Electricity first arrived in Edinburgh in 1881 when, on an experimental basis, a number of temporary public lights were installed around the city by the Corporation. Locations included on North Bridge, around Holyrood Square and Waverley Station.

These lights were powered by a portable steam engine and dynamo which had been sourced from London by Councillor Thomas Landale. Crowds came from far and wide to marvel at the clear, bright light, but were frequently disappointed as things would go wrong and the system had to be turned off after a few hours, sometimes for days at at time. The lighting contract was allowed to expire at the end of December and the city went back to the duller glow of its gas street lamps.

Our story really begins a decade later in 1891 when the Corporation was given the powers to provide the city with mains electricity under the 1890 Electric Lighting Act . When I say “provide the city“, I mean provide anyone who was willing and able to pay. A site for a power station was needed. It had to be central, for the most efficient distribution of electricity (there was no high voltage transmission at that time), and easily supplied with coal and yet not somewhere that would offend with its pollution as the New Street gasworks had. Such a site was found on Dewar Place at the West End, convenient for the Caledonian Railway who had an existing coal yard and small gasworks nearby. This site swallowed up a vestigial street called Tobago Place, one of those Edinburgh street names with a direct link to Caribbean plantation slavery.

An elegant and unobtrusive red sandstone structure was completed to the designs of City Architect Robert Morham, in a style in keeping with the time (this was a period when red sandstone was increasingly being seen in the city). The technical side was overseen by long-serving Burgh Engineer John Aitken Cooper. There was a generating hall in the centre section, workshops to the north and offices to the south at the top of the street. There were initially eight high-speed reciprocating steam engines with a total mechanical power of 400 horsepower ( 300kw), that’s about the same as a top-of-the-range German executive car. Each of these was coupled directly to a DC dynamo that supplied voltage at both 230V and 460V DC for the central districts only. Later, alternators would be provided to supply outlying districts with AC voltage better suited to longer distance transmission at 2,000V and a frequency of 50Hz. The site was large enough for expansion up to 20 steam engines that would be capable of producing 6,000 horsepower. The whole undertaking, including laying 21.5 miles of under-street wiring, cost £100,000 (or about £15.3 million in 2019).

The current was to be switched on at the Central Electric Lighting Station on 11th April 1895. The Corporation sent out invites to all of the worthies of the city to request their attendance at this grand occasion.

The Lord Provost, Magistrates and Council…
request the honour of your presence at
The Central Station, Dewar Place,
at 5 o’clock afternoon,
when you have the opportunity of inspecting the works prior to the turning on of the Electric Current on that evening (About 8 o’clock.)

Wording of the invites to the switching on of Dewar Place power station

The turning on was to be done from a switch within the nearby Rutland Hotel where the celebratory banquet for the invited worthies was being held. The invite was as good as its word and the current began to flow at about 8PM when it was switched on to a toast of “Success to the electric light undertaking” by the Lady Provost, Mrs McDonald. And there was light! A line of electric arc lamps had been installed along the north side of Princes Street especially for the occasion. The spectacle of instant light attracted thronging crowds to marvel at this wonder of the age. With the brilliant light from the glowing carbons mounted 23 feet high every 50 yards, Princes Street could claim to be the best lit street in Europe. But this being Edinburgh, the Corporation had half of the lights turned off at midnight for reasons of economy!

Further lamps were duly added to complete a line all the way from Haymarket to Waterloo Place. The city’s lighting plan was to illuminate the principal tram routes and so the network was quickly extended to Dean Bridge; Viewforth; Fountainbridge; down Leith Street; along the Bridges (which had seen the first gas lighting in Edinburgh not 80 years before, and it’s first electric lights in 1881); to Clerk Street and the Meadows; the Royal Mile and Waverley Bridge to Forrest Road via Cockburn Street. A contemporary verse recorded “When o’er our hills came lines with power, it was indeed our brightest hour;With fourteen lamps our street is bright, a pleasure now to walk by night“

Edinburgh had actually been pipped to public electric street lighting post by Leith. The Leith Dock Commissioners had the Victoria, the West and the East Old Docks lit by electric light in December 1894. A small generating station adjacent to the Commercial Graving Dock housed two steam engines and dynamos to power a system of arc and incandescent lights. The work was done at a cost of £4,000 by the Brush Electric Lighting Company. The Burgh of Leith would join in on the act too too, opening its own small power station on Junction Place in 1897 and turning on the first section of its electric street lights on Leith Walk on Friday December 23rd 1898.

Back in Edinburgh, demand far outstripped the supply from Dewar Place – on the day it started to operate, 177 street arc lamps and 40 private connections were already made with fully 1/2 of the generating capacity already subscribed for. The station was just too small and so it was extended as soon as 1897 to provide more capacity. But even with expansion, such was the demand for this new-fangled, must have, life changing stuff, that once again it was already not enough. But the site at Dewar Place had a fundamental problem; it was penned in on all sides which prevent it being realistically expanded any further – a new power station was needed.

A site next to Carson Street off Leith Walk was soon selected, conveniently adjacent to a railway that formed its northern boundary, allowing for direct deliveries of coal. You will know this street as McDonald Road; the old street by its former name was extended and renamed in 1897 to accommodate the new power station. The name is that of then Lord Provost, Sir Andrew McDonald, whose wife had turned on the electricity just a few years before.

Construction started in 1899, once again to the designs of City Architect Morham and Burgh Engineer Cooper. It was an altogether grander affair than Dewar Place; a modern and efficient steel frame infilled with bricks hidden behind a sandstone “Renaissance Basilica” facade which is complimented by a rather mismatched, octagonal, red-brick chimney. The Corporation had already been caught out twice in as many years with a rapid demand for expansion and so this building was to be big enough to meet future demand plus sufficient land was reserved to double or even triple it in size. If you look at the remains of the generation hall today (and in the photo below) you can see the stubs of the projecting steel arches for where the next half of the building could have gone. When completed it had a mechanical capacity of 5,000 horsepower but it was estimated it could total 20-30 thousand if the site were to be fully utilised.

Part of the project included an intriguing 1,220 yard tunnel under Leith Walk, from the top of McDonald Road to Little King Street (where John Lewis is now), to carry the 21 principal power cables into the city to a distribution node. This passageway is 6.5 feet high and 3.5 feet wide to allow workers access to maintain the cables without having to repeatedly dig the street up. When the station was connected to the network at the end of October 1899 it was noted that there were 245,000 electric lamps in the city (at this time the supply was only for domestic and municipal lighting) and that the peak load was 10,400 Amperes. New connections were being made at the rate of 1,500 lamps per week. A report of the Corporation’s Electric Lighting Department in 1905 recorded “The municipal reputation… has been greatly increased by its management of the electric light, the success of which has been quite phenomenal” It also went on “The waste of… plant is very considerable, arising not so much from ordinary tear and wear, but through carts and other vehicles coming into collision with the lamps…Breakages are… frequent… representing a considerable annual expenditure.”

Notice in the above picture that there are no overhead electricwires for the passing tramcar; it was hauled instead by underground cables driven from a power house at nearby Shrubhill (and also from Tollcross, Henderson Row and Portobello). Edinburgh had decided to persist with a system which was already antiquated; the wires and poles for Electric trams would have been vulgar in its Georgian heart.

Let us now consider Leith again. In 1898 the Burgh had opened their small generating station on Junction Place, next to the Victoria Baths, to provide a supply for municipal and domestic lighting. It had five steam engines producing 660hp and was expanded continuously after that. I assume it may also have helped to heat the pool and public washing baths. The site required all coal to be brought in by horse cart and also included housing for the workers.

On the subject of public transport, Leith rejected joining Edinburgh’s cable-hauled tramway, but that decision left her stuck with horse traction. And so in October 1904, the Leith Corporation took over the Edinburgh Street Tramways Company service within its boundaries and rapidly ripped the whole thing up, relaid it with stronger rails and electrified it. Nothing but the best for Leith! Electric trams of course need electricity, and so the Junction Place station was expanded once more to cope, up to 4,600hp with space for a further 4,000hp. The first electric tram ran as soon as August 1905 (think about that, Leith built an entire electric tram system in under a year…) but the extensions to the power supply did not complete until November 1906.

Back in Edinburgh, yet again the Corporation was quickly faced by the predicted demand problem. Demand for electricity at this time was insatiable and production could hardly keep up, even with the constant extensions to the stations in Edinburgh and Leith. In the ten years from 1903-1913, the amount sold doubled; actual demand was far in excess of this. The new station at McDonald Road had the space to expand, but the world had now settled on turbo-alternators (steam turbines producing AC current) as the most reliable and efficient way to produce electricity – rather than reciprocating piston engines producing DC current. The difficulty was that steam turbines have to exhaust into a vacuum and to create that vacuum you need a condenser; a very big and effective condenser. And to operate such a condenser, you need either a very large cooling tower or a huge supply of cooling water. McDonald Road had neither – there were cooling towers at Dewar Place for its small turbine units, but the vapour clouds they produced were totally unsuited to a city centre location, and the Water of Leith, although not too far off, was totally insufficient for cooling purposes.

As an interim solution, it was proposed to draw cooling water Lochend Loch to the east and return it back, warmed, from whence it came. However Leith Corporation had a veto over this as it still used its former drinking water supply for industrial supply, and these customers were paying good money for water for cooling purposes too, and would not accept it being pre-warmed by neighbouring Edinburgh. This proposal came to nothing and instead, in 1908, an ingenious scheme was hatched whereby small, low pressure turbines were added running off of the exhaust steam of the reciprocating engines. To solve the condensing issue a shaft, 26 feet in diameter and 30 feet deep, was sunk down from the power house to intercept the main sewer running between Edinburgh and Leith. Four 18 inch pipes were run down this shaft through which the liquid contents of the sewer were pumped up into the power station and run through the condensers, before being returned to the sewer, nicely warmed. But for the long term it was back to the drawing board…

The drawing board required another new site and to solve the cooling question once and for all it was resolved to make use of the abundant waters of the Firth of Forth, which we all know to be reliably cold, even in the summer. There were two candidate sites, both logically on the outskirts to keep pollution away from the centre of the metropolis. One was at Granton, adjacent to the Edinburgh & Leith Gas Commissioners new gasworks, and the other was off the Kings Road at Portobello on the site of the Westbank Brick & Tile Works. Granton may have been attractive as land and infrastructure could have been shared with the existing gasworks, but it was half a mile distant from and at 100 feet elevation above the sea which would have required significant effort in pumping just to get to at the coolant. So Portobello was selected, right on the sea shore and just off the existing railway which gave it direct access to the plentiful and expanding supplies from the Lothian coalfield.In 1914, consulting engineer Alexander Kennedy was instructed to draw up plans and arrange quotes for a station with two of the latest turbo-alternators with a power output of 5MW and with ample room to expand as required.

But almost immediately Europe went to war and the Ministry of Munitions had all work big industrial works stopped in order that the country could focus its industrial might on the business of death and destruction. Unsurprisingly, the scheme was paused and production of electricity dropped in the war years due to forced economies, not increasing again until 1918. When the war ended, the Corporation wasted no time in dusting off their plans for Portobello; even in 1918 they were petitioning the Board of Trade to allow them to revive them. The Board referred things to Ministry of Reconstruction, who passed it to the Coal Conservation Sub-Committee. The men in grey suits in that opaque sounding sub-committee considered the matter and gave it their blessing; but only if it was undertaken on a grander scale so that it could also supply neighbouring counties. Alexander Kennedy took his 4 year old plans plans and scaled them up sixfold, proposing three 10MW turbo-alternator sets and expansion possibilities up to the giddy heights of 100MW. For comparison, the “small” coal power station demolished at Cockenzie in 2015 was 1,200MW.

The Board of Trade formally approved the scheme in June 1919 and contracts were issued in October. It would supply not just the burghs of Edinburgh and Leith but also a larger supply territory called the Edinburgh and Lothians Electricity District. This included Musselburgh, East Lothian and Midlothian – which it shared with the Lothians Electric Power Co. The new station would sit to the south of the King’s Road road and was directly accessed by an existing rail branch that had been laid for the Westbank brick through a short tunnel under the road. The boilers were supplied with fuel from a rail-served stockyard to the southwest via a conveyor system which ran in a tunnel under the road. The builders fed steam to three 12.5MW turbo-alternator sets that generated 3-phase AC electricity at 6,600V and 50Hz.

The railway and conveyor tunnels were nothing, however, when compared to those of the cooling system. Three 9ft diameter shafts were sunk down from the station to a depth of 60ft, below sea level, for a total depth of 85ft. From the base of these, 4.75ft diameter tunnels were driven some 1,500 yards out to sea, emerging from the seabed well below the lowest tide levels. This tunnelling was done in the same manner as London’s tube railways, lined with cast-iron segments and smoothed off with a skin of concrete. Two tunnels at any one time were used for the cooling water intake, the third to discharge the warmed water. The average temperature at the inlet was 12C and at the outlet was 19.5C. There was public optimism that this warm water might be used to heat a public swimming pool… The managers of the power station had to develop a pattern of cycling the discharge water through different temperatures for set periods of time and swapping each pipe between inlet and outlet to deal with the problem of mussels growing on the filter screens and blocking them.

Portobello Power Station was commissioned on Monday 11th July 1923 at 11:30AM, when it was opened by King George V and Queen Mary as part of a state visit to Scotland. It was fitting that the King was opening the power station on the King’s Road, as the latter street was named for the predecessor of his regnal number – George IV – who had ridden in his carriage down it a century before on a historic visit to Scotland to inspect the gentlemen Cavalry Volunteers parading on the beach. George V was given a thorough tour of the insides which interested him greatly – as a result of his time in the Navy he had developed a nostalgic fondness for boiler and turbine rooms.

By the time Portobello had opened, the City of Edinburgh had absorbed the Burgh of Leith and was in the process of integrating the tram networks. It was switching its old cable-hauled system over to electric traction, just like Leith’s, which required an additional turbo-alternator to be installed at McDonald Road in the interim. In 1924 a further turbo-generator was installed at Portobello, bringing the total output up to 50MW. McDonald Road and Dewar Place could now be downgraded to the status of principal substations for the city, together with a third in the Cowgate. The 5MW tramway turbo-alternator from McDonald Road was transferred at this time to Portobello. Dewar Place also became the principal public office of the Edinburgh Corporation Electricity Supply Department and that’s where you went, until recent memory, to pay your bills in person. The ECES cypher can still be seen all over the city on lamp posts, tenement wiring cabinets and access covers.

And what became of Leith’s Junction Place power station? It was never big enough; after expansion in 1906, it was expanded again in 1910 but by 1919 it was at its limits and it had been agreed to take an additional bulk supply from Dewar Place. As part of Edinburgh’s settlement to the aggrieved folks of Leith for taking it over, it was to be converted to a public wash house; “at a cost of £20,000 it would be the largest washhouse in Edinburgh, with 100 tubs and a separate ironing room.” Edinburgh’s obligations clearly didn’t trouble her however and it took until 1926 to start work, with the result that it was not opened until January 1928. On opening, the Lord Provost said “the Council [has] now just about given Leith all that it needed and so they might give the Corporation a little breathing space to do something for other parts of the city?” The Convenor of the Plans and Works Committee went so far as to claim that Leith now had the “biggest and most up-to-date washhouse in the world!”. As a rather limited consolatory gesture, Edinburgh made it free to use for the first 3 days. This would remain the largest and busiest wash house in the city, it survived to become an automated laundrette about 1975 and was closed in the early 1980s.

In 1926, the Electricity (Supply) Act was passed to set up a “national grid” using a country-wide standard supply frequency and voltage. As one of the biggest and newest stations, and with room to expand, Portobello was selected to be the principal station for the East of Scotland. Conveniently too, Edinburgh had long ago selected 230V and 50Hz as its supply standard, which matched the new standard, and so no fundamental changes were required. Portobello was quickly expanded with two new 31.5MW sets, for a total of 118MW, well in excess of the planned 100MW.

In 1929 the first transmission tower of the new National Grid was erected by the Central Electricity Board on the Mortonhall Estate. On April 30th 1930, the first phase of the Grid was inaugurated with the switching on of the Central Scotland Electricity Scheme by Minister of Transport, Herbert Morrison. He threw a switch at the new high tension transformer station at Portobello and energised the 132kv lines, connecting Edinburgh, Glasgow, Motherwell, Dundee and Stirling.

More generation required more boilers, which required more chimneys and required more coolant, so a 4th tunnel was sunk out into the Forth to bring in more seawater. The place ended up being a weird architectural mixture of a classically-inspired façade and a progressively more modern and austere industrial rear, as additional units were repeatedly added – with eventually seven stumpy, steam-punk style chimneys poking out of the back.

In 1936, “Edinburgh’s Seaside” finally got its promised open-air pool, which had first been mooted before the power station had even been completed.

Whether or not the pool was kept at the 20C promised from the hot water exhaust from the power station is a matter of much nostalgic debate. You can see many more postcard pictures of the pool at this website.

But the increasing demand for electricity was relentless and the Corporation had big plans afoot to significantly expand the station to 149MW, with a huge extension upwards and outwards to create the necessary space. Step up the wonderfully named Ebenezer James Macrae, City Architect. Macrae is one of those legendary figures in Edinburgh municipal architecture; he designed much of the modern city, and designed it well. He had a particular knack of being able to balance the vernacular tradition, the classicism of the “Athens of the North” and the modern. Frequently somewhat conservative, he broke his mould a bit and went for a strikingly modernist and austere red-brick and concrete block, but still with details hinting at Georgian Edinburgh.

The dominant addition was going to be an immense 350ft tall chimney to try and clear the worst of the stoor away from the washing lines of Portobello. This weighed in at 10,000 tons and had seven hundred and ten thousand (!) bricks in it. These could be conveniently be brought into the site directly by rail from local brickworks like Prestongrange, Roslin, Newbattle and Wallyford. People often say Scotland doesn’t have an architectural tradition in brick; perhaps it’s less pervasive than in England, but it is there. Portobello, after all, is a town founded on brick making and its power station was built on a brickworks, out of bricks!

The original station was dwarfed by the new additions, hiding its mechanical innards from the public’s eyes behind a towering façade of red brick and glass.

The new structure was completed just in time for another war, a booklet published by the Corporation proudly called it the “Hub of Greater Edinburgh“. Note that the artist has made a couple of errors in the image of the power station.

After the war the electricity supply was nationalised and so in 1947 Edinburgh Corporation’s finest asset was transferred to the nascent South East Scotland Electricity Board. Expansion was then back on the cards and by 1950 Portobello’s output was up to 212.5MW (over twice the original expectations). More reshuffling occurred in 1955, when the SESEB and its west coast equivalent the SWSEB were merged to form the SSEB. By 1957 it was producing 272.5MW and had the highest thermal efficiency of any power station in the UK. It wasn’t all smooth going though; an explosion caused by seawater in the switchgear caused an Edinburgh-wide 2 hour blackout in 1953 and in 1961 there was a fire, which fortunately was quickly contained.

The station continued keeping the lights twinkling in Edinburgh and the Lothians for a further 16 years, although it was soon playing second fiddle to the big new cousin along the coast at Cockenzie, which opened in 1967. The end came in 1977, when the huge new coal fired station opened at Longannet – one already fading from public consciousness – and a nuclear plant on the way along the coast at Torness.

Inevitably, Edinburgh was quick to demolish the place before somebody could think of anything else to do with it.

You can view a rather sad video of the demolition progress on YouTube here and you can still visit the old gates and fences if you happen to be passing, and there’s a building on the other side of the High Street that used to house some of the first National Grid switchgear on the other side of the road.

And six years ago, the monumental civic coat of arms that was once proudly displayed over the entrance door turned up, broken into at least 3 pieces, in a council yard at Murrayburn, in Wester Hailes. An old council promise to incorporate it into a new sports centre for Portobello has long been quietly forgotten… I happened to be visiting a council facility at this yard in March 2023 and was very pleased to stumble upon it! Despite being split up, it remains in surprisingly good and bright condition.,

Edinburgh’s Latin motto “Nisi Dominus Frustra“, which runs on the banner beneath the coat of arms, is an abbreviation of Psalm 127, “Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.” I’m not a believer myself, but I think there’s something in that…

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site (including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget) by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

---

_{These threads © 2017-2024, Andy Arthur}