motivator in creating a class and sectoral identity which would endure for over a hundred years. The miners in Niddrie and across the Lothians organised to campaign for better conditions in their life and social work through the creation of trade unions. The Mid and East Lothian Miner’s Association (MELMA) was the organ through which the miners in places like Niddrie, Newcraighall, Tranent and Danderhall expressed their class identity and fought against the power of their ‘masters’ in the later nineteenth century.

Though strikes, industrial action and unionisation had been attempted in the decades previous, the miners at Niddrie did not formally join MELMA until 1889, where they met on a grass pitch in Newcraighall and held a vote on the issue.[50] MELMA was involved in activities beyond the scope of the Niddrie mines and even beyond the Lothians. For example, in 1892, a ‘miner’s agent’ from Niddrie told the Edinburgh Evening News that the union intended to meet with William Gladstone, then the Prime Minister, during a forthcoming trip of his to Edinburgh, in order to discuss their campaign for an eight-hour work day.[51] Against the above charge of strike-weariness, the Mid and East Lothian miners voted to continue with a strike on 17 October 1894 where other Scottish unions had voted to go back to work, receiving continued support from the Miner’s Federation of Great Britain. However, only five days later the strike came to a halt as the mine bosses began evictions of workers from company houses.[52] This tactic was a common one for mine owners of this period: the minutes of the MELMA up to 1918 contain several mentions of pit bosses utilising their ownership of the miner’s houses to break up strikes and punish individual workers. To the miners, this practice was known as “victimisation”, a broad term which included any action against individual miners for their participation in strikes or other union activity. However, due to the strong connections between housing and workplace in Niddrie, its usage there embodies the understanding of these workers of this relationship, and that an attack on one had devastating consequences for both. Further, it betrays the notion that these miners saw their homes in emotional as much as material terms, placing these often-incommodious miner’s dwellings firmly into the “moral economy”. This perspective on housing would become an important prerequisite for the housing actions carried out during the First World War and beyond, helping to usher in the era of council housing and inspire continued action throughout the interwar period and beyond.[53]

Housing, then, was a central cause in the struggle for better conditions for the Lothian’s miners. The importance afforded to housing is shown in the organisational rules of MELMA: if a particular colliery had what was considered a high proportion of men residing in company houses, they were allowed more than one delegate to sit on the board of the organisation. For this reason, the Niddrie pits had two representatives on the governing body.[54] The miner’s union also sought to support men successfully “victimised” by their employers with regards to housing. In 1895 two such members were given cash payments to furnish their moving to a new home: Andrew Cunningham was given £1 after his eviction and firing by the Niddrie bosses; two weeks strike pay was also given to an Alexander Roger to facilitate his moving on from housing at the Niddrie colliery to the Polton colliery in Bonnyrigg.[55] The centrality of housing to the miner’s activities continued well into the twentieth century and the men of MELMA were involved in the housing struggles of the First World War. For example, during the rent strike of 1915, the union sent two delegates, including its president, to the Glasgow Labour Housing Committee’s Scottish National Conference on Housing, alongside 326 other unions, cooperatives and guilds.[56] This relationship with the Labour party seems only to have to strengthened over the years as the housing question gained national attention; on the 5th of January 1918, MELMA adopted a resolution to attend and vote on issues related to housing at a conference in Glasgow aimed at informing Labour Party policy.[57]

The history of Craigmillar and Niddrie certainly gives credence to local’s insistence that the two areas should be considered as separate and unique places. Craigmillar, to the west, was the site of farmland, a quarry and breweries. In Niddrie, coal mining was the dominant industry though farmland also occupied what is now parts of the modern scheme. Unfortunately, due to current events, exploration of the various industries in this area has been limited to what is available online which, though detailed in some respects, has sadly left out a lot of information about the quarrying and breweries. Nonetheless, we can see clearly that a rural class system was in full operation in Craigmillar and Niddrie in the nineteenth century and it affected the social and work life of everyone residing there. Whether a miner in Niddrie or a farm servant in Cairntows, the systems of production borne out of the later years of the previous century shaped and influenced one’s everyday experience. No where else was this as apparent as it was in the housing a person occupied. Wealth and status endowed the gentry and the renting farmers more space and so a more comfortable living, where there workers were left with inadequate homes of one or two rooms and often without suitable washing facilities. This class structure had an attendant ideology which, through both active and passive discrimination, denied the rural working classes representation in artistic, poetic and descriptive depictions of their home region. At work, especially in the agricultural sector, this ideology was tacitly enforced through worker’s participation in competitions which allowed their bosses to police their working skills and loyalty to their craft. However, the conditions at both home and work elsewhere, notably in mining, led the workers there to band together into unions to resist the power of their superiors.

[1] Nick Prior, ‘Edinburgh, Romanticism and the National Gallery of Scotland’, Urban History Vol.22 No.2 pp.210 – 215

[2] The Scots Magazine 01 November 1808, p.48

[3] The Scots Magazine 01 February 1825, pp.72 – 75

[4] Stonehaven Journal 08 October 1850, p.7

[5] Caledonian Mercury 30 August 1856, p.3

[6] St Andrews Citizen 15 July 1899, p.2

[7] Portobello Advertiser 19 April 1884, p.3

[8] Caledonian Mercury 27 February 1804, p.3

[9] Edinburgh Evening Courant 26 April 1828, p.1; ibid 20 December 1828, p.1

[10] Dundee Evening Telegraph Sat 19 December 1891, p.5

[11] Edinburgh Evening News 11 December 1877, p.2

[12] Stirling Observer 13 May 1858, p.3

[13] Renfrewshire Advertiser Sat 06 June 1869, p.5

[14] Caledonian Mercury 16 April 1821, p.1

[15] Caledonian Mercury 12 August 1822, p.1

[16] Caledonian Mercury 22 August 1822 pp.2-3

[17] Caledonian Mercury 27 June 1827, p.3

[18] The Witness 21 September 1842, p.3

[19] Tom Speedy, Craigmillar and its Environs with Notes on the Topography, Natural History and Antiquities of the District (1892, George Lewis & Son, Selkirk) pp.218 – 222

[20] Christopher A. Whatley, The Industrial Revolution in Scotland (1997, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) pp.55 – 58

[21] Antonio Gramsci, ‘The different position of urban and rural-type intellectuals’, in Quinton Hoare & G.N. Smith (ed.), Selections From the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (1971, Lawrence and Wishart, London) p.18

[22] The Scotsman 07 February 1835, p.1

[23] Edinburgh Evening Courant 14 January 1858, p.2

[24] The Scotsman 17 January 1855, p.1

[25] Caledonian Mercury 31 August 1865, p.1

[26] Daily Review 01 February 1866, p.2

[27] Caledonian Mercury 13 June 1839, p.1

[28] The Scotsman 15 August 1832, p.1

[29] Edinburgh Evening News 13 April 1892, p.2

[30] Mid-Lothian Journal 12 May 1893, p.6

[31] Musselburgh News 15 October 1897, p.3

[32] Sean Damer, Scheming: A social history of Glasgow council housing, 1919 – 1956 (2018, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh)pp.17 – 23

[33] The Witness 15 February 1840, p.1

[34] Tom Speedy, Craigmillar and its Environs with Notes on the Topography, Natural History and Antiquities of the District (1892, George Lewis & Son, Selkirk) p.214

[35] Caledonian Mercury 10 May 1804, p.1

[36] Caledonian Mercury 23 December 1813, p.4

[37] Daily Review 28 November 1879, p.3

[38] The Scotsman 11 September 1869, p.8

[39] Inverness Courier 28 February 1844, p.2

[40] The Witness 21 February 1844, p.2

[41] Caledonian Mercury 17 October 1829, p.2

[42] Edinburgh Evening Courant 20 January 1866, p.8

[43] Tom Speedy, Craigmillar and its Environs with Notes on the Topography, Natural History and Antiquities of the District (1892, George Lewis & Son, Selkirk pp.234 – 239

[44] Edinburgh Evening News 13 March 1878, p.2

[45] Caledonian Mercury 24 March 1808, p.4

[46] Musselburgh News 12 August 1892, p.6

[47] Glasgow Herald 8 February 1875, p.4

[48] Musselburgh News 17 January 1893, p.6

[49] Ewan Gibbs, Coal Country: the Meaning and Memory of Deindustrialisation in Post-War Scotland (2021, University of London Press, London) pp.93 – 99

[50] Musselburgh News 09 August 1889, p.6

[51] Edinburgh Evening News 28 May 1892, p.2

[52] Ian McDougal (ed.), Mid and East Lothian Miner’s Association Minutes 1894 – 1918 (2003, Lothian press, Edinburgh) pp.46 – 47

[53] Ewan Gibbs, ‘Historical tradition and community mobilisation: narratives of Red Clydeside in memories of the anti-Poll Tax movement in Scotland’

[54] Ibid. p.39

[55] Ibid. p.50; p.58

[56] Ibid. p.323

[57] Ibid. p.383

Pilton: a prehistory

Pilton is a housing scheme in the north-west of Edinburgh made up, originally, of four-in-a-block cottage-flats, three-storey tenements and semi-detached timber houses. Recently, modern private and mixed-residential developments have begun to spring up around the area, but the older housing forms continue to dominate the area. The scheme, or rather the two schemes of East and West Pilton, were built in stages throughout the 1930s and 1940s under several of the inter-war Housing Acts geared toward the clearance of slums and the rehousing of their residents. Sean Damer’s work on the inter-war council housing of Glasgow, where there existed a unique three-tier ‘league table’ of social housing standards, shows that the particular Act under which a scheme was built had significant social implications for the residents. The bottom two categories, ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Rehousing’, housed in the large part former slum-dwellers and as such came to possess the negative characterisations which plagued the inner-city tenements areas, exemplified by the surveillance of the Resident Factors and ‘Green Ladies’.[1] Being a slum-clearance scheme, my future research on Pilton will focus, partially, on the implications the system of council housebuilding under the various Acts had on the population there and across Edinburgh. However, today I would like to present something different – a ‘prehistory’ of the Pilton schemes. I use prehistory ironically, as Pilton’s history begins much further back than the construction of council houses and even the historical discussion presented here. Despite this, the popular perception of Pilton is that of a suburban, peripheral area connected to Edinburgh not by economic activity but primarily as a place of residence and a site of social problems and decline. This is in part down to a lack of attention paid to the area by historians as much as Edinburgh’s ‘City Fathers’ and housing planners of yore. My work here will show that Pilton’s identity as a working-class residential area marred by difficulties, which in any case is far from a complete understanding even presently, does not represent the full history of the area.

Before beginning, I would like to point out that this is not, by any means, a complete history of the area. This passage relies heavily on newspaper evidence, as a consequence of the coronavirus epidemic forcing the libraries and archives to stay closed, and as such is missing certain details that will be lurking in unreachable primary sources. What is presented here is constructed from as wide a range of sources as was available to me from open libraries, digitized archives and obscured .pdf documents.

Throughout the nineteenth century, what are now the estates of East and West Pilton, Drylaw, Granton and Muirhouse, were, in the main, large swathes of farmland and landed estates. Economic development, however, was not static; encroachment of industry and infrastructure into the farmland northwest of Edinburgh was a constant development throughout the period. If we compare two maps – Robert Kirkwood’s This Plan of Edinburgh and Its Environs (1817) and John Bartholomew’s Plan of Edinburgh and Leith with Suburbs from Ordinance and Actual Surveys (1880) – the extent of the change is obvious. The construction of Granton harbour and pier, extensive railway lines, bridges, scores of buildings and a network of roads set apart the area of the early and late nineteenth century. Industrial development remained on the periphery of Pilton until the next century, however its effects began to generate change in other settlements in the area. By 1845 the New Statistical Account saw fit to describe Granton as a “very populous district” on par with the two other main settlements in Cramond Parish, Davidson’s Mains and the village of Cramond itself. However, neither of the farms at Pilton are mentioned by name, though the farming tenantry in the parish are said to be a “very industrious and intelligent class of men”, and much of the discussion on housing is restricted to accounting for the many mansion houses and estates dotted around the area. Voiceless here are the agricultural workers, the majority population in the district at that time; the only indication the authors give of poorer residents in the area are statistics on the number of people claiming poor relief.[2]

The Pilton area in 1817 and 1880, from the above-mentioned maps

The social life in Pilton at this period was influenced a great deal by the great agricultural developments of the previous century. Until some decades into the nineteenth century, most Scots were rural dwellers of some kind. In the Lowlands, a majority of people were ‘cottars’, landless workers whose home was provided to them along with a small plot in exchange for yearly labour on behalf of the tenant farmer, on whose rented land they lived. From the middle of the eighteenth century, this social structure began to come undone, being affected by the new modes of work that were introduced in line with ‘improved’ farming practices. Increasingly, labour was no longer seasonal, as it was realised that rotating crops increased farming output and, thus, the capital to be produced from farm work. Given that the cottars’ rights to their homes were not protected by law, they were cleared from the land, in cases violently, to make room for the planting of more crops and the introduction of waged year-round labour. Many cottars made their ways into the cities, crowded into the tenement blocks of the late Georgian period and into the ranks of the urban proletariat. Others, however, remained on the farms, though their relationship to the renting farmers was irreversibly changed, revolving now around capital where before it was access to land.[3] Farms surrounding large cities increasingly came to supply the growing industrial centres with food for both the growing urban population and industrial beasts of burden. Commonly, these farms grew turnips, potatoes, hay, oats and grass.[4] Newspaper evidence from throughout the nineteenth century shows that for the farms north-west of Edinburgh, this role was taken up readily, with turnips in particular a mainstay of the crops produced there.[5]

Imagery from Pilton in the nineteenth century offers a glimpse of the way of life brought there by ‘improvers’ and the agricultural revolution. East Pilton farm is depicted in an engraving volume three of James Grant’s Old and New Edinburgh, ostensibly a reproduction from an artwork produced early in the century. In it,the large farmhouse stands two-storeys tall and is accompanied by a longer one-storey house and a cottage further to the left; an illustration of the rural housing division as an extension of social rank.[6] The longer house in this engraving is likely the collective housing for farm hands, known as the ‘bothy’.

East Pilton as it appears in James Grant’s Old and New Edinburgh Vol. 3

The bothy, distinct from the small Highland cottages of the same name, were the communal living spaces for agricultural labourers found on farm in the east of Scotland. In the west, a similar form of housing known as the ‘chaumers’ were provided, with the bothy differentiated by their possession of integrated cooking areas. Whereas, in the west, Lowland agricultural workers could eat food prepared for them in the farmhouse itself, farm servants in the east were expected to cook and consume their food in their separate lodgings. The buildings somewhat resembled barracks, with rows of beds on either side of the long building and a kist for each worker’s belongings to be held. These dwellings were not finely furnished and what extra furniture that appeared, beyond the beds, storage and eating surfaces, were usually old and unwanted wares from the farmer’s home. The dwellers of the bothy were, in the majority, unmarried men. For married workers, a cottage – like the one in the engraving – was usually provided. In the nineteenth century, these houses were typically of only one or two rooms. Much like their tenement-dwelling counterparts in the cities, rural cottagers had no choice but to assign multiple functions to their rooms, with the eating, bathing and sleeping commonly being done in the same space.[7] James Robb gave an account of these two types of dwellings in the Lothians in 1861. Of a two-storey bothy on one farm, Robb said:

“It has windows only on one side, but these are comparatively large and made to open. On the ground floor, there are two apartments … each apartment has one window. The larger … was occupied at the time of out visit by three Irishmen. Its furniture consisted of a table and three iron bedsteads, while a couple of short wooden forms did duty as seats. Two or three iron pots, and a basin of dirty water, stood under the table, while a mug and a few cups were upon it. On the hod beside the fireless grate … stood an ash-covered teapot … a blue woollen shirt covered what appeared to be a barrel in the corner … The blankets were certainly not snow-white, and there was a general appearance of dirt, and a close unwholesome smell in the place … The room up-stairs was occupied by one Highland girl. It was as large as the two below put together, and in summer is made to accommodate six or more persons. It has two windows, is airy and ceiled. There were in it three or four iron bedsteads, two tables, one of which supported a considerable display of crockery, and the other a Gaelic tract. A quantity of coal lay on the floor and a broken looking-glass hung on a nail by the side of the window.”[8]

Of a workers’ cottage, on a different farm, Robb said:

“The houses on this farm have mostly two rooms and a pantry; the floor of the kitchen a mixture of lime and ashes, that of the bedroom is boarded. They have, however, too little light and air. There are some new cottages here not yet occupied, which we inspected. They have a kitchen and parlour … the floor of the kitchen is laid neatly with tiles, the parlour is comfortably boarded. They have, besides, two small but airy and well-lighted bedrooms, a milk house, and a scullery with a sink for the dirty water. The houses are to be fitted up with iron bedsteads, grates and gas brackets … There will be gardens in the front of the houses, and all requisite conveniences in the back. The roofs are high, the rooms all lathed and plastered, and the windows are spacious and made to open … “[9]

What are, today, taken to be essential components of a home, such as a garden, energy supplies and inside toilets were certainly not universal and in many cases a rarity in rural workers’ homes in the Lothians of the nineteenth century. This variation in housing standards within the farm could also be found across the Lothians, with another farm visited by Robb showing older, more run-down cottage stocks. Further variation could be found in different industries, with particularly poor housing for the miners in Tranent, East Lothian, just ten miles from Pilton. Workers and their families there slept on piles of hay and shared their lodgings with animals whose droppings covered both the ground inside and outside of the houses.[10] Also akin to urban workers, farm servants tended to have large families, like that of Charles Bell, a worker on the East Pilton Farm from 1872 onward, who had nine surviving children of a total of fourteen in 1912.[11] This strain on space, even for those who lived away from the farm in houses of a potentially larger size, as the Bells did, is all too apparent.

‘A Farm Cottage’ , artist unknown (19th century) and ‘Farm’ by William Walker (1855) show the variation to be found in agricultural workers’ lodgings in the nineteenth century. The cottage on the left is undoubtedly of an older un-‘improved’ sort, while that on the right is of a newer build.

In spite of this spatial poverty, there does exist some evidence that farm labourers in Pilton were not among the very poorest and could in some cases afford things that were out of reach for many slum-dwellers, urban proletarians and poorer rural workers. Indeed, Tom Devine’s examination of life for agricultural workers in the region during the years 1810 to 1840 finds that life there was relatively stable compared to elsewhere. In a period that saw rural labour risings in England and northern Scotland, along with food riots and the Radical War, the Lothians and south-east were peaceful. This is due in part to the preference for long-hires of six months to a year and the persistence of payment-in-kind into the nineteenth century, protecting agricultural workers there from the fluctuations of the market following the Napoleonic Wars.[12] James Robb’s account of the East Lothian farm workers’ pay shows that payment-in-kind – that is, payment in farm produce rather than cash money – was a popular method of remuneration even into the latter half of the nineteenth century. By his description, a farm worker there in 1861 could expect an annual payment-in-kind valued between £31 and £35, generally, and at highest, £41 15s.[13] Gradually, however, payment-in-kind and in perquisites began to cede ground to cash in the later nineteenth century so that by 1907 they were only accounting for 28 per cent of wages for farm workers in Scotland generally, and 15 per cent in the south-east in particular.[14]

While evidence could not be found of the exact wages at the farms in Pilton or the surrounding area, they do not seem to have fared much worse than their East Lothian counterparts. For example, Hugh Campbell, servant on the farm of West Pilton, brought a lawsuit against Sir James R Gibson Maitland of Barnton after Campbell had fallen into Craigleith Quarry. Campbell’s lawsuit alleged negligence and claimed that poorly maintained fencing was to blame for his forty-foot plunge into the quarry, where he lay all night.[15] Little is known of Campbell and it may be that he was of a higher grade than a simple labourer, but an individual worker raising the fees to pay a lawyer to bring a suit against a landowner suggests a certain amount of monetary or social capital. This case is, by any means, not a common one among the stories in the newspaper and it may be that Campbell was using his own savings to pay for the proceedings. There is evidence to support this theory, as in the case of John Thomas O’Donnell, a labourer on East Pilton farm, who was robbed of £27 10s of his savings by a man he had met while drinking in Edinburgh.[16] The ability to save money in these amounts attests to a better level of pay and cheaper costs of living for farm servants in Pilton than was available to workers in other sectors of the economy, and while Campbell’s lawsuit against a man significantly higher in social grade most likely failed, his actions speak toward a confidence in means not attributed to the poorest industrial inner-city residents. Further, newspaper stories of burglaries of Pilton farm labourers’ homes in the later nineteenth century, considering the presence of villas, farmhouses and mansions in the vicinity, perhaps point to a relatively decent material wealth among the workers there.[17]

Beyond their year-round labour, farmworkers in Pilton of the nineteenth century often took part in competitions in which they had the opportunity to show their prowess in their trades. For example, John Cleland, servant of Archibald F. Allen, the proprietor of East Pilton, placed in the top ten of a ploughing competition held at Mortonhall in February 1841.[18] Agricultural production extended out from the workplace and into the social lives of the servants of farmers. This stretching of work into play appears to have been exploited by the middle-classes to order and discipline their workers. This can be demonstrated by the organisation of an annual exhibition by the Cramond Parish Horticultural Societyin which prizes were awarded to farm servants for specimens of flowers, fruit and vegetables along with the conditions of the workers farmed lot adjoining their cottages.[19] Given the scrutiny of the workers’ houses here, it appears that these competitions were also a means through which the tenant farmers regulated the social and home lives of their workers, softly reinforcing the rural class system. Implicit bolstering of social rank can also be seen with George Stenhouse, owner of the farm at West Pilton: for his sixty servants in 1861, he threw a ‘sumptuous supper’ in the barn on the steading, decorated with evergreen plants. The number of servants itself is an indicator of the wealth of Mr Stenhouse, but it is interesting to observe that while, on the surface, the gesture was thankful, the workers were not dining inside the house but were still relegated to the buildings whose purpose was linked to the labour performed on the farm. This implicit paternalism seems to have gone unnoticed or was even accepted as normal by the workers; they thanked their boss in the lines of the local papers.[20]

Stenhouse appears often in the news of the period and it is clear from these occurrences that he was a wealthy man. He entrusted a neighbour with enough capital to purchase seven work horses, for example.[21] His house on West Pilton farm, in contrast with the labourer’s cottages, contained two ‘public rooms’, three bedrooms and an inside bathroom.[22] One of these ‘public rooms’ would have undoubtedly been a dining room. The importance of a dining room in middle-class homes, both urban and rural, had grown since the 1700s as the culture of consumption provided people of means with a way of expressing their class character and status in material objects. The importance of good china and the large tables, often made of expensive imported wood, was as much to do with exhibiting wealth as it was with entertaining guests.[23] In addition to his large farm at West Pilton, he was also the owner of land in Clermiston upon which he rented out a dairy farm, with enough room for up to 30 cattle.[24] Stenhouse’s farm had a very positive reputation in Edinburgh and was famed for its turnip and grass production, though it also grew wheat, beans and barley along with keeping horses and cattle. This reputation continued even past George’s death, as it was featured in an article in an 1892 edition of the North British Agriculturalist in which his widow states that she had continued to run the 170-acre farm in his absence. She also told the paper that Stenhouse’s connections with local Police Commissioners had helped to keep the farm afloat in its early years.[25]

Social as well as economic power can also be seen in Stenhouse’s one-time neighbour, Archibald Finnie Allen. Allen inhabited and ran the farm at East Pilton and also seems to have been considerably wealthy: an auction of his goods in December 1846 lists various work implements from carts to harnesses, myriad agricultural produce along with eight work horses, two ponies, four milk cows, twenty-eight swine and eighteen shots.[26] Allen was a founding member of the Scottish Mutual Insurance Association of Cattle and Horses, serving on the subcommittee which arranged the paperwork that dealt with its establishment.[27] He was also able to afford a game certificate, hunting being a notable pursuit of the nineteenth-century middle classes.[28] Allen was also signatory of a request for farmers to be in attendance at a debate on Corn Laws in Edinburgh’s Royal Exchange in March 1842.[29] Interest and involvement in local politics seems to have been a common thing among the notable farmers north-west of Edinburgh; in 1882, Peter Inglis, then the tenant farmer in East Pilton, was elected by the land and heritage owners as a Road Trustee for Crammond Parish.[30] Inglis was also made Vice-Chairman of the Crammond Parochial Board in 1886, serving under Henry Davidson, the tenant farmer at Muirhouse, in the latter’s role as the Chairman.[31] Involvement of the middling sorts in poor relief had long been an established practice, as they held much stronger connections to the local community than the lords and had colonised the ranks of the church since the previous century, and so it is typical that one might find the names of prominent farmers among the Parochial Boards.[32]

Being a tenant farmer in nineteenth-century Pilton, then, meant a lot more than running a business. It was a respectable middle-class profession through which great wealth could be had in the form of cash money but also in the form of social contacts and social control. The evidence above suggests that, whether in work or in receipt of poor relief, working-class people in Crammond Parish had to contend with the gaze of their social superiors extending into their private lives and their inner characters in a similar, though not identical, way to the urban poor.

Farmers, though, were not the whole of the middle-class that occupied the area in the nineteenth century. James Grant mentions, for example, that Wardie, east of Pilton, was “… studded by fine villas rich in gardens and teeming with fertility” by the time of his book’s publication in the late nineteenth century.[33] In the 1890s, Leith Burgh Council began planning the construction of a fever hospital at East Pilton, a six-acre patch of land lying on the East Pilton farm being chosen in October 1892.[34] Opposition to this plan from residents in the villas at Wardie was raised the following month in a special meeting of the Council, on the basis of concerns about a potential depreciation of the value of their homes if the building was to go ahead.[35] These concerns were resolutely ignored by the Leith Burgh Council and the construction proceeded on the site chosen. It was far from an easy process; controversy over the initial £36,000 cost and the realisation that the ground on which it was to be built required an extensive drainage system led to several changes to the architectural plans. Contractor delays held up the project for months, controversy arose over the issue of local governance of the Leith Council over a piece of Midlothian and even after the hospital had been built, a fire caused £100 worth of damages and two spires on the building had to be demolished and replaced due to irregularities.[36]

Locals’ concerns may have been ignored due to a snobbery held in Leith Burgh toward the more rural dwellers to their west. The system of competition between the Leith and Edinburgh Burghs produced a mutual antagonism between the two, with the latter holding the former in contempt as an inferior and peculiar town. Pilton, Muirhouse and the other north-western areas appear to have taken the brunt of Leith’s frustrations at their unfavourable comparisons with their larger neighbour, as they did during a meeting of the Leith Burgh Council on 29 January 1897. The drainage system for the East Pilton Hospital had burst, with raw sewage and medical waste pouring out onto the land and into the ocean at Leith. The Edinburgh bourgeoisie had relished their opportunity to taunt and mock their counterparts in Leith, leading to bruised egos and renewed bitterness in the town over a project that had already proven to be too much of a headache. When one member, a Councillor Waterstone, appear to agree with the criticism by complaining that his usual bathing grounds by the Chain Pier at Wardie had been polluted, another member openly mocked him by drawing a cartoon of him diving in and coming up covered in dung and other farm wastage – to the loud amusement of all except Waterstone.[37] The rural character of the area was a point of derision, despite the obvious status, wealth and influence many residents of the Pilton area held in the region.

Despite the mockery of the urban bourgeois, the rural character of Pilton and the surrounding area persisted for some time after the turn of the century. East and West Pilton, along with neighbouring farms, continued to produce turnips, grass and other agricultural products to be sold at public roups in the city.[38] Farming would continue to dominate the landscape in the area until the early 1930s, when the first sale of land for council housing occurred.[39] Horticulture and the celebration of prize specimens continued to play a role in social life, as shown by the holding of annual ‘Children’s Flower Services’ at Wardie United Free Church.[40] The appearance of the Bruce, Peebles and Company’s new engineering works in East Pilton brought the industrial development that had been slowly edging itself further west from Leith right to the farming community’s doorstep. This company would produce tramways for Hong Kong and, later, machines for the Brown Boveri company in Switzerland, and also provide employment for the area until its closure in 2005.[41]

It was in the 1920s that the winds of change first came to Pilton. In 1922, as a result of persistently high post-war unemployment levels, Edinburgh Burgh Council began a £300,000 project of roadbuilding between Granton and Cramond with the belief that it would provide work both in its development and in future industrial development in the area. The possibility of housing or, as the council put it, “a new garden city by the sea” was also considered.[42] There was still a push to use the areas of Granton, Pilton and Muirhouse for the construction of factories and other works in the late 1920s; following the construction of a new electrical power station in Portobello, the Edinburgh Society for the Promotion of Trade produced a map in which north-west Edinburgh was marked as ‘schedule one’ readiness for industrial development.[43] It was not to be, however, as before even the council could begin building houses in the area, private developments began to spring up in Pilton. Despite the economic trouble which wracked the industrial workers of Scotland, clerical and other middle-class salaries grew in the inter-war years. In turn, this created a demand for new housing, which was met by a trend of private bungalow building in the outer limits of Scottish cities, helped also by a growth in car ownership and public transport provision.[44] Pilton was the site of one of these developments in the late 1920s and early 1930s; on Crew Road North, an example of these bungalows, complete with two bedrooms, a parlour, bathroom and scullery, was advertised with a yearly rent of £25 and a fue duty of £2 19s 6d, well out of reach for agricultural or industrial labourers.[45]

A Glasgow bungalow of the type built in Scotland in the 1920s, note the rural character of the land in the background.

Despite these initial private developments, which continued to appear patchwork in the area throughout the 1930s, Pilton was not fated to become a land of bungalows and villas. In 1931, Edinburgh Corporation bought 150 acres of land, the first of many land acquisitions from the Duke of Buccleuch and the estates of Barnton, Sauchie and Bannockburn. Council housebuilding went rapidly underway, transforming the area and sweeping away the social life revolving around the production of agriculture. The name Pilton quickly became disassociated with high-quality turnips and Italian grass as the grey-harled tenements and stone cottage flats sprung up, replacing the farmers and their servants with an industrial population transferred from the slums of the Old Town and Southside.

The idea that Pilton’s history began with the construction of council houses, or that its importance in history is limited to its function as a housing scheme is patently untrue. While the drive for housing in the 1930s undeniably transformed the landscape and essentially shaped our conception of the area, its history and its social life up to the present day, Pilton before the scheme was host to a social life and system particular to a certain place in history. The rural class system there grew out of the changes in agricultural production in the eighteenth century and critically influenced the way that people related to one another. The agricultural worker in the Lothians, and demonstrably at Pilton, was not the lowest paid or worst-housed in the region, especially when weighed against the industrial workers in the city slums or the miners to the east, and appeared to enjoy stable wages and employment. However, they and their families, whether they realised it or not, had to contend with a paternalistic social order. This is perhaps embodied most strongly in the housing provided to them: lacking the space, the public rooms and, in many cases, the provision of an inside water source or wash closet that the tenant farmer could claim for himself. Pilton’s housing made solid the rural class system. The tenantry not only had more space to live, and to exude their wealth, but also the space to pursue political and economic ties with others of a similar standing. Their connections in the cities saw them act as insurance brokers and political agents, and their status in the countryside allowed them into the ranks of the church and onto the Parochial Boards. If the advent of council housing swept away the power of private landlords in the cities of Scotland, as Richard Roger shows, in Pilton it also done away with an entire system of rural social codes, production and economic relations.[46]

[1] Sean Damer, Scheming: A Social History of Glasgow Council Housing, 1919 – 1956 (2018, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh) pp.30 – 72

[2] New Statistical Account Vol 1 1845, pp.589 – 506

[3] TM Devine, The Scottish Nation (2006, Penguin, London) pp.123 – 155

[4] M. Stewart & F. Watson, ‘Land, the Landscape and People in the Nineteenth Century’, in Griffiths & Morton (ed.) A History of Everyday Life in Scotland, 1800 – 1900 (2010, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh) pp.23 – 29

[5] The Edinburgh Evening Courant Thurs 17 September 1868, p.2

[6] James Grant, Cassell’s Old and New Edinburgh Vol III, (1881, Cassell, Peter & Galpin, London) p.309

[7] David Jones, ‘Living in One or Two Rooms in the Country’, in Annette Carruthers (ed.) The Scottish Home (1996, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh) pp.40 – 52

[8] J Robb, The Cottage, the Bothy and the Kitchen (1861, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh) pp.8 – 10

[9] J Robb, The Cottage, the Bothy and the Kitchen (1861, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh) pp.3 – 4

[10] Enid Gauldie, Cruel Habitations: A History of Working-Class Housing 1780 – 1918 (1974, George Allen & Unwin, London) p.22

[11] Midlothian Advertiser Fri 05 January 1912, p.4

[12] TM Devine, ‘Social stability and agrarian change in the eastern lowlands of Scotland, 1810 – 1840’, Social History Vol.3 No.3 pp.331 – 337

[13] J Robb, The Cottage, the Bothy and the Kitchen (1861, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh) p.11

[14] R. Anthony, ‘Farm servant vs agricultural labourer, 1870 – 1914: A Commentary on Howkins’, The Agricultural History Review Vol 43, No.1, p.62

[15] The Edinburgh Evening News Tues 29 November 1892, p.4

[16] Midlothian Advertiser Sat 01 December 1906, p.4

[17] The Scotsman Fri 10 May 1868, p.2

[18] The Witness Wed 03 March 1841 p.3

[19] The Scotsman Mon 09 August 1880 p.6

[20] The Scotsman Wed 30 January 1861 p.2

[21] The Scotsman Wed 24 April 1861 p.7

[22] The Scotsman Wed 12 July 1912, p.3

[23] Stana Nenadic, ‘Middle Rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow, 1720 – 1840’, Past and Present No.145, pp.142 – 143

[24] The Scotsman Thurs 19 March 1863 p.3

[25] The North British Agriculturalist Wed 24 August 1892, p.6

[26] The Scotsman Wed 23 December 1846, p.1

[27] The Scotsman Sat 18 January 1845, p.1

[28] The Caledonian Mercury Sat 31 August 1839, p.1

[29] The Caledonian Mercury Sat 26 March 1842 p.1

[30] The Scotsman Sat 16 September 1882, p.9

[31] The Scotsman Sat 04 September 1886, p.10

[32] RA Houston, ‘Poor Relief and the Dangerous and Criminally Insane in Scotland c.1740 – 1840’, Journal of Social History Vol 40, No. 2 pp.454 – 455

[33] James Grant, Cassell’s Old and New Edinburgh Vol III, (1881, Cassell, Peter & Galpin, London) p.306

[34] The Edinburgh Evening News Wed 26 October 1892, p.2

[35] The Edinburgh Evening News Fri 11 November 1892, p.3

[36] Information on the construction and decision making surrounding this project can be found in issues of The Scotsman, The Edinburgh Evening News, and other local papers between 1892 and 1899. These can be viewed if you have a subscription to the British Newspaper Archive; if not please contact me and I will provide my references if you’d like to write more on this topic.

[37] Musselburgh News Fri 19 January 1897, p.4

[38] The Scotsman Wed 02 September 1908, p.12

[39] The Scotsman Wed 02 September 1931, p.16

[40] Edinburgh Evening News Mon 11 July 1904, p.4

[41] Edinburgh Evening News Thurs 12 October 1905, p.2; The Scotsman Sat 9 November 1929, p.11

[42] The Scotsman Fri 13 October 1922, p.6

[43] Edinburgh Evening News Thurs 19 April 1929, p.6

[44] TM Devine, The Scottish Nation (2006, Penguin, London) pp. 348 – 349

[45] The Scotsman Sat 10 January 1931, p.3

[46] R. Rodger, ‘The Decline of Landlordism: property rights and relationships in Edinburgh’, in D. McCrone & B. Dicks (ed.), Scottish Housing in the Twentieth Century (1989, Leicester University Press, Leicester)

A Question of Pilton

The past few months have been a bit hectic for me, personally and professionally. After ten years on the council waiting list, my family finally received a council house. Out of the blue, we were notified that we were to be offered a house, were given a date for the viewing and that we had to pick out new flooring for the house. We snuck up to peek through the windows a few times before we accepted the keys. Before they give you the house, everything is gutted. There’s no wallpaper, no flooring and no white goods. Although we were given these things after a few weeks, a family friend hadn’t been so lucky – she was left with bare floors.

The furniture the council do give you is, in a word, shite. The doors are bare, unvarnished planks of brown wood with a handle attached and writing scribbled on the side. The cooker and hob are tiny and unpowerful; the fridge-freezer is similarly small unaccommodating. We had to paint, decorate and furnish the house ourselves and (for the vast majority of it) on our own dime. The two-day flitting was probably the worst of my life (I’ve done four so far) with highlights including pushing a couch through the living room window and taking a wardrobe apart only for it to smash half-way down the stairs. The past few months have been a series of renovations and repairs, all the while still working from home. In short, moving during a pandemic was not very fun.

Regardless, I have gotten some good work done in the meantime (partially this is what has been keeping me from writing a blog post). I’ve moved away from the Southside to Pilton, and with it away from the Victorian-Edwardian private lets to the council house era. The coincidental mirroring with my private life has not been lost on me. Reading about the bare-bones condition of council tenants in ‘re-housing’ type schemes had all too many parallels with my own experience of a new home. In brushing up my knowledge with some secondary reading, I’ve come across some great works of Scottish housing history.

Two which I feel are the most important are both written by Sean Damer and both are oral histories of council schemes in Glasgow – 1989’s From Moorepark to Wine Alley and 2018’s Scheming are studies in social history focusing around the experiences of tenants in the new inter-war housing areas. In my mind, these two are fundamental texts for anybody interested in the history of council housing. The rich detail that Damer’s method is able to uncover is staggering and his analysis is able to contextualise these people’s experiences with broader developments not only in housing politics, but in social trends and ideologies.

Inter-war ‘cottage flats’ in Carntyne, Glasgow

In Scheming, Damer has sought to re-emphasise the unique nature of Glasgow’s ‘tiered’ housing system, present between 1919 and 1956, which classified its council housing areas into three types: ‘ordinary’, ‘intermediate’ and ‘re-housing’ (from highest to lowest quality). He is able to demonstrate this system’s links with what came before, especially the social regulation of the sanitary authorities and the construct of the ‘deserving’ poor, and established its influence on housing practices that followed. However, Edinburgh, my area of study, did not have the same system as Glasgow and its housing policy diverged from the largest city’s in several ways. This has me thinking about how deeply Edinburgh’s system of housing allotment in the inter-war years has affected its own urban identity (and given Glasgow’s experience, I believe it will be a fundamental determinant) and into which category do my own schemes fit.

Both Pilton and Craigmillar were built in the interbellum and would be worth areas of research along Damer’s lines. Pilton itself was a rural area for centuries; the farms there were common names among the livestock and produce auctions in Edinburgh, and famed especially for their turnips. The trade was evidently bountiful – in 1861, George Stenhouse, the proprietor of West Pilton farm was reported to have thrown a dinner party for all sixty of his servants![1] Stenhouse also owned a property in Clermiston, large enough to house up to 30 cattle.[2] Clearly he was a rich man and his neighbours in Windlestrawlee and East Pilton do not seem to have fared much worse. Up until the 1920s, the area’s character was thoroughly agricultural despite the encroachment of industry along the dockside at Granton and housing developments at Trinity.

The land for the East and West Pilton estates was purchased in sections from 1932 onwards, from the estates of Barnton, Sauchie and Bannockburn. 122 acres was purchased at a price of £31,080 for East Pilton and 118 acres for a price of £41,890 for West Pilton, in 1932 and 1935, respectively.[3] This meant that the first houses constructed in East Pilton would have been built under the Greenwood Act, but the houses in West Pilton built under the provisions of the later 1935 Housing Act, under which subsidies for general needs housing were abolished and slum-clearance had become the focus. These housing acts, as Damer has shown, shaped the form and quality of the housing built to a significant extent, with the ‘re-housing’ type built under the slum-clearance provisions and usually to the lowest quality. The importance of this to understanding both the material reality of living in Pilton and in understanding the negative image that the area acquired is fundamental. While Damer demonstrates that most of the areas in Glasgow’ three-tier system acquired a bad name in the city, the difference in social life, in council provisions and in the way that residents regarded outsiders and newcomers could be stark.

Placing Pilton into a tier-system might become a job into itself when it comes to writing a history of the area. By all means it may be that this tier-system is not sufficient to explain housing inequalities in Edinburgh. This will form a fundamental question of my PhD research next year and one that I look forward to answering.

[1] The Scotsman, Wed 06 January 1861 p.2

[2] The Scotsman, Thurs 19 March 1863 p.3

[3] The Scotsman, Thurs 19 May 1939 p.6

Reflections

To fill a small gap in my research’s outputs and to change pace a little, I thought it would be fitting to reflect on my work so far and present a wee discussion of my goals, my progress and my thoughts on the topic so far. As you can probably guess, the disturbance in output in squarely down to the influence of the coronavirus and the subsequent shutdown.

The plan was to turn from a Scotland-wide scope to a more localised focus on Edinburgh over the summer. To do this, I intended to visit the Moving Images Archive in the Kelvin Hall (a brilliant resource, which I would recommend any researcher visit at least once) in Glasgow to view early Edinburgh Corporation-sponsored films and compare them to those in Glasgow of the same period. Elizabeth Lebas covered the period of municipal film-making in Glasgow from the late nineteenth century through to the nineteen-seventies in her book Forgotten Futures (a great read, recommended to me by Jesse Olszynko-Gryn). My idea was to investigate whether or not her readings of those films were specific to Glasgow and, if they weren’t, what stood out about how the Edinburgh Corporation presented the city and its environs. Alas, the archives are all shut and the digitized collection of films on the SMIA website is limited, so that particular idea has been put on hold.

Instead, I’ve decided to switch the plan up a little bit. Rather than setting aside a couple of months to research Edinburgh as a whole, the work on the city is happening alongside a focus into one of my target areas – the Southside. Compared to the other neighbourhoods under study – Pilton and Craigmillar – the Southside has a much longer history as a built-up are of inner-city Edinburgh and so the time needed to be spent on it, it think, will be considerably longer than the others. It also developed in tandem with the city from the 1700s onward and so tying in major events in the history of the development of Edinburgh, such as the construction of the New Town and its bridges to the Old Town, would be easy – or at least, that’s the way it seems to me.

My research and outputs so far have really been limited to the period up until 1939, and even at that my twentieth century knowledge is still limited. This is something that has been bothering me and I am keen to start work on inter-war and post-war housing. However, the amount of time spent on the Edwardian, Victorian and earlier periods have been very fruitful. For example, I have learned a good deal about both housing as a commodity, the status afforded to those living in certain types of housing and the development of a consumer economy in Scotland. The latter is particularly important: in my work with Castle Rock Edinvar, one of the main themes to be navigated through is consumer culture in housing; that is, houses as sites of consumption and houses as consumer goods themselves. Much primary and secondary information has been discovered relating to the types of decoration, furniture and work tools present in homes and the outlets and entertainment where people would spend their money (if they had it).

I am also eager to get down to more detailed and specialised writing. So far I have, in my last two blog posts, only really given a broad overview of what I had learned over the first few months of work. I am still not one hundred percent happy with the level of analysis present in them, but with the need to move on to more precise subjects I feel as though they are the best that I could do without spending an excess amount of time on them. In any case, I feel that they give a somewhat comprehensive understanding of the issues surrounding class and housing in pre-1945 Scotland despite their lack of fine points. My aim for the rest of the year is to produce more detailed and nuanced histories – an aim to which, hopefully, a more localised focus will be more favourable.

In my last blog post, I posited that the history of housing in Scotland is the history of class division and conflict. Given that my scope was mostly pre-twentieth century, it may be the case that with the introduction of council housing and the subsequent rise in owner-occupancy in Britain that class plays a much more subtle role going forward. From my readings so far it certainly seems that class does figure significantly into council housing allocation: people previously living in torn-down slum areas were not considered to be suitable candidates for housing in New Towns such as East Kilbride and Livingston, those places were reserved for more ‘respectable’ workers, and instead were homed in high-rise flats and schemes on the periphery of cities. This sort of discrimination, coupled with the class character of the designers, the administrators and the builders of council housing, paints, even from a cursory glance, a picture ridden with class issues.

However strongly class figures into this history, though, the picture may not be complete looking through a strictly Marxian filter. It is incredibly tempting to reach for that old, reliable tool, invaluable in explaining the difficulties faced by workers and the working poor, but other analyses may be more suited depending on the focus. The middle-class obsession with sanitation and their efforts to discipline working-class people and their environment to fit their sanitary and medical standards speaks to a Foucauldian approach; on the other hand an analysis of consumerism and the effects it presents in twentieth century culture would be better facilitated by Zygmunt Bauman’s work. Whatever the case, more than one set of tools will be necessary to completely understand the social tensions, ideology and practice in Scottish housing.

My research into the Southside of Edinburgh should be completed by the end of June. From then, I will move onto the Pilton or Craigmillar area. Another blog post will be up next month, but given the need to compile more and more research, it will most likely not be related to the project. I am considering writing a bit about my dissertation project and findings from 2019. Watch this space.

To conclude, Coronavirus has definitely impacted the research and outputs, but thankfully it has been minimal. I am incredibly grateful to be able to keep working on this and to stay employed through this incredibly stressful and uncertain time. Especially so considering the disruption I have watched my friends endure – unemployment either on furlough or forced onto the terrible Universal Credit system, loved ones dying or falling ill, troublesome landlords looking for rent payments and threatening eviction and a general sense of malaise and anxiety. Being able to work has been a welcome distraction and I honestly do not know how I would have been able to cope without it. I am feeling positive about the work and am looking forward to delivering some much-needed research into areas left behind and marginalised.

Housing, Life, Consumption and Class in Modern Scotland

Here I would like to explore the connections between housing and social change in more detail than I did in my previous blog post. The history housing in Scotland cannot be told without an understanding of the social forces and influences at work during their construction, demolition or refurbishment. Housing and status are tightly interlinked in history and through studying the buildings, neighbourhoods and conditions in which people lived, we can also glimpse important information about the development of modern class relations. As we will see, for much of Scottish history, the common house – that available or practicable to working Scots – shared similar structural features: space was undifferentiated and, for most, was divided into only one or two rooms, whether in the rural bothy or salmon lodge of the early modern period or the urban tenement flat of the nineteenth or early twentieth century. Houses, though, are more than the sum of the material and space that make up their physical presence; rural life in pre-industrial times had an entirely different social logic and structure than urban living in the Victorian period, of which house-type and housing tenure were a part. As we will see, social and economic changes significantly impacted the processes of life related to housing, the responsibilities placed upon those looking for housing and the social roles fulfilled by landlord and tenant. Distancing between the middle and working classes is a prominent feature of this period of study and nowhere is this borne out more, outwith the factory walls, than in housing.

Before the agricultural revolution and the subsequent clearances of people from the land in the rural Scottish Lowlands, eighteenth-century rural life was based on a structure of land-ownership in which three main classes predominated. The lairds, who owned the land and rented it out; the ever-decreasing number of renting farmers; and the cottars who were essentially ‘landless’ and who entered into housing agreements with the renting farmers in exchange for their labour. Only the renters paid in money for their access to the land, in addition to providing transport, manpower and tools to their laird when demanded. The renters were also beholden to court-enforceable contracts which made their duties enforceable and enshrined their landed status by law. By contrast, the cottars had only to provide labour during certain peaks in the harvesting season and to assist the renter with their duties to the laird, no cash was exchanged for their keeping of a small plot of land. The nature of these private agreements accorded them no protection through the courts and when the introduction of new agricultural practices extended the amount of time, space and labour needed on the farms, the renters and lairds were able to rid the farmland of these workers with little difficulty. The marketisation of the agricultural economy made the renters more-and-more powerful men, growing to become a strong rural middle class by the turn of the nineteenth century. Now commanding labour by employment, rather than extralegal arrangement, they were made rich through orienting their production toward consumption in the cities and towns. The cottars, once making up between two and three fifths of the rural Lowland population, were ‘annihilated’ as a class, thrown from their cottages to make way for improved agricultural production, becoming new farmland labourers, destitute and homeless in their parishes or migrants to the growing cities.[1]

John Slezer – Prospect of the Abbey of Dunfermline (1693) : In the foreground of this image we can see a typical Scottish ferm-toun of the pre-improvement era

The quest for countryside ‘improvement’ which brought with it the changes to agricultural practice also brought with it changes to the housing of the rural poor. The cottar’s ‘annihilation’ also saw their small houses subject to demolition and replacement. These old houses were communal and continued a pattern of living which had existed in Scotland for centuries, with life lived in one or two rooms with no fixed use; that is to say that work, relaxation and recreation all happened in the same space. Their replacement, the ‘improved’ houses, were much the same in terms of structure but had more stringent building standards, differed most in the common furniture found therein. With the growth of the money economy in rural areas and the development of industry in the cities, standard furniture and consumer goods began to become more common in rural households. Previously, the most basic furniture was a rarity, but, through the nineteenth century, beds, storage cupboards, catalogue-bought chairs and clocks came to be found in cottages throughout Scotland. By the end of the century, a strange fusion of the traditional and the modern characterised homes of the countryside, whereby the tools of work and the traditional hearth existed in the same spaces as items which extolled status or income.[2]

As noted in my previous blog, Scottish urban development was not entirely concentrated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; areas of considerable population density, notably Edinburgh, had developed between 1550 and 1650. However, town and city evolution in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was relatively uneven. Some larger burghs in the seventeenth century, markedly those close to the ‘big four’ principal cities, experienced significant population decline.[3] Many settlements across the lowlands also failed to achieve a truly urban character – that is, a mature local government administration, thriving industry or a large permanent population – and remained market towns or agricultural settlements in this period.[4] Localities that did grow in this way were able to exert significant control over who was able to practice their crafts within their boundaries and, as was the case with the settlements which had grown around the capital, were engaged in a battle of competition and control with neighbouring settlements over the right to practice crafts or to trade within their bounds.[5]

The quest for ‘improvement’ and the spread of Enlightenment values which had begun reshaping the social landscape of the Scottish countryside were also, at the same time, active forces in the development of Scotland’s urban areas of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A focus on the reform of manners and on the aesthetics of beauty in architecture saw the burghs of Scotland, from the smallest to largest, lose features considered to be unrefined. This presented itself in the re-fronting of many older buildings in the burghs, especially in removing wooden features and adding stone ornamentation to their facades. Towns across Scotland began to host a wider range of entertainment ventures, such as dance instructors and coffeehouses, and commercial outlets for luxury goods, including silk merchants and silversmiths. Not only is this an indication of a developing interest in the aesthetic and recreational value of the urban environment but is also strong evidence of both the growing disposable incomes of middling sorts and the development of a consumer economy.[6] The rapidity at which the modern market and industrial economy grew in the eighteenth century was hastened by changes in the laws and conventions on trade. Tom Devine points toward the 1672 opening of the right to overseas trade to non-Royal Burghs and to the slackening practices of the trades guilds before 1740 as particularly important factors in the development of the modern money economy. Traditionally, only elite merchants of the Royal Burghs – the Burgesses – were allowed to engage in trade after a long, often seven-year, period of apprenticeship in the guilds followed by the payment of expensive duties. Access to this course of instruction was often difficult for those of middling and lower ranks to access; beyond the expense, the control of admissions was in the hands of established Burgesses who preferred to confer admission to their offspring. This system began to wane by the beginning of the eighteenth century. The opening of trade saw the number of people attempting apprenticeships drop, preferring not to engage in the traditional route to mastery of commerce, instead trading independently. For those who did complete these courses of training, a shorter period of apprenticeship, three to four years was most common, and lower fees for entry were granted to them. These changes represented the coming of a more fluid and competitive market and brought prominence to a number of families from the middle strata of Scottish society, many of whose descendants would become the masters of industry and commerce in the nineteenth century.[7]

William Simpson – Fiddler’s Close (1848): Many features of this inner-city Glasgow close would have been the target for eighteenth-century improvers: the wooden stairs and features on the exterior of buildings, and the visibly unaligned housing placement. The fact that they appear to have survived into the Victorian period perhaps attests to the limited scope of improvement efforts in the cities. Given the date of this painting and its location, this early-modern area would eventually become, or already be in the process of becoming, a slum.

Despite the growing interest in the beauty of urban constructions, there were limitations on the reforms to the condition of buildings. Housing in Edinburgh in this period, for example, was built very densely with little space between buildings, owing in part to the limitations imposed upon housebuilding by the walls of the city. Tenement blocks stretched on in rows to the north and south of the Lawnmarket and down toward the Cannongate. The social make-up in these buildings was mixed; aristocracy, merchants, artisans and the very poorest could share the use of a single building, with floor occupancy dependent on the class-character of the tenant: well-to-do families could afford to occupy the sought-after first and second floors; the middling ranks often lived in the highest floors; the very poorest occupied the stories below ground. The furniture found in these homes also indicated class: the middle ranks and above could afford to purchase furniture like beds, chairs and tables and even certain trinkets such as looking-glasses and pottery..[8] If they were lucky enough to have more than one or two rooms, space was still often cramped and rooms continued to have mixed uses, even into the nineteenth century. John Sime, an architecture student, produced a plan of his family’s house in the Lawnmarket area for a project in 1808, showing the layout of the building the furniture in each room. While there is a separate bedroom, granting its occupant a degree of privacy unafforded to the poorer classes, each other room has a bed either folded into a recess or hidden in a cupboard, including the kitchen.[9]

The changes in the social structure of the countryside, the resulting exodus of cottars and other rural poor coupled with the growing industrial economy of the burghs saw that by the year 1800 over one sixth of the Scottish population was living in a settlement of over 10,000 people. This figure would only continue to grow throughout the nineteenth century. The influx of people in need of housing was dealt with by subdividing existing buildings – a practice known as ‘making down’ – or was exploited by housebuilders and landlords, who used these newcomers as a source of capital. The fue system and the system of lending that was common to the housebuilding industry in Scotland encouraged the creation of dense tenement blocks, with ‘houses’ of one or two rooms and only a ‘close’ or alleyway to separate them. The result was that as the population of cities continued to increase, so did the population density: in 1791, Glasgow’s population was 66,000 with an area of 716 hectares, or 92.2 people per hectare; in 1831, the population had risen to 202,462 and despite boundary changes adding an additional 167 hectares of land, the population density rose to 229.2 people per hectare.[10] Between 1831 and 1841, the Blackfriar’s district of Glasgow (today’s Merchant City, University of Strathclyde and Glasgow Cathedral area) saw its population increase by forty percent, but the number of houses in the area remained unchanged.[11] The lack of housing and desperation to find work in the cities coupled with a lack of capital led people to settle for solidly substandard housing arrangements in large numbers; overcrowding in Scottish cities was endemic.

Thomas Annan – High Street from College Open (1868) : Glasgow’s High Street is the main thoroughfare in the Blackfriar’s district (now Merchant City). The rest of Annan’s photos, commissioned in the 1860s by the Glasgow Corporation’s City Improvement Trust, are available to view online. – the National Library of Scotland has a digitized collection. They show the dreadful overcrowding and squalid conditions which had become commonplace in the Scottish inner-city of the Victorian period

The houses in urban centres which were affordable to working-class Scots were overwhelmingly that of the one-roomed, the ‘single-end’, or two-roomed flat, some of them vacated in this period by the more affluent urban citizens in favour of more spacious housing in the peripheries. Privacy in these quarters was non-existent and the use of space was strictly general. Edwin Chadwick’s 1843 Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain described the practice in Scotland of keeping the body of a deceased loved one in the flat until they were buried, potentially exposing the whole family plus any visitors to infectious diseases.[12] Crowded living conditions are also evident in George Bell’s 1849 tract Days and Nights in the Wynds of Edinburgh. Though concerned mostly with the sanitation, behaviour and morality of the poorer citizenry of the Old Town, and written from a place of self-assured moral superiority over the subjects, descriptions of the living conditions are vivid:

“The chamber which was about twelve feet long, by seven or eight feet broad, was occupied by seven human beings – two men, two women and three children. The men, father-in-law and son-in-law, were seated together at their craft. They were shoemakers. The wife of the old man was seated on the ground, binding a shoe. One small candle gave light to the three. The wife of the young man sat at the fire, suckling an infant; and two children, about two and four years of age respectively, sat on the ground at her feet. We interrogated the men, and found that neither of them were in regular employment; they could not get it, and therefor they worked on their own account, that is, when they could afford to buy leather. The profit upon their labour was so small, that under any circumstances they were obliged to work fifteen hours a day in order to sustain themselves. They seldom or never went out of doors, and their diet was of meagre description.”[13]

These conditions were prevalent in Scottish working-class housing and were unchanged for many throughout the nineteenth century. Despite the slum clearances and various municipal projects aimed at improving the condition of the cities, though notably not at providing municipally-owned housing for workers, squalor was still endemic for many working class families. An 1891 line drawing shows a family of eight living in a single-end with no source of light or fresh air visible. Four of them, two adults and two children, are huddled around the fireplace, three children share a small bed on the right-hand side and an adult male rests on a makeshift bed to the left. The only other piece of furniture visible is a small stool; there are no work tools, decorative features or ornaments. The walls of the house are cracked, and the brick exposed.[14] These terrible, cramped and insanitary conditions represent the living of the very poorest in Scottish cities of the period. More fortunate people, though still living in one or two-roomed houses for the most part, could expect a house with baths, sinks, coal bunkers and worktops built in, but still had to contend with the tight spaces and resulting spread of disease. In these tenement homes, food was cooked over the fire and many houses came with complicated cast-iron hobs and water-heating apparatus, though, for the majority, these contraptions would be scores of years old and seldom brand-new. Some industrial workers could even afford to furnish their homes with whole dining sets and beds, though space dictated that these objects’ size and number had to be limited and often furniture had to be moved around to bathe or unfold bedding. Rarely, either, were beds occupied by just one person, children often shared one and parents the other; in many circumstances whole families occupied a single bed. Alongside the previously mentioned storage of dead bodies, lack of space in tenement houses saw parents engaging in sexual intercourse in the company of their children, children being forced to play in the landings and rooms of the housing block, whole families bathing in the their room on one day per week and the taking of turns to eat dinner at a table with too few chairs to seat every member of the family at once.[15]

Victorian house ‘tickets’: these metal plates were attached to the doors of Scottish tenements, bearing the cubic measurements of the space within and the maximum number of occupants allowed. This practice began in the 1860s in Glasgow before spreading to other cities, and gave pretext for the city authorities and police to enter working-class homes to inspect their occupants and conditions. These visits were often done in the early morning hours. There is no evidence that the ticketing of housing had any positive impact on the housing of the Scottish poor; it appears that the only effect it had was to further subject working people to scrutiny of the middle classes. Regardless, this practice continued on into the early twentieth century.

Working class people of the nineteenth century also had to contend with moral scrutiny by their social superiors. Landlords, industrialists and merchants were ranked among the elders of the Church of Scotland: evidence from Aberdeen shows that multiple class ‘fractions’ existed within the Kirk, representing different factions of capital, but united in their wholly bourgeois status. For these men, the business and religious world were interlinked. Financial solvency and moral upstanding were one and the same and instances of financial hardship or vice led to investigation and appearance before the Kirk session. For working class people, this meant judgement by a board composed of employers, landlords and shopkeepers, all of whom ranked above them and from whom essential services for living were procured. [16]  This moral scrutiny upon the lower classes was also exercised through the system of letting. When one entered into a renting agreement as a tenant, one was not only procuring housing but was also entering into a system of moral, financial and social control with the landlord acting as adjudicator. Landlords often required a character reference from a previous tenant for any new renter. A similar judgement of character was also needed for any ‘tick’, credit from landlords but also from other bourgeois such as shop owners, to be given – and this was often needed, given the seasonal nature and lower wages of certain industries in Scotland. The personal standards examined were diverse. Perhaps understandably, previous rent arrears and indebtedness were taken into account, but a tenant’s punctuality and performance at work, their ability to moderate vices and their temperament were all examined before a rental agreement could be made or ‘tick’ given out. A family’s behaviour and their ability to meet the moral standards of the middle classes were the criteria which allowed them access to the most basic commodity and standards of living.[17]

The landlord’s power, then, was not simply an economic and social power, but a moral and ethical one which was readily exercised to police working-class behaviour. This is not to diminish or minimise the hold that letting agreements gave landlords over their tenant’s material conditions, on the contrary this aspect of the relationship was equally imbalanced. Beyond the ability to raise or lower rents or to charge steep deposits, the landlord also had the ‘right of hypothec’ over their tenant’s property, including everything contained within the home from furniture to work tools. Once entered into an agreement, these possessions were legally the landlord’s and were liable for sequestration if it the landlord felt a tenant might be in financial trouble and about to miss a payment. This differs significantly from other, similar laws in place in England and elsewhere at the time, where possessions could be taken only after debt was accrued. In Scotland, a tenant’s possessions could be taken even before this had happened.[18] Scottish letting was also based on the ‘missive’ – a long term letting agreement which further constrained and controlled the tenant’s actions by confining them to a single property for up to eighteen months, regardless of fluctuations in pay, rates or any misfortune that may befall the family, on threat of legal action.[19]

Life was lived much differently at home for the bourgeois. Their growing capital and social power were being expressed in Scottish architecture as early as the eighteenth century, with the construction of the New Town to house the richer elements of Edinburgh. In each of Scotland’s principal cities, their new-found social status was put on show in the city centres as Grecian and Neoclassical building were constructed to house banking, educational or business centres – foundational institutions which had brought the middle classes such wealth. The spread of shopping ‘warehouses’, analogous to modern supermarkets, also began to appear in the nineteenth century, where wealthy individuals could purchase fine furniture, home decor or clothes among other things which extolled their status.[20] There did exist, for a time, areas where an intermingling of the classes was present, especially in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Aside from the above-mentioned Old Town of Edinburgh, the Laurieston, Gorbals and Hutchesontown areas of Glasgow, fued out for development from the 1790s, were host to a mix of social classes. However, much like the Old Town, social segregation became entrenched: certain streets and sub-areas of these neighbourhoods found themselves occupied more and more by people of the middle-classes and the dual developments of incredibly insanitary conditions and the growth of more spacious and luxurious housing to the West. By the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the Gorbals and its surrounding areas was an exclusively working-class slum.[21]

An early nineteenth century drawing of a Gorbals street, artist and year unknown: This scene is an indication of the mixture of classes present in the area at the time. To the left of the picture stand a group of well-dressed men and women in what appears to be leisure wear. They are looking out onto the street where a man working a horse and cart goes about his job. The Gorbals area was originally envisioned as a middle-class suburb, but the coming of industry to the south side of the River Clyde brought with it many workers.

Glasgow’s West End was built slowly, in pieces from the 1830s onwards to house the cities elite burghers, ranging from lawyers and doctors to industrialists, who sought an exclusivity and fashion in their living arrangements, away from the crowded conditions of the city’s east and centre. A mix of villas, terraced town houses and tenements formed the majority of the stock in this area.[22] Similarly, middle-class tenements and villas were also built in large numbers in Merchiston and Morningside in Edinburgh.[23] These dwellings could be differentiated from working class primarily by their number of rooms, which could number five or more, and by their exteriors which often featured ornate stonework and bay windows.[24] The more generous space offered by these dwellings meant that bourgeois life at home was not constricted by dimensional limitations that plagued the working class. Privacy was available for each member of the family, and areas for work, recreation and rest were clearly delineated. The wealth of the residents and the space afforded to them meant that these middle-class homes featured a great deal of internal furnishings, exotic and curated in the case of the richest. This is evident in photographs from the latter nineteenth century: pictures from the mid-1890s of William Reid’s apartment above his upholstery business in the city’s New Town show a collection of antique furniture, a filled bookcase, walls covered in mirrors and paintings, all set in spacious and light-filled rooms with large windows and decorative ceiling lights.[25] Even more impressive was Arthur Sanderson’s residence in Dean Village, the interior of which was designed by William Scott Morton to reflect a different style of art in every room, with paintings crowding the walls dating from the middle ages onward.[26]

Blythswood Square, 1900: the Blythswood district , much like the areas further to the west, was built from the 1820s onward to house Glasgow’s bourgeois elements who sought separation from the lower classes and more comfortable living

This gulf in material conditions was very much apparent to citizens of Victorian and Edwardian Scotland. By the closing of the nineteenth century Scottish housing had become a site of significant confrontation between landlord and tenant. Frustrations mounted on both sides as a result of the conditions of housebuilding, letting, reform and general living inhibited both the extraction of capital from housing for the landlord and a basic standard of living for the tenant. Landlords had a significant hold on the intuitions of local authority, especially in Edinburgh, but had reluctantly conceded a certain amount of control over the housebuilding industry since the 1860s. They had to contend with building regulations that covered every aspect of the trade, from the rate and quality of bricks laid in a day to the types of tiles used in the roofing, and were prevented from exploiting the areas cleared of slums for the building of new houses. In addition to this, the Scottish building industry was beset by rapid fluctuations in demand which the typically small housebuilding companies found difficult to predict and prepare for, resulting in a great number of bankruptcies, reduced building activity and diminishing capital investment.  Landlords and other middle-class city dwellers also shouldered the burden of taxation with rates increasing to pay for a growing number of municipal projects and sanitary measures.[27]

The most significant pressure on landlords’ power and income, however, would come from the tenants. Despite the efforts of the city Corporations to deal with the issue of housing through sanitary reforms and regulation of housebuilding, Scottish housing had hardly improved by the early twentieth century. Slum conditions persisted in the smaller burghs and the enforcement of building codes did not become universal until the 1890s. Landlords and housebuilders often went to great lengths to find ways to bypass them in any case. Overcrowding remained a significant problem: in 1911 over forty-five per cent of the Scottish population lived more than two to a room, with the figure rising to over two-thirds in some of the larger burghs of the central belt. More than half of the housing stock was still composed of only one or two rooms and though the proportion of Scots living in these houses had fallen, the absolute number had risen to over two million.[28] Working class tenants also had to deal with increased scrutiny from their landlord or factor, who, in response to their weakening position, began to intensify use of their ‘right of Hypothec’; in 1909 the amount of rent recovered through the courts was more than triple that of 1899. Further, rates of eviction were high in cities like Glasgow, in which there were 1 warrant of eviction filed in the Burgh Court for every fifty-four people in the year 1886. To make matters worse, in 1911, the Housing (Scotland) Act shortened the notice period given to tenants before eviction.[29]

Slum conditions in Glasgow, 1910: These photos from the Burrell Collection show the cramped, filthy environment which defined daily life for millions of Scots. Note the condition of the range in the picture on the right. The uncleanliness of these homes, their dampness and mold and their lack of fresh air caused significant illness in their inhabitants, stunting the growth and causing defects in the bodily functions of infants. In the picture to the left, we can see two beds in a recess. These were popular throughout the 1800s and early 1900s as it was often necessary to conserve space.

The stage was being set for conflict. Working-class people had often resisted unfair rents, but this came at a significant social cost. As mentioned above, character references and clean tick books were often prerequisites for entering into a ‘missive’ and failure to provide these could see a family relegated to the lodging house, the poorest single-end or to the street. Regardless of the risks, some would avoid their rent payments and disappear before their factor could visit to collect. The early twentieth century saw these actions supplanted by more boisterous and political acts of resistance; tenants began to refuse to leave their dwellings while in arrears, forcing their cases to be heard in the courts. Working-class institutions like the trades unions and the Labour Party incorporated housing issues into their purview, advocating for the introduction of a programme of municipally owned, high-standard housing as early as 1902. The issue became a mainstay of Scottish pre-war politics; the Labour Party’s fortunes, which had been stymied by the dominance of Home Rule for Ireland in political discourse, rapidly changed as they contributed more efforts on behalf of tenant’s rights and housing conditions in the urban realm. The disgusting, cramped and diseased conditions in which many, even the more fortunate, lived fostered a boiling anger which was only too glad to finally receive an outlet.[30]

The situation would only be exacerbated by the First World War. As mass volunteering for the war effort left large numbers of vacancies in factories and other workplaces, urban areas were flooded with workers looking to take advantage of the need for labour in essential industries. This put significant pressure on the available housing, of which building had ceased for the duration of the war, and saw landlord’s asking prices for deposits and rent rise in order to capitalise on the situation. In addition to this, war conditions saw the prices of common commodities rise, cutting further into the budgets of the already-suffering working class. Many people were forced to lodge with a family already occupying a tenement house, easing the strain on both their finances but aggravating the dire, insanitary conditions that already plagued these homes. For thousands of families, this was the breaking point. In the spring and summer of 1915, under a campaign led by women’s groups like the Govan Women’s Housing Association and the Federation of Female Workers alongside the male dominated industrial unions and the Labour Party, masses of people in Glasgow and across Scotland began to withdraw their rent payments. Landlords, factors and other housing agents, coming to collect their rent, sequester property or serve notices of eviction were met with mobs who attacked them, humiliated them by covering them in eggs and flour and who would openly mock and shame them. Mass demonstrations took place, most notably in Glasgow, but also in other cities across the country, protesting for the introduction of rent controls for private rents, municipally-owned housing and the creation of tenant’s courts, where working-class tenants could settle disputes and state their case against their landlords. Though tenant’s courts would not appear, the struggles of the summer of 1915 were successful: the autumn saw the passing of the Rent Restrictions Act, placing for the first time limits on the increase in rent in the United Kingdom.[31]

Scenes from the Glasgow Rent Strike of 1915: Note the strong presence of women here. Female socialist leaders, Mary Barbour being the most famous among many, were instrumental in the organisation and success of the strikes and were able to convince women from across the sectarian divide to resist rent collections and property sequestration.

So too were the strikers successful in persuading government of its responsibility to provide housing. From the Addison Act 1919 onwards, a programme of national housebuilding began, providing for the first time a municipal alternative to private renting. A series of four further Acts between 1923 and 1938 established subsidies for private rents and for slum clearances, among other reforms aimed at easing the pressure of the housing market on tenants and improving the urban cityscape.[32] McCrone and Elliot characterise these pieces of legislation as a ‘sacrifice’ of landlordism by the industrial interests that dominated central government; the actions of rent strikers and the involvement of workers’ organisations in their campaigns threatened to create a situation in which revolutionary spirit flourished, threatening the British state directly. Housing was not only the most politicised issue of this period, but also the most malleable and so intervening into the workings of the housing market made all the more sense to the industrial bourgeoisie who feared a campaign of industrial action or agitation for workers’ control of the economy.[33]

Devine marks the interwar housing legislation as a watershed for the construction and form of the Scottish townscape: no longer were tenements favoured, at least the type that was common in the preceding years, as the trend of low-rise flat blocks and semi-detached council housing, which would define the Scottish urban realm more and more throughout the century, was born.[34]Despite these significant gains on the part of tenant’s and the working poor, municipal housebuilding in the immediate inter-war years proved unsatisfactory. Of the 300,000 houses envisioned to be built in the first few years following the armistice, only 31,000 of those had been completed – 2,000 of which were in Scotland. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, with turbulent national politics and the onset of depression, various housebuilding schemes were attempted or re-attempted with varying degrees of success. Slum conditions continued to develop in older properties. Rent strikes continued to occur in this period, and although it was hoped that concessions toward rent controls and municipal housing would insulate industrial capital from the most radical elements of the growing communist and socialist movements, a general strike was called in 1926.[35]

Though small in number, the new housing schemes created between the wars did offer Scottish tenants – the lucky few – a marked improvement over life in the older areas of the cities. A primary benefit was the inclusion of more rooms; for the first time it was possible for many families to assign a separate bedroom for each child, allowing for much improved privacy and spatial use. However, this new privacy and form of living proved to be too sharp a change for some who missed the communal nature of living in a tenement block: the socialising which was necessary during the daily housework, the ability to rely on close neighbours to watch the children when needed and the familiar social spaces of the pubs, all of which were largely absent from the schemes. It was not unheard of for people who missed these attributes to return to their old neighbourhoods.[36]

Inter-war social housing in Carntyne, Glasgow: these houses were the first to guarantee inside toilets, facilities and more than two rooms to working-class tenants. Due to their small numbers, however, the inter-war council houses were mostly occupied by the labour aristocracy, or by a lucky few poor tenants. Note the significant departure in design from the typical Victorian tenement – while these appear to be four-in-a-block flats, the multitude of windows indicates a much higher degree of natural light, more sources of fresh air and, importantly, a less general use of space. Gardens, front and back, have replaced the back court and close.

Social class is omnipresent in the history of housing in Scotland. As much as it is the history of a housing type, it is the story of two classes whose fortunes increasingly diverged over the course of two centuries, with one gaining access to the higher echelons of Scottish society, exercising command over the form of their environment and reaping wealth unimaginable to their ancestors. The other forced into tight city blocks, bound by rigid social and economic mores, compelled to fight for even the most meagre reforms to be taken by those with power. Distance between the classes was also physical; increasingly, the Scottish city became rigidly divided into quarters occupied by the members of similar occupations, incomes and living conditions. Efforts to contain the worst filth, disease and poverty experienced by Victorian Scots were also tainted by class discrimination and interest. As we will see later in my research, the implications of these dynamics do not only concern the people of the squalid nineteenth century slums, but run vein-like through the history of Scottish housing into the present day.

[1] TM Devine, The Scottish Nation, (2006, Penguin, London) pp.123 – 155

[2] David Jones, ‘Living in One or Two Rooms in the Country’, in (ed.) Annette Carruthers, The Scottish Home (1996, National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh) pp.37 – 57

[3] Ian D. Whyte, ‘Urbanisation in Early Modern Scotland: A Preliminary Analysis’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies Vol 9 Issue 1 (1989) pp.26 – 29

[4] Ibid. pp.30 – 32

[5] Aaron M Allen, ‘Conquering the Suburbs: Politics and Work in Early Modern Edinburgh’, Urban Studies Vol. 37 Issue 3 pp.431 – 435

[6] Bob Harris, ‘Towns, improvement and cultural change in Georgian Scotland: the evidence of the Angus burghs 1760 – 1820’, Urban History Vol. 33 Iss. 2, pp.200 – 210

[7] TM Devine, ‘The merchant class of the larger Scottish towns in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries’, in G. Gordon and B. Dicks (ed.) Scottish Urban History (1983, Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen) pp.92 – 102

[8] Helen Clark, ‘Living in One or Two Rooms in the City’, in Annette Carruthers (ed.), The Scottish Home, (1996, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh) pp.59 – 61

[9] Ian Gow, The Scottish Interior

[10] These figures were calculated using information from a Glasgow City Council leaflet on demographics, available here: https://web.archive.org/web/20070703130648/http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/NR/rdonlyres/E3BE21DA-4D84-4CC4-9C02-2E526FDD9169/0/4population.pdf

[11] Enid Gauldie, Cruel Habitations: A History of Working Class Housing 1780 – 1918pp.84 – 85

[12] Edwin Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population of Great Britain, (1843, W. Clowes and Son, London) p.42

[13] George Bell, Days and Nights in the Wynds of Edinburgh, (1849, Johnstone and Hunter, Edinburgh) p.31

[14] Ian Gow, The Scottish Interior: Georgian and Victorian Décor, (1992, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh) p.120, fig. 49b

[15] Helen Clark, ‘Living in One or Two Rooms in the City’, in Annette Carruthers (ed.) The Scottish Home (1996, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh) pp.59 – 82

[16] AA McLaren, ‘Class Formation and Class Fractions: The Aberdeen Bourgeoisie 1830 – 1850’, in G.Gordon and B. Dicks (ed) Scottish Urban History (1983, Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen) pp.112 – 123

[17] D. McCrone and B. Elliot, ‘The Decline of Landlordism: property rights and relationships in Edinburgh’, in (ed.) Richard Roger, Scottish Housing in the Twentieth Century (1989, Leicester University Press, Leicester) pp.219 – 220

[18] Ibid. pp.219 – 220

[19] Richard Roger, ‘Crisis and Confrontation in Scottish Housing 1880 – 1914’, in Richard Roger (ed.) Scottish Housing in the Twentieth Century (1989, Leicester University Press, Leicester) pp.39 – 40

[20] TM Devine, The Scottish Nation (2006, Penguin, London) pp.329 – 331

[21] JG Robb, ‘Suburb and Slum in the Gorbals: Social and Residential Change 1800 – 1900’, in G.Gordon and B. Dicks (ed.), Scottish Urban History (1983, Aberdeen University Press, Aberdeen) pp.132 – 165

[22] CM Artherton, ‘The Development of the Middle Class Suburb: The West End of Glasgow’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies Vol 11, Issue 1 (1991) pp.23 – 24

[23] TC Smout, A Century of the Scottish People (1986, Collins, London) p.32

[24] TM Devine, The Scottish Nation (2006, Penguin, London) p.341

[25] Ian Gow, The Scottish Interior: Georgian and Victorian Décor (1992, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh) pp.121 – 124, fig. 50a, 50b & 50c

[26] Ibid. pp.126 – 127

[27] Richard Roger, ‘Crisis and Confrontation in Scottish Housing 1880 – 1914’, in Richard Roger (ed.) Scottish Housing in the Twentieth Century (1989, Leicester University Press, Leicester) pp.33 – 39

[28] Ibid. pp. 26 – 30

[29] Ibid. pp. 41 – 42

[30] Joseph Melling, ‘Clydeside Rent Struggles and the Making of Labour Politics in Scotland’, in Richard Roger (ed.) Scottish Housing in the Twentieth Century (1989, Leicester University Press, Leicester) p.58 – 65

[31] Ibid. pp.65 – 70

[32] TC SMout, A Century of the Scottish People 1830 – 1950, (1986, Collins, London) p.52

[33] D. McCrone & B. Elliot, ‘The Decline of Landlordism: Property Rights and Relationships in Edinburgh’, in R. Rodger (ed) Scottish Housing in the Twentieth Century (1989, Leicester University Press, Leicester) pp.223 – 227

[34] TM Devine, The Scottish Nation, (2006, Penguin, London) p.347 – 348

[35] Joseph Melling, ‘Clydeside Rent Struggles and the Making of Labour Politics in Scotland’, in R. Rodger (ed.) Scottish Housing in the Twentieth Century (1989, Leicester University Press, Leicester) p.75

[36] Helen Clark, ‘Living in One or Two Rooms in the City’, in Annette Carruthers (ed), The Scottish Home (1996, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh) p.81 – 82

Urbanisation and the growth of the Victorian Scottish City

Scotland’s journey from a highly rural and agricultural nation in the eighteenth century to an urbanised and industrial nation in the nineteenth century is unique in its pace and intensity, a fact commonly reflected in historiography of the period. This short piece will give an overview of this story and introduce some of the themes which I will be focusing on while studying the subject of housing. One example of particular interest to me is the practice of ‘ticketing’ houses which appeared in Victorian Glasgow before spreading to other cities – it is a primary instance of the tension between quantitative and qualitative measures of good living in housing. Additionally, this passage will also give an overview of the ‘fue’ system of land ownership and how this affected the shape and style of working-class dwelling in the nineteenth century. Emphasis should be given to the word overview; this is not a definitive history by any means, rather this is a brief chronology of housing history in Scotland from around 1750 to about 1900 as taken from a few, authoritative sources.

First, it would be helpful to define the term ‘urbanisation’. Urbanisation is a process in which a nation or people begin to live more and more in single settlements, moving themselves from a multitude of small, rural villages (in Scotland’s case, ‘ferm-touns’) into towns and cities. In some places on mainland Europe, this process began in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.[1] Scotland, too, experienced town growth this period as evidenced by maps held in the National Library of Scotland. The comparison between Georg Braun and Franz Hogenburg’s 1583 map Edenburgum, Scotiae Metropolis and James Gordon’s 1647 Edinodunensis Tabulum is stark. Much growth is evident in the density and number of housing units, especially north of Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket where the green spaces of the late sixteenth century had been completely filled over with tightly packed tenements, some six or seven stories off the ground, by the middle of the seventeenth.[2]

A portion of the Edinodunensis Tabulam – 1647 – showing densely packed tenements north of the Cannongate

Generally, however, the process of mass urbanisation occurred later and much more rapidly in Scotland than elsewhere. The eighteenth century saw the percentage of Scots living in towns of over ten thousand inhabitants more than triple, from 5.3 per cent in 1700 to 17.3 percent in 1800.[3] In 1750 only one in every eighth person in Scotland lived in a town with a population of over 4,000 people.[4] By 1840, the figure had risen to slightly less than one in three living in towns of over 5,000.[5] From 1841 to 1911, Glasgow’s population almost tripled from 275,000 to 784,000; Edinburgh came to host 400,000 residents; and the number of Dundonians grew from 60,000 to 165,000.[6] For the towns and cities in Scotland to have grown so rapidly, however, there must have been some explosive change elsewhere; a great deal of these migrants of the first industrial revolution were those forced off the Lowland farmland to make way for new agricultural practices.[7]

This influx of working people from the neighbouring countryside and, in Glasgow and Edinburgh, from across the North Channel, created high demand for housing. One response to this was the practice of ‘making down’ or subdividing existing buildings to create more housing units.[8] However, if an enterprising housebuilder wished to use this demand to profit, he had to enter into an agreement with the landowner of a type unique to Scotland: the ‘lessor’, the housebuilder, had to provide a down-payment and agree to pay a ‘fue’ to the ‘superior’, the landowner. These fues were life-long: the property would forever remain in the lessors hands so long as he kept up his payments to the superior.[9] This system, in contrast to England where landowners had the possibility of recovering their land and all that had been built on it, meant that Scottish landowners had no vested interest in the quality of housing stock erected on their assets. It also created an incentive for them to ask for the highest amount of down-payment and fue as possible, and, consequently, for the housebuilder to generate returns as quickly as possible. This led to the building of the largest number of units in as quick a time as could be managed. Some housebuilders and landlords also practiced ‘sub-infuedation’, whereby a lessor would charge other housebuilders an even higher duty to build on their land and resultingly spread the practice of cheap, quick and crowded housebuilding. In addition to this, it was common for housebuilders, who were undoubtedly bourgeois but not men with the riches of industrial capital, to finance their projects with bonds made up of multiple different sources of funding and with variable rates of interest, furthering the need for speedy returns on their investment.[10]

The result was a mass of crowded, dark and insanitary tenement dwellings which circled or invaded the Grecian and Classical architecture erected to showcase the new urban bourgeoisie’s status and wealth. From 1780 to 1850, such striking architectural wonders were erected in the city centres for the headquarters of banks and financial institutions, universities and schools, churches, or as monuments and statues, and adjoining areas became home to the stately residences of middle-class business owners.[11] For the vast majority of people, however, life was lived in a house of one or two rooms in a block of tenement flats; the very worst-off lived in a ‘single-end’ with no windows at all.[12] Neighbourhoods were tightly packed in working-class districts: when the Edinburgh Corporation began to clear some of their worst slums in the late 1860s, it was found that some parts of the city’s Old Town had a population density of up to six hundred people per acre.[13] The health effects of the poor living conditions, sanitation and massive overcrowding in poorer districts had begun to show by the 1840s; repeated epidemics of infectious diseases like cholera and typhoid, encouraged by the rancid water and cramped conditions, brought the national death rate up after years of sustained fall.[14]

Three Engravings from c1845, reporduced in ‘Old and New Edinburgh’ (1890), showing the dense tenement areas around Edinburgh’s Old Town Areas like this came to house a great number of working-class industrial workers in the early nineteenth century

Owing in part to these horrifying conditions, coupled with economic downturn, industrial action and the rise of Chartism, a “sense of urban crisis” had spread across Scotland in the 1830s and 1840s. Significant barriers to improvement existed in the structure of local government which from the 1840s to the 1890s had split responsibility for overseeing sanitary and health concerns, making it difficult to co-ordinate efforts to tackle the cities’ problems. Central government was also of little help: laws passed in Westminster to enforce housing standards in 1868, 1879 and 1882 did not make provisions for trying lawbreakers in Scottish courts, mistakes which went unnoticed for years after their ascension to law.[15] Local property capital was also vastly overrepresented in Scottish local government, stymying any efforts for intervention in the market which might have reduced their ability to profit. As late as 1875, of the Edinburgh Corporation’s elected members four-fifths were landlords with a collective number of 1,000 properties between them; in 1905, three-quarters were landlords with 1,300 properties – and this is not even to speak of the membership of the various committees, where landlords could make up to 90% of the membership in the late nineteenth century.[16] Further, the middle classes of Victorian Scotland held several views that prevented effective intervention: firstly, interference with the private free market was held to be at odds with liberal capitalism; secondly, they believed that charitable acts and institutions would be enough to help solve the problems that working-class people faced; and thirdly that the working classes could be divided into ‘respectable’ and ‘unrespectable’ and thus ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ of relief.[17]

As a result, the middle-classes in Scotland used little of their political, economic, social and moral power in society to build or promote the creation of quality working-class housing. Rather, the focus of reform in the Victorian Scottish city often was on sanitation and the provision of services. The Glasgow Water Works Act of 1855 set a milestone for municipal political action. Created to deal with the city’s diseased and polluted water supply, it allowed for the creation of a huge infrastructure project to build a series of pipes which would provide clean water from Loch Katrine. Edinburgh followed with a similar plan the next year and eventually each of Scotland’s principal cities did the same. Edinburgh was also the first city in Scotland to appoint a Medical Officer of Health in 1862 to oversee the enforcement of sanitary standards and inspect the conditions of housing. Glasgow also provided municipally-owned gas lighting from the squares of the city centre to the darkest tenement wynd. In the 1860s and 1870s the city also began to provide municipal washhouses, hospitals and laundromats and, by the end of the century, the addition of Corporation-run tram lines made Glasgow the most extensively municipalised city in the United Kingdom.[18]

The 1860s also saw the appearance of ‘City Improvement Trusts’ in Scotland. These were set up by local Corporations to oversee slum clearance, identifying and destroying the very worst of tenements. For Victorian Scotland, these efforts represented a transgression of private property rights and were not undertaken without controversy. Proposals for slum clearance in Edinburgh sparked debate between moderate and radical Liberals about the policy’s potential breaching of the principal of laissez-faire.[19] In Glasgow, Lord Provost John Blackie lost his seat due to anger over the Improvement Trust’s cost.[20] It should also be noted that these schemes had no provision for rehousing those who lost their homes at the council’s expense. Another popular tactic for ‘dealing’ with the housing problem in the cities was that of ‘ticketing’. Medical Officers or Corporation-employed inspectors would measure the dimensions of each tenement dwelling, calculate the number of occupants allowed per room and visit the dwelling, usually in the hours after midnight, to ensure the limit was being upheld. The name referred to the tin plate which was fixed to the door of the house, bearing the maximum number of inhabitants allowed.[21]

Commissioned by the Glasgow City Improvement Trust, Thomas Annan photographed some of the closes and Wynds of the city”s East End which had developed since the early days of Glasgow’s urbanisation. The housing stock here was some of the worst in the city. Apart from the generally poor condition of the buildings, notable is the lack of windows on the buildings in the foreground.

Despite this intractability on the issue of housing, there were some slow but notable improvements by the Edwardian era. After years of building up municipal projects and flexing its muscles in terms of its public spending and regulation, local government had created a somewhat rigorous municipal sector. Local government provision of services had become an accepted and essential part of life in the cities of Scotland, paving the way for later, more extensive council housing schemes. By 1890s, too, the Corporations had consolidated their power structures and gotten rid of the duel parochial-central board system which had hampered progress earlier in the century.[22] Housing stock in the cities had also improved since the mid-century. One-roomed houses, which in 1861 were home to over a third of the Scottish population, were only inhabited by nine per cent of Scots by 1911. However, the proportion of people living in only two rooms had increased from thirty-seven per cent to forty-one per cent; half of all people, then, still lived in two rooms or less. The dire windowless flats, however, had disappeared from the townscapes.[23] Of course, these improvements were nowhere near enough and from the 1890s to the 1920s, rent strikes would break out in multiple Scottish cities over the price and quality of working-class housing.[24]

From this brief passage, we can see how nineteenth century Scottish housing and living conditions were affected significantly by several factors, most prominently: the free-market ideology and liberal values of the urban bourgeoisie; a system of land-ownership, leasing and financing which encouraged the building of tall, dense buildings with small but numerous housing units; and a system of local government which was resistant to change in both political interest and governing structure. I will be exploring this time period in more detail as this project goes on, especially the practice of ticketing houses and its relationship to later uses of quantitative measures of deprivation in Scottish history. I mentioned early on in this post the existence of the tenement form of housing long before the industrial revolution – indeed, this tradition of housebuilding in the nineteenth century seems to be a continuation of practices from as far back as the sixteenth century. These buildings were very tightly packed, at least as dense as those built in the Victorian period. Since these predate the huge expansion of the urbanisation, the emphasis placed on population growth and the subsequent need to house a new, large section of urbanites, though a convincing explanation when applied to the proliferation of tenements in Victorian Scotland, is not sufficient to give reason to the style’s popularity in Scotland, generally. This is an avenue of investigation not covered in my reading and may be an interesting avenue for future researchers.

[1] TM Devine, The Scottish Nation, (2006, Penguin, London) pp.153 – 154

[2] Both maps are available online, here: https://maps.nls.uk/view/00003284; and here: https://maps.nls.uk/view/74475427

[3] Ian Whyte, ‘Urbanisation in Early Modern Scotland: A Preliminary Analysis’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies Vol 9 Issue 1 (1989) p.22, table 1

[4] TM Devine, The Scottish Nation, (2006, Penguin, London). p.123

[5] TC Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, (1986, Collins, London) p.32

[6] Ibid. p.41

[7] TM Devine, The Scottish Nation, (2006, Penguin, London) p.163

[8] Ibid. p. 341

[9] MJ Daunton, ‘Housing’ in PML Thompson (ed.) Cambridge Social History of Britain Vol II: People and their Environment, (1990, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) pp.199 – 200

[10] TC Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, (1986, Collins, London) pp.37-38

[11] TM Devine, The Scottish Nation, (2006, Penguin, London). pp. 329 – 331

[12] TC Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, (1986, Collins, London) p.34

[13] PJ Smith, ‘Rehousing/Relocation Issue in an Early Slum Clearance Scheme: Edinburgh 1865 – 1885’, Urban Studies Vol 26 (1989) p.103

[14] TM Devine, The Scottish Nation, (2006, Penguin, London) pp. 166 – 167

[15] TC Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, (1986, Collins, London)p.40 – 43

[16] D. McCrone & B. Elliott, The Decline of Landlordism: Property and Relationships in Edinburgh, in R. Rodger (ed.) Scottish Housing in the Twentieth Century, (1989, Leicester University Press, Leicester) pp.221 – 222

[17] TC Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, (1986, Collins, London) p.51

[18] Ibid. pp.43 – 45

[19] PJ Smith, ‘Rehousing/Relocation Issue in an Early Slum Clearance Scheme: Edinburgh 1865 – 1885’, Urban Studies Vol 26 (1989) pp.103 – 106

[20] TC Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, (1986, Collins, London) p.46

[21] MJ Daunton, ‘Housing’ in PML Thompson (ed.) Cambridge Social History of Britain Vol II: People and their Environment, (1990, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge) p.201

[22] TC Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, (1986, Collins, London) p.42

[23] Ibid. pp. 33 – 34

[24] D. McCrone & B. Elliott, The Decline of Landlordism: Property and Relationships in Edinburgh, in R. Rodger (ed.) Scottish Housing in the Twentieth Century, (1989, Leicester University Press, Leicester) pp.223 – 227

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started