Sometimes I get asked a question to which I kind of know the answer, but want to check on my facts before I respond, and the answer ends up being much more involved that I ever thought it might be.

Q. What is it with these steps at the top of West Norton Place? What is the construction history? Are they something to do with easing the gradient of Regent Road / Montrose Terrace for trams?

If you don’t know this bit of Edinburgh, where we are is called Abbeymount, where beyond London Road, the top bit of the Easter Road starts climbing steeper and in a circuitous manner around the old Regent Road School, up to the junction of Montrose Terrace and Regent Road, and then drops right back down the other side towards Holyrood.

So why does Easter Road take a winding, S-shaped course (orange line) to get to Holyrood, when logically it should just plough straight ahead at the top of Easter Road, along the cul-de-sac of West Norton Place and onwards (green line)? The short answer of course is that it wasn’t always this way. In fact it wasn’t this way at all prior to 1816. We are going to have to dive back into what this part of old Edinburgh looked like via the National Library of Scotland’s online map library.

Prior to 1800, most horse and cart traffic between Edinburgh and its port of Leith went via the Easter Road (the name means exactly that, it is the east road to Leith from Edinburgh) and into the city via the Canongate, past a tollbar at the Water Yett (Water Gate) via the little village of Abbeyhill. This was also the principle route to the village of Restalrig, if you continued along the magenta line and off the map to the right, and for those brave enough to try an overland journey, east and south to London past Jock’s Lodge on the white arrow.

At the turn of the 19th century, the land at Abbeyhill was a small estate known as “Baron Norton’s Feu” or “Norton Park“. Fletcher Norton was an English lawyer who settled in Edinburgh and established himself prominently in the world of Scottish law and ingratiated himself into local society.

To the south of Norton Park was Abbey Hill itself (highlighted green), a village just outside the city boundary and really just a street of taverns, stables and smithies like you might expect as being needed on the way into and out of town. It only extended to the limits of the green boundary. In yellow is a little suburb of villas known as Maryfield (from where the current streetname comes) and in orange is the Upper or Over Quarry Holes, an ancient Edinburgh place with a fascinating and gruesome history all of its own of executions, witches, skirmishes, drownings and treachery.

Anyway, you’re probably already ahead of me and have seen those faint pencil lines on the map above and have realised they’re very close to the modern street alignment and you probably now want to know what they’re all about; so let’s move on. At the turn of the 19th century, Edinburgh has a problem (well, it had many, but let’s just look at this specific one). It was increasingly renowned and lauded for its neoclassical New Town architecture, its flourishing society and its place as a beacon of learning and enlightenment. But the physical approach into this “modern Athens” is rubbish!

The visitor arriving from the south by sea will approach from Leith. They can choose to pick their way up the footpath along the line of General Leslie’s old 1650s fortifications that will become Leith Walk, or they could take a horse and coach up the Easter Road and enter this grand modern town through the ancient and crumbling – and frankly embarrassing – Canongate. Or if you had come the hard way overland, as you approach the city you can see little of this renowned new metropolis unfold before you as your carriage bumps and sways its way past Jock’s Lodge and into the Canongate via Abbeyhill; looking out the window you could be back in the early 18th century.

Something had to be done! And who better to do it than that most eminent of Scottish Georgian engineers – Robert “Lighthouse” Stevenson. Stevenson doesn’t need many introductions, but his role in shaping, and forever changing, this end of Edinburgh I had not until now appreciated.

Stevenson planned to improve the approaches to the city from Leith by the widening and levelling of the “Walk of Leith” into that wide boulevard we now call Leith Walk. Show-piece Georgian townhouses and fine tenements were built at the top as you entered the city, at Gayfield Place, Antigua Place, Picardy Place and Baxter’s Place. And of course who should live in one of these fine new townhouses at the latter address than the Stevenson clan themselves! , at Baxter’s Place

However that was only one part of the improvements. The next scheme was the “Great Post Road from London“, the road we now know as London Road – or the western extremity of the A1. This was proposed from around 1800 and an Act of Parliament was made in 1803 approving its construction. You can see the route on this 1804 map highlighted in red, also by John Ainslie.

However, Stevenson and the magistrates of the city were not entirely satisfied. Although this new road created a wide, flat and straight processional approach, it meant the arriving visitor had their view of the city obscured by the Calton Hill and to get to Princes Street they would have to go up Leith Street – this spoiled the whole point of the new road! Robert Barker’s panorama from Calton Hill of 1793 shows that Leith Street was hardly a grand and splendid gateway to the city.

No, what was needed was an even better way into the city; one with breathtaking and statement views of the metropolis as you entered it and with the smoothest and flattest possible route for horse carriages. The answer was obvious to one Magistrate, William Trotter (“Scotland’s greatest cabinet maker“) and also to Stevenson. Instead of the road around, below and to the north of the Calton Hill, they were going to have to go over it to the south. This might seems the obvious route with the benefit of 200 years of hindsight, but this proposal was a vast engineering challenge. That side of the Calton Hill was known as the Dow Craigs (black or dark rocks) and was all towering cliffs. There was a good reason it had never yet been built on, as this 1796 print (depicting a scene of about 1790) shows.

We can tell that the above print dates to before 1791, as between then and 1796, Robert Adam (“Scotland’s Greatest Architect“) built the city their new house of punishment, “the Bridewell,” on the south slopes of the Calton Hill, where St. Andrew’s House now stands. It was the magistrate William Trotter again who hady been instrumental in getting the new jail sited here, as the original idea of locating it in the Nor’ Loch Valley was anathema to him. The Bridewell was constructed from stones hewn out of the Salisbury Crags of Arthur’s Seat themselves (the ridge directly behind the Bridewell in the below print). These provided a ready supply of stone to which Stevenson would also turn to realise his grand scheme for a road around the south of the hill to connect the London Road directly with Princes Street.

We are hugely fortunate that Stevenson’s beautiful drawings for his plans have survived and have been digitised by the National Library of Scotland, you can view the full map and zoom right in on it here.

There were some other problems to solve however. Firstly, the yawning gap of the Calton Gorge had to be bridged, where the ancient Leith Wynd entered the city via the nominally independent burgh of the Calton. This required the construciton of the Regent Bridge. However, at that time Princes Street was closed off at its eastern end by a rather humdrum collection of buildings known as Shakespeare Square (where Trotter lived and worked).

No problem, they would just be demolished. They were hardly very grand anyway.

And as for the decrepit buildings below in the ancient High and Low Calton? Demolish those too.

With demolition complete, the Bridge could start to be constructed. You don’t get an idea of just how impressive the bridge is – and just how slender the arches supporting Waterloo Place are – until you see it unhidden by the buildings that have long enclosed it.

The viaduct of Waterloo Place and the Regent Bridge allowed Stevenson to build a wide and constant road with a 1-in-35 gradient from the East End at Register House to a summit outside the Bridewell. From there the road ran relatively straight at a 1-in-26 decline for the 1,000 or so yards down to a junction with the new London Road. This required a lot of cuttings and bankings as illustrated in his plans.

Stevenson quarried the rock for the bridges, embankments, infill and road surface from Salisbury Crags, needing at least 10,920 cubic yards. Indeed in the 4 years 1815-1819, some 45-50,000 tons of stone were quarried off of the crags for this and other schemes. It was estimated that each ton of stone won from the Salisbury Crags meant 2 more lost in rubble and waste, which was simply tipped down the slopes of the crags. Some of this waste was recovered, but such was the alarm caused by the rapid and significant alteration to the appearance of the Crags that they were never quarried again after this.

Work proceeded quickly and was formally completed in 1821, although the route was passable as early as 1819. Although that’s an important part of the story, it still doesn’t answer why the area around West Norton Place looks like it does now. We need to keep going. If we look closely at Stevenson’s Plan, something strikes you. There’s what looks to be a bridge at Abbeymount. Yes, there’s definitely a bridge. It’s not a very big bridge. But there’s a bridge.

Now I bet that’s news to you – it was to me! So was this bridge ever actually built? Or was it altered to the current road layout before completion? Let’s check the 1817 town plan. Yes there’s still a bridge. But the problem with the town plans of this time is they frequently record what was intended to be built, not what was. (Just look at those 2 canals there running through the Upper Quarry Holes!)

Winding the clock forward slightly to 1821 and what is this? Oh no! The bridge is gone! And we also see the distinctive S-shaped road up to and down from the Regent Road between Easter Road and the Canongate.

So what’s going on here? Was the road built exactly to Stevenson’s plan? Was there ever a bridge over Easter Road? Or did it change as construction proceeded to the arrangement we all know and love to this day? The answer wasn’t readily obvious in maps or the books. The next best place to look is in the newspapers of the time.

Stevenson had a great vision for his new road, envisioning three grand tiers of townhouses rising above it, impressing those entering the city but also not impeding the residents’ views south to Arthur’s Seat. He showed real determination to drive this scheme through. He didn’t just demolish buildings, but had half a graveyard dug-up and its contents exhumed and relocated to make way for his road. I think in his tunnel vision to complete it, he overlooked something; angry people in local newspapers. (No, that’s not a joke, he really did.)

If you trawl through the green ink sections of the Scotsman and Caledonian Mercury at this time then what you will find is, even before the scheme was completed, the residents of the rapidly expanding and affluent South Side of the city were deeply aggrieved at there being two big new roads into and out of the city but none for them. They felt that having to cross the North Bridge, then turn to cross the Regent Bridge to proceed east out of the city was far too circuitous a route. His bridge at Easter Road to carry the Regent Road over was also felt to be too narrow for cart traffic to pass easily through, so he upset the carters of Leith and the Canongate too. The residents of Abbeyhill were aggrieved by the dark and narrow defile he had created.

And to be honest, the “Angry People in Local Newspapers” were right here. The new road provided a smooth and monumental access to the city from the east, but it got in the way of existing traffic and was convoluted to access from the Easter Road or Abbeyhill; the usually infallible Stevenson had made it too small. The “Commissioners for the New Road” obviously felt they had a serious problem on their hands here and as early as May 1819, it was reported that the Easter Road bridge (work on which had only started in September 1817) was to simply be filled in, and the road carried up to the Regent Road level and back down the other side by new embankments. Of course, this wasn’t ideal either as although it connected the new Road to the Easter Road, it was going to be much too for the carters. So the green ink vented its ire on behalf of the carters of Leith and the Canongate into the Caledonian Mercury once again.

The other sides of the gushet (Scots for a triangular portion of land) formed by the new roads being East and South Norton Places– it was common in Edinburgh at this time to give the buildings different streetnames to the roads they were actually on – East Norton Place is on London Road, South Norton Place on Regent Road, later Montrose Terrace. For the convenience of people on foot, a small staircase was provided for getting between the Regent Road and West Norton Place. It’s still there, and was only recently shut off as a through route as being in disrepair.

Norton Place developed into a little block of Regency tenements in its own right at the eastern end, but remained undeveloped at the west until much later. The below image shows the junction of the original London Road alignment (right) with Stevenson’s Regent Road (which is now Montrose Terrace) on the left. The former Regent Road school, where the steps are, is to the left of the crane.

But what about the steps in the picture that started this thread off? Well, in 1872 or so, the Heriot Trust built a school in the sliver of land between West Norton Place and the new alignment of Easter Road. This would become the Regent Road Public School when the School Board took it over from Heriot’s, later it was the Abbeymount Techbase and more recently the Out of the Blue Abbeymount Studios. The school was split into upper and lower levels, to make use of the awkward site, with separate entrance gates into high and low-level playgrounds..

And between the maps of 1876 and 1893, our staircase is built, with tenders being sought for it in 1891 to be precise! I imagine that this was because of the huge increase in population in the neighbourhood as the tenements sprung up on Easter Road and in Abbeyhill. The original staircase was too steep and narrow for heavy public use and a wider, more direct one was built instead.

All because the city had to block up the ancient “desire line” for foot traffic between Easter Road, the Abbeyhill and the Canongate 72 years previously when they filled in Stevenson’s bridge. So next time you stand at the top of Easter Road and look up the hill in front of you and wonder why the road ahead sweeps around the old school in a cutting, rather than straight ahead, the answer is that you’re looking at a Georgian on-ramp that was put in in a hurry to solve some Georgian traffic-flow problems caused by a bridge that was built too narrow.

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