Stop what you are all doing right now and take a look at this original post-war AIROH prefab for sale on the ESPC! espc.com/property/49-cr…
AIROH, or the Aircraft Industries Research Organisation House, was developed by the British aircraft industry as a way to find use for its skills and manufacturing facilities in the postwar environment
The aircraft industry primarily used aluminium, and therefore so did the AIROH house. It has been described as an "airplane in house form". It could be manufactured in sections in a factory, transported on rail or road, and assembled quickly on site by unskilled labour.
The sections themselves were built on a mechanised production line, there's an excellent description of it with lots of pictures here; medium.com/@briancpotter/…
Aluminium had its advantages; it was light, strong and - initially - readily available from scrapped aircraft. It took 2 tonnes of aluminium to build an AIROH house frame. So a single large fighter like a Typhoon might give you a house, or perhaps 3 Spitfires give you 2 houses.
But it also soon became very expensive once the initial supply of scrap was used up, and could be put to more economically productive uses. But unlike steel and concrete, it didn't suffer from corrosion, hence AIROHs are still going.
This house may be a timewarp, it's certainly been brought up to date from when it was initially built. It's about 60m^2 inside, so small but perfectly formed, and these prefabs were each given a substantial plot of land. Offers over £79k for all this?!
This looks to be 1 of quite a few on this street that escaped being recycled into aluminium cans or similar
The AIROHs were always meant to be temporary. Round the corner from this are BISF (British Iron & Steel Federation) houses, which although prefabricated were meant to be more permanent. These are in 2 different states of modernisation.
The BISF was one of the better design of prefabricated houses as I understand it. You can still find a lot of them around the place, less so the concrete ORLITs
The derailment by strikers of the Flying Scotsman on May 10th 1926 has meant a much more serious and fatal rail accident in Edinburgh later that same day which claimed 3 lives and injured many has been somewhat overlooked 🧵👇🚂
The 1:06PM train from Berwick-upon-Tweed to Edinburgh hit a goods train being shunted across its path at St. Margaret's Depot just west of the tunnel under London Road. Due to the General Strike, most signal boxes were unmanned and only a rudimentary signalling system was running
The busy but confined St. Margaret's depot was on both sides of the LNER East Coast Mainline as it approached Edinburgh, with Piershill Junction for Leith and north Edinburgh to its east and the 60 yard tunnel under London Road constraining it to the west.
It's been hard to find time recently for any in-depth threading, but I think tonight we can sneak in the story of the lesser-known Leith shipyard of Ramage & Ferguson, builders of luxury steam mega-yachts to the Victorian and Edwardian elites. ⛵️🧵👇
In its working life from 1877 to 1934, the Ramage & Ferguson yard built 269 ships: 80, almost 1/3 of the total, were luxury steam yachts, built mainly to the designs of the 3 most prominent yacht designers in the world. It became the go-to shipyard for the rich and famous
When I say yachts, don't think about those little plastic things bobbing around in marinas these days. We're talking about multi-hundred (up to two thousand!) ton wooden and steel palaces, fitted out to the standards of ocean liners
As promised / threatened, there now follows a thread about the origins and abolition of the Tawse as the instrument of discipline in Scottish teaching. So lets start off with the Tawse - what is it and how did it evolve? 🧵👇
"Tawis" or "tawes" is a Scots word going back to c. 16th c., a plural of a leather belt or strap. In turn this came from the Middle English "tawe", leather tanned so as to keep it supple. Such devices were long the favoured instrument of corporal punishment in Scottish education
In 1848, George Mckarsie sued Archibald Dickson, schoolmaster of Auchtermuchty, for assaulting his son without provocation with a tawse "severely on the head, face and arms to the effusion of his blood". He was awarded a shilling but had to pay all expenses!
This pub has been in the news for the wrong reasons recently, but despite appearances it's a very important pub; a surviving example of only a handful of such interwar hostelries built in #Edinburgh - the Roadhouse. And these 9 pubs have a story to tell. Shall we unravel it?🧵👇
The short version of the Roadhouse story is thus: a blend of 1930s architecture and glamour used by the licensed trade to attract a new generation of sophisticated, Holywood-inspired, car-driving drinkers. That's partly true, but not the full story here
To understand how Edinburgh got its roadhouses we have to go back to 1913 when the Temperance movement was at the peak of its power and the Temperance (Scotland) Act was passed. This was also known as the Local Veto Act as it allowed localities to force referendums on going "dry"
In 1839, Dr. Thomas Smith of 21 Duke (now Dublin) Street in #Edinburgh tried on himself a purified extract of "Indian Hemp" - Cannabis sativa. He "gave an interesting account of its physiological action!". He was most probably the first person in Scotland to get high.
The medicinal and psychoactive properties of "Indian Hemp" had only just been introduced to Western medicine that year by Irish doctor William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, so it's unlikely anyone had done so before.
Cannabis seeds were advertised for sale in Edinburgh in the Caledonian Mercury as far back as 1761 (apply to the Gardener at Hermitage House in Leith), but these probably refer to Hemp: Cannabis sativa. 🌱
Between 1950 and 1973, #Edinburgh built 77 municipal, multi-storey housing blocks (of 7 storeys or more), containing 6,084 flats across 968 storeys. So as promised, I've gone and made a spreadsheet inventory of them all. Let's have a look at them chronologically 🧵👇
1950-51 saw the first such building - the 8 storey Westfield Court with 88 flats (and a nursery on the roof!) Built by local builders Hepburn Bros, it was heavily inspired by London's Kensal House by Maxwell Fry. It was a bit of a 1-off though and is rather unique in the city.
There then followed a series of experimental mid-rise blocks, variations on a theme, as a rather conservative local administration (headed by the Progressive Party) tried to work out what it wanted to do regards high-rise housing post-war.