With sweltering temperatures set to return to Edinburgh this week, thousands of locals will be planning a trip to Portobello to make the most of the sunshine.
Whenever there’s the slightest hint of heatwave, the famous district, with its two-mile stretch of beautiful promenade, golden sands and refreshing waters, really is the place to be.
This was especially true for the youngsters at the Craigmillar Summer Playscheme during the 1976 school holidays. Much like this current summer, the UK was in the middle of an unprecedented heatwave, with the mercury reaching highs of 32C for two weeks straight.
READ MORE: Fascinating Edinburgh footage from Portobello's outdoor pool in 1965 resurfaced online
But rather than sitting idle and soaking up the sun, the Craigmillar kids made an exceptionally sweet short film that manages to capture all the fun of Edinburgh's seaside.
Titled ‘Adventures of Wullie’, the fascinating footage, which has been restored by the Scottish Screen Archive in collaboration with the Craigmillar Archives Trust, and is available to watch online, shows the kids having fun in the sun in a surrealistic homage to Scots comic strip hero Oor Wullie.
The children are seen playing games, bouncing around on space hoppers and having a laugh in the streets and parks of Craigmillar before descending on nearby Portobello, which at that time was still a huge draw for holidaymakers from far and wide thanks to its outdoor swimming pool and an amusement park, the aptly named Fun City.
The 23-minute long film, which was awarded the Isabel Elder Trophy at the 1976 Scottish Amateur Film Festival, is interspersed with a series of imaginative animated sequences showing a cardboard cut-out “Wullie” aboard a small boat on a choppy sea before being swallowed up by a whale.
In the next scene, our protagonist is swiftly ejected from the whale’s blow hole, conveniently landing at “Porty Belly”. The kids are then seen acting out the next part of Wullie’s adventure in which he gets to meet 1970s Edinburgh pop heroes, the Bay City Rollers.
Sign up to our Edinburgh Live nostalgia newsletters for more local history and heritage content straight to your inbox
But it’s the sequences filmed at Portobello’s Fun City which are the most fascinating. We catch a glimpse of the beach and promenade before being whisked through Fun City’s colourful entranceway and into a world of waltzers, dodgems, coconut shies and a House of Horrors. The clip is brief, but you can practically smell the pungent mix of hot chips, ice cream and seaside air.
Following their Portobello visit, the children are then filmed flying around Craigmillar, Oor Wullie-style, in homemade carts while a ‘cops vs robbers’ drama unfolds. The film ends, as every Oor Wullie story should, with a shot of an upturned bucket.
Originally run by the Codona family, Fun City was Scotland’s first permanent funfair when it opened in the early 1900s. While it was still in full swing in 1976, Fun City would suffer from declining visitor numbers leading to its eventual closure in 1998. Flats now occupy the site.
'Adventures of Wullie' can be viewed in full on YouTube.
READ NEXT:
Stunning Edinburgh snaps from 50s and 60s show an evolving city
15 images of Edinburgh fashion that'll take you right back to the 00s
The abandoned Edinburgh church that housed a huge cannabis haul worth £75,000
These 23 incredible Edinburgh images will take you right back to the 1980s
Edinburgh natives can't decide what we want to be called - here are our options
