A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park

Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.

The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.

In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.

For the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.

The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.

It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.

Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:

[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow

The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.

Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.

A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.

Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.

The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.

At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.

Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.

Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!

As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.

If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.

A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.

However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.

It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!

In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.

The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.

We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.

Lothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!

NCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.

With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.

And if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.

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 supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

“Preposterously Large and a Potential Rival to the Castle rock”: the thread about Argyle House

Brutalist buildings are the Marmite of architecture – passionately loved or loathed. It’s easy to assume that the term comes from their brutal appearance (adj. savage; violent; unpleasant or harsh) and not the French béton brut for raw concrete. One such specimen was much in the news in Edinburgh yesterday when it was announced that plans had been lodged for the demolition and replacement of Argyle House in the West Port area of the city. But while other news sources make much click capital out of it having briefly appeared in some Netflix police show or another, here at Threadinburgh I prefer instead to go down the rabbit hole of the hows, whys and whats of this much-critiqued building of the moment.

Argyle House takes its name from its developer; Argyle Securities Ltd. This was an Edinburgh-based property development company that had been formed in 1960 to take advantage of the wave of prominent civic redevelopment schemes sweeping the nation in that decade. Its chairman and managing director was Meyer (Mike) Oppenheim, a prominent local businessman, philanthropist and managing director of theJames Grant & Co. (West) chain of furniture stores.

Meyer had done very well for himself in life and he and his family lived at the historic Whitehouse in Barnton, that quiet and leafy quarter of the city to where the real money retreats behind tall hedges and well manicured lawns and driveways.

In October 1960 it was publicly announced that Oppenheim had acquired the Royal Lyceum Theatre from Howard & Wyndham. This coincided with a plan first mooted in 1956 to replace the adjacent Synod Hall on Castle Terrace, whose occupants included Poole’s Synod cinema, with a new opera and concert hall for the city.

Oppenheim wasn’t really that interested in running a theatre – instead he came up with his own, rival million-pound plan to transform the block into a “magnificent centre… for the Edinburgh Festival“. This would replace both the Synod Hall and Lyceum with a multi-purpose performance, entertainment and commercial venue replete with restaurants and a hotel.

The Town Council approved his scheme in 1962 with a promise to lease it back off of Oppenheim once it was complete. But as a businessman known for sticking scrupulously to budget and deadlines, he soon tired of rising costs and delays from the meddling of officialdom and walked away from the whole thing. Instead he gifted the Lyceum to the city in 1964. The city tried to take up the opera house scheme on its own and had the Synod Hall demolished in 1966, but each of its multiple subsequent attempts faltered and instead an ugly gap was left on the Castle Terrace site for almost 40 years.

Before that scheme had collapsed, in 1961 Argyle Securities acquired the long-established Edinburgh firm of garage proprietors, Rolls-Royce body builders, car hirers and undertakers John Croall & Son for £300,000, substantially outbidding a number of other offers that had wished to take it over as a going concern. Like the Lyceum, Oppenheim wasn’t actually interested in owning a garage for the purpose of running it, he was much more interested in the plot of land on the corner of Castle Terrace where Croall’s had their main works.

In 1953 Edinburgh had adopted its City Development Plan which had re-zoned much of the decrepit old housing of the West Port and High Riggs area for commercial purposes. This made what was then almost worthless residential land potentially very valuable to commercial developers; it was protected from rebuilding the housing and could be easily acquired on the cheap. Meyer Oppenheim was once such developer of the moment. Times were good – Argyle Securities had quickly gained a reputation for completing projects on time, on budget and for a handsome profit. It floated on the stock exchange in 1962 with a market capitalisation of £400,000 at which time it owned a portfolio worth some £843,000. Argyle added to the Croall’s site by buying up adjacent condemned residential properties between the West Port and King’s Stables Road Lane and formed a grand new redevelopment scheme. This would become the eponymous Argyle House and was approved by the Corporation Planning Committee in September 1966.

The architects were Michael Laird & Partners and the principal contractors were James Laidlaw & Sons of Rutherglen, probably best known for the enigmatic St. Peter’s Seminary at Cardross. Curiously, Laidlaw’s Edinburgh office at 24 Manor Place was shared with Argyle Securities. But this was no coincidence – Oppenheim had bought the firm in 1964 as he sought to vertically integrate his operations.

To mark the commencement of work, Laidlaws took out a half page spread in the Scotsman extolling the worthiness of their new construction.

Argyle House. A new building for the New Town will be worthy of the fine architectural traditions in this unique area

To finance the £1,500,000 development, loans were provided by Standard Life Assurance who also bought the site and leased it back to the developer for 175 years. At this time Croall’s business operations were sold to new owners and relocated to Corstorphine. Demolition commenced in 1966 with construction starting the following year. Argyle already had occupants lined up, a sixty-three year lease having been agreed with the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works for the entire building. This would allow the centralisation of existing government departments in the city including the headquarters of the Department of Health and Social Security and the Department of Employment and Department of the Environment in Scotland and offices of HM Stationery Office.

A two-storey L-plan block on Castle Terrace and Lady Lawson Street would contain public facilities such as enquiry counters, a job centre, and meeting rooms for the DHSS. This lower section, which the untrained eye can mistake for a separate building entirely, was faced in Blaxter stone with the pair of public entrances dominated by massive abstract concrete reliefs by George Garson: “bound to cause discussion and some bewilderment… if they have a message it is that the ways of authority are mysterious and that the symbolism of government through sculpture is a happily dead art“.

Rising up behind this were the two J-shaped office towers which extended down to eleven-storeys at their deepest point and were connected by a central service core. Their construction made use of the Bison prefabricated large panel system (LPS) which promised reduced costs and quick, easy construction but resulted in a highly repetitive and monotonous “impersonal egg-box”external appearance of the 4.5 ton wall slab panels.

Argyle House was completed on schedule and on budget, as was the Oppenheim way, and was officially opened by John Silkin MP, Minister of Public Buildings and Works, on July 22nd 1969. At this time, with a floor plan totalling over 250,000 square feet of office space, it was both Edinburgh and Scotland’s largest commercial office and could house between 1,400 and 1,700 civil servants. At 320,000 square feet, the equally visually controversial New St. Andrew’s House at the St. James Centre took the city’s number one spot the following year (although it would not be occupied until 1974).

Colin McWilliam, the Scotsman’s architecture critic (“he admired modernism, but his taste was catholic and his judgement sound“) was quite taken with the end result and tried valiantly to compare the building’s scale and architectural effect with Playfair’s Georgian Royal Terrace on the Calton Hill. He summarised it as:

A huge three-dimensional balance-sheet set up specifically to show the maximum profit to investors.

He gushed over the “pencil-slim margins in limestone-concrete” and “backwards splay of the dark flint facing below each window“. His main complaint was that too much had been crammed in to too small a site, resulting in a building that was “preposterously large and a potential rival to the Castle rock“.

McWilliam hoped that subsequent development would show a similar “high level of care in layout and detail” so that they would “not be a denial of Edinburgh’s own character” and result in the “hell of over-intensive commercial use, of which London already [held] so many examples“. Given much of the output of the Edinburgh architecture scene since, his hopes were probably in vain.

Postscript. Architectural champions of Argyle House, Malcolm Fraser and the Fraser/Livingstone practice have proposed how a low-intensity intervention could make the existing building fit for the next 60 years of its life with a much reduced cost and environmental impact.

After Argyle House, Oppenheim’s next big scheme was through another company he controlled, the Scottish Homes Investment Company, buying over the rights to develop the private enterprise “new town” of Dalgety Bay, across the Forth in Fife. Laidlaw would make its mark on the city by constructing the Royal Commonwealth Pool in time for the 1970 Games. Meyer Oppenheim retired in 1971 at the age of 66, having grown the value of Argyle’s investments five-fold, its market capitalisation three-fold and its profits twelve-fold in a little over a decade. Standard Life Assurance, his long-term financial backer, bought over much of his shareholding and he retired to an active life of philanthropy. As well as the Lyceum and the vista of Argyle House, one of his lasting gifts to the city was founding and endowing the Water of Leith Walkway Trust in 1976. He passed away in 1982 at the age of 77, a year after the first section of what would become a fifteen mile walkway was opened to the public.

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 supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

Strolling the farmer's market on a sunny, summer day

https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/54742376710/in/photostream/

#Edinburgh #Edimbourg #StreetPhotography #StreetMarket #photography #photographie #PeopleWatching #HoldingHands #FarmersMarket #CastleTerrace #market #marche #BlackAndWhitePhotography

The master of mutton pies https://www.flickr.com/photos/woolamaloo_gazette/54742019746/in/dateposted/

Farmer's Market, #Edinburgh #Edimbourg #photography #photographie #StreetPhotography #FarmersMarket #StreetMarket #CastleTerrace #PeopleWatching #Pies