Andy Arthur - Threadinburgh<p><strong>The thread about Bristo Public School, from “one of the worst” in the city to further and higher education (by way of a car park)</strong></p><p><em>Preamble. The schools of the “School Board” era of public education (1872-1918) have for some reason a particular fascination for me, one which is more profound where they are either no longer in use as schools or have disappeared entirely. This thread began as a couple of lines for my own notes about each of the “Lost Board Schools of Edinburgh” but rapidly snowballed into an intention to cover each, in alphabetical order, on its own and in rather more detail, but not so much that they can’t be posted quite frequently. </em></p><p><strong>Bristo Public School </strong>was located on Marshall Street in that old district of the city known as Easter Portsburgh. It opened in 1877 with a capacity for 600 children at a time when the <em>Edinburgh School Board</em> was rapidly trying to expand education provision in the city at the same time as dealing with a legacy of inherited and substandard properties. The School Board was formed as a result of the <em>Education (Scotland) Act 1872</em> which made education compulsory for children aged between 5 and 13 in Scotland (but not free). The school occupied a site where once had stood the General’s Entry lodgings of Robert Burns’ paramour <em>Clarinda </em>– Agnes Maclehose – and took its name from the adjacent Bristo Street, itself an old Edinburgh place name dating back to the early 16th century.</p> 1893 Ordnance Survey town plan overlaid on a modern Google Earth satellite image, centered on the location of Bristo School. General’s Entry is the small lane to the south of the school. Move the slider to compare.<p>Construction was intended to begin in 1875 but was delayed on account of the original cost estimate of £8,760 being far in excess of what the Board had budgeted per capita. The final cost, including purchasing the land, ended up at £26 10s per head, a huge sum for the time compared to other new schools. It was designed by the architect to the Board, William Lambie Moffat, in the Collegiate Gothic style that was then in favour for schools and was extremely similar to his <em>Leith Walk School, </em></p>Leith Walk Public School, 1887 engraving. Note the similarity in the design of the tower, the primary gable end and the ornamental buttresses with the photo below of Bristo School.<p>Serving a densely populated neighbourhood, in its early days Bristo School was frequently overcrowded. Just three years after opening it had 840 pupils, some 40% more than it was designed to take, and the adjacent <em>Marshall Street Halls</em> had to be taken over in 1885 as an annexe and <a href="https://threadinburgh.scot/2023/12/11/the-thread-about-south-bridge-school-the-ups-and-downs-and-uncertain-future-of-an-inner-city-educational-establishment/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">a new school was begun at South Bridge to provide additional capacity</a>. Matters came to a head in 1896 when the school suffered a negative inspection on the grounds of the overcrowding and the substandard nature of the annexe and the <em>Scotch Education Department</em> cut its grant. On investigation the School Board found that almost half of the pupils actually lived closer to another of their schools than Bristo and so by redistributing them closer to home it was possible to both deal with the overcrowding and close the annexe.</p>Bristo School, looking wesr down Marshall Street west towards Edinburgh University’s “New Buildings” off Teviot Place. © Edinburgh City Libraries<p>The capacity crisis may have been solved but the school continued to cause the Board problems. On account of its north facing position, cramped plot and being surrounded all around by tall tenements, it was particularly dark inside and had a very small playground which was also very dark. <a href="https://threadinburgh.scot/2022/11/23/the-thread-about-how-edinburghs-victorian-school-architects-tried-to-stamp-out-left-handedness-how-german-thinking-and-london-styling-heavily-influenced-their-work-and-a-spot-of-victorian-nimbyism/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">The lack of natural light and ventilation – very important to Edinburgh’s Victorian school designers </a>– soon saw it labelled as “<em>insanitary</em>“. Furthermore it lacked any hall and the arrangements of its classrooms were unsuitable to cope with class sizes; there were too many small spaces. As early as 1900 the School Board were exploring options to replace it and an extension was added to the rear as an interim solution at a cost of £4,350, further decreasing the playground space. In 1909 it was reported that as a result of the poor lighting within the building that it had the highest proportion of children with “<em>defective eyesight</em>” in the city. A special experiment was carried out from 1930 onwards whereby entire year groups were transported to <em>Liberton Playing Fields </em>by tramcar, one day per week in the spring and summer, to have their education outside, far removed from their usual oppressive and dark surroundings.</p>Five-year-old children of the infant department of Bristo School, dressed for a mock coronation portrait photo in June 1911 to mark the occasion of King George V’s coronation.<p>In 1925 the school found itself caught up in the <em><a href="https://threadinburgh.scot/2022/10/15/the-thread-about-the-sciennes-school-strike-of-1925-why-it-was-stoked-by-political-sectarianism-and-how-a-group-of-mothers-stood-up-to-the-authorities-and-won/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">Sciennes School Strike saga</a></em> and it was observed at this time that it was under capacity. By 1927 its roll was in steady decline on account of slum clearance in the district which transferred much of the populace to new housing schemes in the southeast of the city. By 1933 the population of school age children in the Southside was declining at 10% per annum and there were 1,228 vacant places in its schools. As a result Bristo, described by Edinburgh Corporation’s Education Committee as “<em>one of the worst</em>” of its schools, was closed in 1934. The remaining scholars were transferred to Sciennes and South Bridge. In 1935 it was proposed to re-open the school by transferring pupils from the condemned St Ignatius’s Roman Catholic (RC) school in Glen Street and St Columba’s RC – the former Causewayside School – into a new Intermediate RC school for the district. Nothing came of these plans except sectarian controversy until final approval in 1939 but war quickly intervened and put them on hiatus again, this time permanently. Instead, after closure it was used for a variety of purposes including evening classes, a day centre for the long-term unemployed and hosting community groups such as the Boys’ Brigade.</p>1951 aerial photo showing Bristo School on Marshall Street, running from bottom right to middle of shot. In the top left corner is the Teviot Union of the Edinburgh University. Note the 1900 extension at the rear of the school which served to make its already small playground even smaller and darker. Photo SAW039077 via Britain from Above.<p>In 1938 the <em>Clarinda Club</em> – a local appreciation society of the poet Robert Burns – marked the school being built upon the site of her lodgings by unveiling a commemorative bronze plaque on its walls. During WW2 it served as training centre and headquarters for First Aid and Air Raid Precautions. Another more unusual purpose was established which was the <em>Nursery Equipment Centre</em>. This was set up to produce soft and wooden toys and playthings for young children, these no longer being produced by industry during wartime. In 1941 part of the school became a <em>British Restaurant</em> – a municipal wartime canteen – operating under the name <em>Clarinda’s</em>.</p>Unveiling the Clarinda plaque at Bristo School. Speaking is Councillor Wilson Mclaren and to his left is George Mathers MP. Inset is Dr John Trotter of the<em> Clarinda Club</em>. The plaque read “Near this spot resided ‘CLARINDA’. Friend of Robert Burns 1787-1791”.<p>The <em>Nursery Equipment Centre</em> attracted a significant number of volunteers with disabilities which prevented them from undertaking war work and became something of a specialist centre in helping people adapt their lives to work. Such was the success of the scheme that it – and the school – was taken over by the government’s new<em> Disabled Persons Employment Corporation </em>as a work training centre for the disabled – a<em> Remploy Factory</em> – until purpose-built premises were completed at Sighthill. </p>Men at work at the Bristo Remploy centre. The man on the left is John Collister, in the centre is the instructor Thomas Williams (holding the hammer) and to the right his pupil, Robert Lennie. <p>When Remploy vacated the school in 1949 it was taken back by the Education Department and repurposed as the <em>Bristo Technical Institute</em>. This was a training centre for apprentices in engineering trades, either on day release from their workplaces or taken as evening classes. It taught specialist skills that could not gained on the job such as technical drawing, physics and chemistry and also basic certificates in maths and English to bring candidates up to standard. After 1959, much of this part of the city was threatened by the comprehensive redevelopment plans of Edinburgh University, which wanted wholesale demolition of the area but the old school survived where much did not. The institute closed in 1966 after the opening of the new <em>Napier Technical College</em> at a purpose-built campus in Merchiston, with most of the city’s pre-existing hodgepodge of technical further education being transferred to it. The building was then leased by <em>Heriot-Watt College</em>, which was at this time on nearby Chambers Street and about to gain university status, as its Department of Industrial Administration. <em>Heriot-Watt University</em> began its move to its new Riccarton campus in 1969 and left its <em>Bristo Building </em>around 1974. By this time the old school was the last remaining building on the western portion of Marshall Street and it was quickly and one old educational institution was unceremoniously demolished by another just shy of its centenary; Edinburgh University replaced it with a windswept car park that was perennially covered in puddles.</p><p><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/georgeupstairs/6004096117/in/photolist-2kv1F4n-QgTH16-2jVXWem-a9yyAz-ai75jg-ai9SE1-25VNJbP-ai75ac-44cRz1-6aZhqo-4aECh1-2jvFhCR" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.flickr.com/photos/georgeupstairs/6004096117/in/photolist-2kv1F4n-QgTH16-2jVXWem-a9yyAz-ai75jg-ai9SE1-25VNJbP-ai75ac-44cRz1-6aZhqo-4aECh1-2jvFhCR</a></p><p>The car park was meant to be a temporary measure, but I clearly remember parking there in the 1990s when my Dad would take me to the Museum on Chambers Street; the University scheme for which it had been cleared never came to fruition. This most wantonly destructive of Edinburgh institutions would not finally build upon the gap site until the 21st century. The final part of the development – the School of Informatics’ <em>Bayes Centre</em> – was opened on the site of Bristo School as recently as 2019. It was perhaps some small consolation that the site was at last returned to educational use again.</p> <p class=""><em><em>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 to find further stories to bring you – by <a href="https://ko-fi.com/andyarthur" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank"><strong>supporting me on ko-fi</strong></a>.</em></em> <em>Or please do just <strong>share this <a href="https://linktr.ee/threadinburgh" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">post on social media</a></strong> or amongst friends.</em></p> <p class="">These threads © 2017-2025, Andy Arthur.</p><p class=""><strong>NO AI TRAINING:</strong> Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. 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