Local history

The Royal Scots Regimental Museum’s annual outreach exhibition opened at Out of the Blue this morning. Depute Lord Provost Cllr Lezley Cameron (right) helped launch the event.

Constipation and baldness are not the exclusive preserve of Spurtle readers in 2025. 

Such travails – experienced singly or in tandem – have afflicted local residents since at least the mid-19th century, as evidenced by a recent archaeological find in the area.

Following a second round of public consultations in late November, we await with interest a new planning application from Ediston and Orion Capital Managers to develop the site bounded by Dundas Street, Eyre Place, King George V Park and Fettes Row/Royal Crescent.

We expect to see latest proposals for the New Town Quarter later this month.

Local resident, playwright, poet and Edinburgh's first makar Stewart Conn has lived alongside the disruptive demolition here since work began in 2022.

We're delighted to see the premises at 43 Leith Street back in active use. We covered their lease by Edinburgh Council to The Mother Black Cat Ltd back in June (Issue 340)

Local author Rosslyn MacPhail’s biography of her great great grandfather Captain John Orr (1789–1879) was published in October and will be launched later this month in Edinburgh Castle. 

The final round  

We now enter the last days of the Industrial Hall, Edinburgh’s first purpose-built exhibition space on Annandale Street.  

No amount of roller-skating stunts, Christmas carnivals, circus troupes, galloping Cossacks and smoke-shrouded boxing collisions could disguise the fact that Scotland’s economy in the postwar Depression of the early and mid 1920s could not sustain a commercial venture of this kind.

In wet conditions yesterday, local resident David Harrison led a tour of Rosebank Cemetery to look at some of the graves there erected and maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

The end is nigh 

As 1925 drew to a close, rumours about the future of the Annandale Street Industrial Hall, Edinburgh's first purpose-built exhibition space were confirmed when the