The school reopened as South
Bridge Resource Centre to
serve various services, adult
education and youth groups
13
Johnston (Canongate too) and the singing-master,
Mr Sneddon (not from Canongate). The school
could not keep up with demand and was enlarged
in 1892. In 1905-6 an entirely new school was
built next door on Drummond Street. for the
infant department, with junior schooling staying
at South Bridge. The Board’s architect, John
Carfrae, used a Renaissance style as favoured in
London and exploited the difference in height
between Drummond Street and Infirmary Street
to make ita full 3 storeys, for reasons of economy.
During the 1970s, South Bridge School found a
new lease of life in the summers when it began to
increasingly be used for productions at the
Festival Fringe – pertinent to the current
discussion around its future.
When Head Teacher May Beattie left what was
now called South Bridge Primary to move to
Stockbridge Primary in December 1982, the
writing was already on the wall. Not just for her
former school, but all of the city’s three remaining
Old Town and Southside schools – Lothian
Regional Council wanted to shut the lot. Inner
city depopulation had proceeded faster than
council projections and each school by this point
was down to just three composite classes, with
fewer than 500 children in schools built with a
capacity of over 3,000.
The council’s favoured plan was to shut South
Bridge, Milton House and Preston Street and
open a “new” school in the old James Clark
Technical School (“Jimmy’s“) at St. Leonard’s Hill,
saving £80,000 a year. An alternative scheme
offering a lesser reduction of £64,000 could be
achieved by merging South Bridge and Milton
House and disposing of the James Clark building.
This was favoured by the Council’s Labour group
and there was a particularly vociferous campaignagainst the closure of Preston Street by the
parents at that school. It had been intended to
close Milton House and move pupils there to
South Bridge, but it was recognised that the
former school was better located to serve the
main centre of population at Dumbiedykes and
had a more favourable site in general, so the
opposite happened.
Statutory notices to this effect were published
in November 1982. And so it was that South
Bridge Primary School closed in 1983 and
its pupils moved to Milton House on the
Canongate. Also a school by Wilson, it was in
a red sandstone Scottish Baronial Revival style.
The combined new school was renamed as Royal
Mile Primary School.
The last day at Infirmary Street came in May- Pupil Murray Ramsay ceremonially rang
the school’s hand bell for the last time. Six year
old Sally Atta was overcome at the occasion
and had to be comforted by the head teacher
Mrs Sturgeon.
But while it closed as a school, that was not
the end of education at South Bridge – Lothian
Regional Council reopened it as the South
Bridge Resource Centre to serve various outreach
services, adult education, youth groups and more.
The Old Town Oral History and Old Town
Community Development projects moved in, as
did the Canongate Youth Project, which has been
there since 1984 and is the primary occupant of
the building.
Various other community and educational
projects have come and gone, but The City of
Edinburgh Council’s Adult Education Service
are still run from here - for now.
School leavers pose at
South Bridge Public
School in 1933