On this day, 40 years ago, a councillor cut the ceremonial ribbon and opened a section of cycle path in north Edinburgh. This was a rather special bit of cycle path however as it hadn't been built by the council. It was built by direct citizen action: over the course of a single week it had been reclaimed from the trackbed of an old railway a group of volunteers. Wind the clock forward four…

Part eight of the "Lost School Boards" series pays a visit to St Leonard's Public School, one of which no trace now remains and that was thoroughly removed from the map in a 1980s redevelopment scheme. A building that was criticised for most of its life for being architecturally underwhelming and offering a dark and cramped site, it nevertheless provided ninety years of educational service to the…

"A classic example of his indifference to practically everything but rhyme"; the withering summary by an Edinburgh Evening News journalist in 2002 when recalling the work "The Ancient Town of Leith" by the poet and tragedian William McGonagall. A man most associated with the city of Dundee, he was born and would die in Edinburgh and is fondly remembered for his prolific output of universally…

Despite being a local history site Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park. Any attempt at a quick and easy piece of research and writing soon went out the…

Today marks 200 years since the death of John Kay, the Edinburgh barber turned artist, etcher and engraver renowned for his prolific caricatures. In the best Georgian tradition, these gently lampoon the great and the good of the city's society in the late 18th century. But this post isn't a homage to the man himself, there are whole books written on his subject. Rather, in Threadinburgh style, we…

April Fools' Day marks a suitable 30th birthday for the City of Edinburgh Council, a body which upon its establishment found itself in charge of a scheme promising
a cheap and easy transport fix but which proved to be anything of the sort. It was a scheme hallmarked by political intransigence, a perfidious PFI consortium, chaotic project management, acrimonious landowners, repeated threats of…

Edinburgh doesn't have the greatest track record when it comes to building public concert halls; such projects usually involving endless (or even terminal) delays. Even the grand old lady of the Usher Hall is no exception, taking almost eighteen years to resolve wrangling over potential sites and for plans to come to fruition. A lesser told chapter in that story is that in order to make way for…

When it closed its doors for the last time in 2022 the Victoria School in Newhaven was by far and away the oldest in the city still in public use. But this wasn't an end, it was merely the start of a new chapter in its long life. The old building soon re-opened as a community and heritage centre and - having finally outgrown the confines of its Victorian facilities - the school was moving to a…

St Leonard's Crag is the romantic sounding name for a quarried-out promontory where Holyrood Park meets the old district of St Leonard's. Perched atop it is a handsome old building whose striking feature is a grand corner tower on which regular listeners with a keen eye will spot the letters "ESB "; a give-away that this was once a school. But not just any school, it was the last that would be…

If you're at all familiar with the district of Bonnington then you may well know a burnt-out ruin on Newhaven Road. It's been this way long enough that you might not remember it being anything else. It certainly poses many questions. For a start; what was it, and how did it come to be in this sorry state? What are those over-grown terraces on the riverbank beneath it? And just what does the…