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Edinburgh Live
Edinburgh Live
World
David McLean

Incredible 1980s photos show Edinburgh tower blocks that have since been pulled down

In the 1980s, they dominated much of the cityscape, but residential tower blocks are now relatively rare in the city of Edinburgh.

Dozens of multi-storey flats rose across Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland in the 1960s and '70s as part of the UK-wide social housing boom that sought to improve living conditions for the working classes.

High rise flats would be constructed to house existing residents and newcomers in areas such as Dumbiedykes, Niddrie and Leith, while new council estates were also springing up at Oxgangs, Sighthill, Wester Hailes and Muirhouse as the city boundary expanded.

For a variety of socioeconomic reasons, however, the post-war housing dream of 'villages in the sky' quickly turned sour, and by the 1980s, the nation's concrete tower blocks were instead being dubbed 'slums in the sky'.

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Within just a generation of the flats going up, many were already being torn down.

As of 2022, only a small fraction of Edinburgh's post-war tower blocks remain.

And while many districts of the capital have waved farewell to their high rises, all is not lost.

In 2015, an online digital image archive was created of every tower block in the UK in a bid to emphasise the social and architectural importance of the building type, and "to frame multi-storey social housing as a coherent and accessible nationwide heritage".

Supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Tower Block UK project collected together more than 4,000 photographs of multi-storey dwellings mostly taken in the 1980s by Professor Miles Glendinning of the Edinburgh University.

Edinburgh Live has gathered together a selection of images from the Tower Block UK website showing high rise flats that have vanished from the capital's cityscape since Professor Glendinning embarked on his mission to record the structures all those years ago.

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