The Category-A listed Cables Wynd House. Leith’s answer to Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation. Unmistakably the Banana Flats on account of their bendy plan. But did you know they are neither the only nor the original Banana Flats in Edinburgh?

Because there’s another Banana Flats in town and they precede Cables Wynd by over a decade, and (controversially for Banana Flats purists) they are in Gorgie. I’m talking of course about the equally bendy (but rather less iconic) Westfield Court.

So why is Westfield Court interesting and why is it important? Let’s make the case for it.

Westfield Court started life before WW2, the brainchild of local property developer Alexander Glass who had acquired a substantial plot of land around the old village of Gorgie Mills. It is for Glass that the street Alexander Drive, on which Westfield Court sits, is named and it was Glass who had recently changed the face of – and modernised and expanded – Gorgie by building expansive new flats and shops along the western length of Gorgie Road. He had sold a plot to the Poole family who built the Roxy cinema.

His next venture was to be an even more modern structure, a concrete and steel high rise that mixed modernist living and community facilities, directly inspired by Maxwell Fry’s equally bendy Kensal House in Ladbroke Grove. This was the first modernist municipal housing block in the UK and as well as thoroughly cutting edge flats, included a community centre, laundry, canteen and nursery.

Inspired by London (as his shopping parades along Gorgie Road and also St. John’s Road in Corstorphine obviously were), Glass’s new flats at Westfield would have been his working class answer to Edinburgh’s first modernist flats, those of Ravelston Garden (the “Jenners Flats”).

But this of course never happened because the war intervened. Glass’s modernist dream remained just that. Post-war, the economic and strict regulatory environment prohibited private speculative building. But permits to build – and financial compensation – could be gained by private developers if they handed their plans and land over to the municipal authorities to progress. And that’s exactly what Glass did; the land and plans for Westfield Court were offered to the Edinburgh Corporation, who jumped at the chance to kick-start their post-war reconstruction of the city with ready-made plans for ultra modern housing.

As early as 1946, the housing committee approved the idea. There was some resistance to the idea, as the “Civic Survey and Plan for Edinburgh” (aka the Abercrombie Report) made it known that the land between Haymarket and Dalry was intended for industry. The idea eventually won through against the report however, and final plans were approved in May 1949 to the designs of architects Henry Hubbard and William Williamson.

There had been big changes from the original design however, to befit its new use as municipal housing. The basic building was a steel and concrete frame and floors, the exterior walls being pre-cast panels by the notorious Orlit company, with the inner face of the walls in brick and internal partitions of newly-patented “Eecon” blocks. At 8 storeys tall, it was the tallest (for its time) 20th century housing block not just in Edinburgh, but in Scotland. Rather than later “streets in the sky” ideas, with lateral access corridors along certain floors, it was a single 445 feet long block with 6 traditional “tenement” access stairs, each with the modern convenience of a lift.

The total accommodation was 88 flats, with every flat above the ground floor had its own south-facing balcony for the “airing of children“, and on the ground floors there were 14 “special” bedsit flats and two smaller flats for “spinsters and ageing persons“. All the other 72 flats had 4 rooms. The entire building had had no fireplaces or coal fuel. There was a central domestic boiler for hot water and heating, which also circulated around a drying cupboard in each flat. Each kitchenette had gas cookers and its own “gas incinerator cupboard” where rubbish could be burned, before being disposed of down ash chutes on the north face of the building.

Each flat had its own bathroom and toilet, and wooden floors overlaid the concrete (except on the ground floors, where they were laid with mastic). Sound deadening around the lift shafts was with wood wool. But Westfield Court’s most unusual feature (and possibly unique in Scotland) was on its 8th storey, where the entire floor was given over to a 3-class nursery school for 80 children, complete with a penned-in rooftop playground.

There’s a wonderful picture on Scran, which I cannot share here but can only link to, showing a forlorn looking child rattling the bars of the playground, looking down on the world below from 8 storeys up. Sound insulation around the nursery was a constant problem in its years of operation; the builders had given attention to the noise from the lift shafts but seemingly not from the noise of the feet of 80 children on the ceilings of 7th storey flats. Staff and children reputedly went around the place in their slippers.

The builders of Westfield Court were Hepburn Brothers of Dunfermline and Edinburgh, and this was a big departure for a company who were one of the primary constructors of the city’s sprawling interwar Bungalow Belt. The consulting engineers were Kinnear & Gordon and they had their work cut out for them: construction wasn’t simple as Westfield is a flood plain of the Water of Leith and was cut through by old mill lades, with the water table just 7 feet below the surface. Extensive piling work had to be undertaken to provide secure foundations.

The completed structure was not the distinctive orange, cream and brown paint of today (that is from a later modernisation) but bright white concrete

The first phase of work completed in June 1951, and Lord Provost James “Miller Homes” Miller proudly unveiled the new flats to an assembled audience of workers.

Little over a month later, on July 27th 1951, the first residents – the Mcaslan family – were handed over the keys to their new house by Councillors P. J. Robson and D. Wilkie.

The “Super Flats” as the press called them had cost the city around quarter of a million pounds, about 10 million in 2023 money, and rents for the 4-room flats were set at 38s 7d per week, including 21s rent, 5s 7d for rates and 12s for the heating and water. The communal heating system was very effective – too effective – and the houses gained an envious reputation as the warmest in the city. The daily consumption of hot water was found to be 60 gallons /house, and the charges covered only 5% of the council’s bills for the system. For that reason alone, all the subsequent multi-storey flats built at this time had individual gas fires or electric heaters / immersion systems as the city was unwilling to take on such a financial burden again. Communal heating in Edinburgh was finished before it ever got going.

Over the door of the main pend is a carving by Hew Lorimer ARSA, with the city’s motto (Nisi Dominus Frustra) and a diorama of Scottish workers and industry around a mother and children, perhaps symbolising the optimism of post-war rebirth and reconstruction.

By the 1980s, the once bright banana block was now a rather grim soot and pollution stained one, so Edinburgh District Council took the fateful decision in 1991 to bring the block “up to date” with a coating of multicoloured carbonation-resistant “Mulsicoat” acrylic.

The council chose a palette of “caramel, chocolate, beige and white”, and a pattern on the rear elevation reputedly based on the Baths of Carcalla, and covered the whole block in it

The rooftop nursery remained until 2010, specialising in helping children with additional needs, when the council took the decision to close it, ostensibly over health and safety fears for fire evacuation of children down 8 storeys of stairs, but it was part of a wider cuts programme.

Former Lord Provost Eric Milligan, who had been one of the nursery’s pupils back in the 1950s, spoke up in its defence (in a letter to Michael MacLeod at the Guardian), saying it was “distinctive and quirky” and “one of the most imaginative uses of space in Europe.” The nursery was converted into 5 flats, and appropriately for the story of modern Edinburgh, one is now being run as a Short Term Let, the council having been unable to take action against it as it found it had already given it permission to operate as a Bed and Breakfast…

So now you know that Westfield Court is much more important than it looks. It has a formative position in the story of post-war Scottish council housing, was for a short time the tallest “multi” in the land, pioneered the idea of mixing housing with other social facilities* and pre-dates the “other” banana flats by some 12 years.

* = One feature that had originally been proposed for Westfield Court – but was not included in the final designs – was a mortuary and chapel of rest. There was a genuine concern over lack of such facilities for the working classes, and some Labour councillors hoped to include them

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