The Kirkgate Stone and The Cant Ordinary Digital projection, Back to Heritage exhibition 2014, St Donat’s Church, Zadar, Croatia
The Kirkgate is a residential street in an area of Edinburgh called Leith, which is the port area for Edinburgh and was actually a separate town geographically for hundreds of years. It was a fiercely independent area and was on several occasions besieged by both English and Scots aggressors. Despite the setbacks the port flourished by trading with the Hanseatic ports of northern Europe and the Baltic, and established six hundred years of shipbuilding in the port which finally came to an end in 1984.
The Kirkgate was the main street connecting the port area to the rest of Leith and suffered almost complete destruction in a ‘regeneration’ process of the second half of the 20th Century. One of the most notable buildings to be destroyed in a similar process during the 19th Century was the Cant Ordinary Inn – a drinking house and hostelry which was frequented by the likes of Queen Mary and Oliver Cromwell and is said to have dated back to the mid 13thCentury. It was demolished in 1888 and a Victorian tenement housing a famous tailor shop was built in its place with a commemorative stone plaque set into the façade of the new building.
Most of the old property in Leith was owned by private individual landlords and property business landlords who rented out the housing. These owners were notorious for not carrying out maintenance and repairs to the properties and subsequently much of them rapidly declined into sub- standard housing. Unfortunately for the tenant families these owners would not invest in electric power or proper sanitation facilities. The living conditions were squalid for many people who still had to pay rent to the owners. This led to the Edinburgh authorities using ‘compulsory purchase orders’ to take possession of the housing and then demolition after re-housing the tenants. Subsequently during the 1960’s the Victorian building displaying the plaque was itself demolished and the plaque was re-set in a housing complex of unremarkable late sixties design. During this time the historic Kirkgate suffered almost complete destruction and ceased to be a street at all after the road plan was disregarded and eradicated in the rebuild and its Northern exit to the old port was blocked by a curtain of poor standard Modernist housing.
The destruction hugely contributed to the erasing of community identity and this street in particular suffered rapid social decline through the past forty years and remains an example of insensitive and short-sighted urban planning.
John Mullen - Artist 