The Transformation of Edinburgh: Land, Property and Trust in the Nineteenth Century

by Richard Rodger

• ISBN13: 9780521780247
• ISBN10: 0521780241
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-12-03
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This clear and lucid study explores the physical transformation of Edinburgh in the nineteenth century. It is based on a formidable amount of new archival research and enriched with fascinating illustrative material. In a powerful analysis of how the law adapted under intense pressure from institutions and individuals to new possibilities for profit, Richard Rodger shows how urban expansion was financed. Victorian 'feudalism', he argues, was reasserted. As a consequence, durable housing was created, though at densities and at costs which had adverse consequences for the tenement dwellers within. Trusts, educational endowments and the Church were each instrumental in this process. The urban environmental damage associated with intensive building and overcrowding is also explored, as are the public health and co-operative responses which they prompted. Historians - whether political, urban, economic, social or legal - will find challenging new insights here, which have a resonance far beyond the confines of one city. Winner of the 2003 Frank Watson Prize.

Table of Contents

List of figures	vii
List of tables	xii
Acknowledgements	xv
List of abbreviations	xix
Part 1 Urban frameworks
Introduction	3	(27)
Institutional power and landownership: the nineteenth-century inheritance	30	(39)
Victorian feudalism	69	(54)
Building capital: trusts, loans and the kirk	123	(51)
The building industry and instability	174	(15)
Part 2 Building enterprise and housing management
The search for stability	189	(22)
Industrial suburb: developing Dalry	211	(28)
The genesis of a property owning democracy?	239	(39)
Landlord and tenant	278	(66)
Postscript: `firmiter et durabile': the construction of legitimacy	344	(9)
Part 3 Complementary visions of society
Co-operation and mutuality: the `Colonies' and the Edinburgh Co-operative Building Company	353	(62)
Civic consciousness, social consciences and the built environment	415	(44)
Adornment, ego and myth: the decoration of the tenement	459	(28)
Conclusion: reinventing the city	487	(22)
Principal sources	509	(7)
Index of Edinburgh street names and districts	516	(6)
Index of individual building firms	522	(1)
General index	523