Fact of the Day: As part of the "EH4" postcode, Blackhall and its immediate surroundings have the second highest number of millionaires in the UK and the highest number in Scotland.
Edinburgh was a stronghold of various radical groups such as the Friends of the People, the United Scotsmen and those involved in the Pike Plot in 1794. Edinburgh was also a centre of opposition to Britain’s involvement in the war against revolutionary France. Out of a population of between 70,000 and 80,000, 11,000 citizens signed a petition calling for a halt to the war. Riots in 1800 and 1801 signified that the opposition was also concerned about the economic impact on ordinary people. Campaigning for the right to vote saw the ordinary citizens of Edinburgh active in the reform movements of the 1830s, 1860s and 1880s.
There was an Edinburgh trade union committee in the 1830s. This is known because the press refer to a march and rally organised to celebrate the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832. However, it seems probable that the formation of a permanent trades council in Edinburgh took place in 1853. It has met continuously since then.
Reports on the Old Town of Edinburgh in the 1840s documented that the area had the most unsanitary living conditions of any other city in Britain at the time. It was reckoned that ‘overcrowding in the Blackfriars area was four times greater than in prison cells’ in this period’. The Edinburgh News went so far as to describe Old Town houses as ‘chambers of death’. In 1850, it was noted at the Reform Association that ‘the unclean heart of Edinburgh would not be gutted out until it was planted all around with new houses.’ The collapse of tenements on Edinburgh’s High Street on the 24th November 1861, when 35 people were killed and a further 100 injured also brought the issue of the condition of buildings in the Old Town into sharp public relief.
Trade unionism among skilled workers like printers, stonemasons, and upholsterers dates from the turn of the 19th century. Because of this, much of the radicalism of the Chartist movement for the vote in the 1830s and 1840s was located among the skilled artisans. Edinburgh stonemasons were the first in Scotland to win the nine-hour day in 1861 when much of the New Town was being built. Out of the strike, which turned into a three-month lockout, the workers set up a house building cooperative. A decade later this cooperative had built 1,000 affordable homes for workers in the city. The most famous of these are the seven sets of “colonies”.The intention was to use their collective practical skills as builders and joiners to build ‘comfortable and respectable houses’ for rent or sale at reasonable prices for working people. Houses for those who ‘prefer the privacy of self-contained dwellings with private gardens to homes in common stair tenements. The first houses at Stockbridge cost between £100 and £130 to buy and a mortgage scheme was established to allow ‘every facility for acquiring the Company’s property’. A house could be secured by a £5 deposit, and property investment companies loaned the balance to be paid back in instalments of £13 per annum for 14 years on security of the title deeds. This compared very favourably to the annual rent at the time of £11 per annum for an Old Town flat and enabled workers on modest, but regular incomes to be rehoused in better homes.’
It was also made a condition of purchase that it was ‘unlawful to convert, or permit to be converted, any of the dwelling houses into sheebens or brothels or to have any cow house, pig house, or manufactory.’ The Colonies were a radical experiment in home–owneship based on the principles of mutuality and participation. They are a monument to the cooperative housing movement and are recognised as important in histories of working-class housing in Britain. As well as having an interesting social history, the Colonies are of architectural interest. The cottage style of the two storey terraces with upper flats often reached by outside stairs is unusual in the Scottish cities. The overall scale of the layout, the high-quality workmanship and the detailed control of their design cannot be matched in this type of housing anywhere else in Scotland.
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