Edinburgh 1975: The dramatic shift which laid the foundations for today’s World Heritage Site

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As 1975 drew to a close Scotland faced an uncertain future. In November, the first oil from the North Sea had been piped ashore. Almost unimaginably, Scotland was becoming an oil producer, at a time when the Middle Eastern oil states had dramatically hiked the price. Yet, that same volatility in energy markets accelerated the long term decline of many of Scotland’s traditional industries, creating widespread unemployment. Edinburgh was also at a point of transition. Numerically, the population of the capital was in decline. It had reached 459,000 in 1970, but fell to 442,000 through the decade. In part, this reflected the cusp of a wider trend, smaller households and more single person households.

However, the city was also emerging from a period which had seen many homes demolished, leaving land vacant for years.

The Cockburn Association initiated a campaign that characterised Edinburgh as the ‘Hole-y City’. There were over 100 derelict sites, some marked where a single tenement had been demolished, but others were depressingly extensive, such as the ten acres at the former Morrison Street goods yard. Most of them were in public ownership in one form or another. The Town Council closed houses deemed to be unfit, and there were a lot of them, particularly in neighbourhoods developed before 1914, but often did so without immediate plans as to rebuild. Large sites had also been cleared for ambitious new developments. This was particularly the case in the South Side, where comprehensive redevelopment had commenced to enable the expansion of the University of Edinburgh into an area of “obsolete development and bad layout”. The Principal of the University had described the project as not “a question of destruction but of replacement”: but many residents and small businesses did not want to be replaced or displaced to distant estates.

Further clearance had been undertaken to enable modernisation of the road system. To accommodate rising levels of car ownership and motorised traffic, an inner ring road was planned, and clearances had commenced particularly for the eastern section in St Leonards and in Leith Walk (alongside the new brutalist St. James Centre with its retail, hotel, office and car park complex).

These visions of a new, modern, streamlined Edinburgh were sketched in artists’ impressions of cars on motorways above pedestrian parades filled with shoppers. By 1975 this version of the future was in tatters. Public opposition, in which the Cockburn Association had been prominent, had stalled the planned transformation. The 1973 oil crisis quadrupled oil prices, seriously damaging the UK economy. The money had run out. The difficult years that followed were a golden age for temporary car parks, potholed and puddled, waiting in hope of better days to come.

A sense of normality about the creeping decay blighted urban Britain, including Edinburgh. The Cockburn Association brought pragmatic, but controversial clarity: the drift in policy and action was degrading “the beauty of Edinburgh”. It contended that “Any argument about the merits of public or private development becomes purely academic at a time when government, at every level, is out of cash.’ The Association proposed that most of the sites should be used for new housing, with a call to the Town Council to give away, free, small awkward sites to organisations that would operate “fair” rent schemes, and so provide opportunities for former inhabitants to return to their neighbourhoods. However, the Association also advocated that large sites with commercial potential should be sold, subject to requiring development of high architectural quality.

It would take another decade of contested green belt policies, and a system of government grants and subsidies, before private investment began to take on inner city gap sites. Meanwhile, housing associations began to repair and modernise properties that previously faced demolition. Much of the Old Town was in a precarious state by the end of the 1970s, with many gaps and a large hole between Blackfriars Street and Niddry Street. After several failed proposals, this was filled eventually by what is now the Radisson hotel. Even the New Town had suffered, but it proved to be the catalyst for a community-based and conservation-led approach to area-based urban renewal, exactly what the Cockburn Association had advocated for 100 years before its centenary in 1975. The Edinburgh New Town Conservation Committee was set up in 1972, as an initiative by residents. It was soon providing advice on repair issues. Led by its director, the architect Desmond Hodges, it launched a programme of repair grants that the Cockburn Association warmly welcomed.

Under its own first salaried Secretary, Oliver Barratt, the Association set up the Cockburn Conservation Trust, which worked in partnership with conservation architects to deliver practical projects, not least in the Old Town.

The introduction of a new planning system in 1975 helped consolidate the shift in policy. Strategic planning became the function of the new Lothian Regional Council, while local planning was the responsibility of the Edinburgh District Council. The Region soon scrapped the contracts for the Inner Ring Road. The University Comprehensive Development Plan was withdrawn. With input from residents, a South Side Local Plan was prepared, which prioritised retention and improvement of buildings, and upgrading public open spaces and communal back greens. The District also declared two Conservation Areas – the South Side in 1976, then the Old Town in 1977.

It was a watershed moment that saved Edinburgh, preserving the historic fabric but also showing the potential for development through partnerships that actively involved residents and civil society. Fifty years ago, this dramatic shift laid the foundations for today’s World Heritage Site, and also saved areas like Gorgie and Dalry and parts of Leith. It worked because the property market was relatively weak, but picking up. Could it be replicated today?

Cliff Hague and Richard Rodger are the editors of Campaigning for Edinburgh – The Cockburn Association 1875-2049