During the 1970s, the school
found a new lease of life in the
when it was used for staging
Festival Fringe productions
12 FEATURE SOUTH BRIDGE RESOURCE CENTRE
In light of the Festival Fringe Society’s plans to use a £7 million
UK Government grant to convert a former school on Infirmary
Street into a new hub, Andy Arthur takes a look at its history...
T
here is potentially a forced
loss of accommodation for
long-sitting community
groups and public services
from Edinburgh’s South
Bridge Resource Centre to
make way for a new multi-
million pound home for the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society. This seems a
good time for a thread on the history of the
former school building. It gives us a useful case
study of 150 years of inner city social and
economic change in the city’s Old Town.
South Bridge Public School was opened by
Edinburgh School Board on 2nd November
1886, with the Right Hon Arthur J. Balfour,
then Secretary of State for Scotland, formally
cutting the ribbon. It was designed by the
Board’s architect, Robert Wilson, in the
Collegiate Gothic style then favoured and cost
£7,942 to build, with the total cost of the project
including land purchase, staffing etc. being
£14,500, which was borrowed from the Scotch
Education Department.
It had an opening roll of 1,170 children
(although not all attended at once). At this time
the ESB was falling over itself at this time to build
schools to meet the demands of the 1872 act
which made Education in Scotland compulsory
(but not free) and a booming inner-city
population. It was the first Board school to
consist solely of classrooms as prior to this a
mixture of school rooms and class rooms had
been employed, with various innovative systems
of partitions to subdivide spaces as required into
smaller teaching spaces. Three infant rooms on
the ground floor which could be opened together
with partitions, with older children on the
first floor.
The Head master was Mr Paterson, who
transferred from North Canongate School, the
head mistress being Miss Brander (also of that
establishment), the first assistant Mr Johnston
(Canongate too) and the singing-master, Mr
Sneddon. The Board also provided evening
classes here under Mr Robert Williamson MA,
for those seeking personal advancement but also
children who could not attend during the day as
they were working. As well as a core curriculum,
subjects such as shorthand, drawing, bookkeepingetc. were offered to “young men and lads“.
Education at this time was segregated (with
separate boys and girls classes, playgrounds and
school entrances.
If you’ve ever been in one of these old Board
schools, you’ll know that there’s a curious double
arrangement of internal stairs – this was to keep
boys and girls separated when moving around
the school). Women and girls were offered similar
evening classes at this time at Bruntsfield
and Torphichen Street schools, and could also
take dressmaking, fancy and plain needlework
and cookery.
As well as keeping boys and girls apart, the
architect struggled to accommodate such a large
school on a confined site. This had been bought
by the ESB off of the Town Council from the site
of the town’s Fever Hospital, which was the
original Royal Infirmary building and as well as
being constrained by space it was north facing
(poor for natural lighting) and hemmed in on all
sides which was poor for ventilation.
The school was co-located with the Infirmary
Street Public Baths, built at the same time, which
were the first such public facility in the city (and
the only Victorian public bath in Edinburgh not
to survive – its empty shell was later re-purposed
as the Dovecot Studios). When the school
opened, it was ESB‘s first organised purely on
the classroom basis. Prior to this, they had
used the schoolroom layout, with a small number
of large teaching rooms and classes (more like
lecture theatres) overseen by a single teacher
with help from assistant teachers and “pupil
assistants” drawn from the most able of the
older students, with smaller rooms off thislarge space for separated tuition. But just to be
sure, the partitions between the classrooms at
South Bridge were sliding to allow the spaces to
be combined together for this more traditional
style of education.
The school was built to relieve overcrowding at
the new Bristo (Marshall Street), St. Leonards
(Forbes Street) and Causewayside public schools.
Milton House and Castle Hill schools would also
be built in the Old Town in the next decade,
allowing most of the older, smaller Heriot Trust
schools that the Board had inherited to be closed
and sold off. An exception was Davie Street,
which served the Pleasance district, which was
retained and expanded as a Board school.
The first Headmaster at South Bridge was Mr
Paterson, who transferred from North Canongate
school, the headmistress Miss Brander (also of
that establishment), the first assistant Mrwith
the
Changing