The thread about Clovenstone (so much more than just a bus destination!) and the Wester Hailes housing scheme

This thread was originally written and published in December 2023.

I’ve previously jested that Clovenstone is a placename that only exists on bus timetables. This is of course silly. But is there anything more to say about Clovenstone than its where more than one bus route starts and finishes? Of course there is. Let’s go find out

Number 3 bus to Clovenstone. CC-by-ND 2.0, Kieran / V267 ESX via Twitter

First up – if Clovenstone actually exists, where is it and what is it? Well, it’s the southeast most neighbourhood of the vast Wester Hailes housing scheme that was built on the outskirts of west Edinburgh between 1968-75 and it was the last part of the overall scheme to be built.

Wester Hailes Housing Scheme, general overview of the neighbourhoods and construction phases.

The Clovenstone neighbourhood is a mix of low and mid-rise housing, centred around Clovenstone
Primary School. When built, each of the neighbourhood districts of Wester Hailes had a primary school at their centre, although some were intentionally temporary, planned to cope with the initial population boom as new families moved to the area and had children, growth which would taper off as the population aged and require fewer schools. Somewhat confusingly, the temporary wooden prefab school that had been built in 1957 in The Calders scheme (part of Sighthill) had been called Wester Hailes, so there was no Wester Hailes Primary School in Wester Hailes itself!

Clovenstone (creative commons, via Wester Hailes Digital Sentinel)

The scheme name – Clovenstone – is a fanciful one and is actually a bit of a misnomer. The Clovenstone, as its name suggests, was a split stone that formed a landmark. However it was over 1km away from the housing scheme, and was lost by quarrying at Redhall in the 1860s. The stone stood in what is now Dovecot Park off the Lanark Road. This was greatly quarried out for the prized Redhall stone (proprietor one James Gowans of Rockville fame), before being worked out by the 1890s. The hole that was left behind was backfilled with the city’s refuse in the 1930s-50s and later landscaped as a park.

OS 6 inch map, 1855, showing distance from Clovenstone housing scheme – which is centred on the old farm of Wester Hailes – to the Clovenstone standing stone itself. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of Scotland

Quite how the name of a distant, long-gone and probably forgotten standing stone came to be applied to a 1970s council housing scheme is anyone’s guess. It is never mentioned in any of the usual sources for Edinburgh local history; newspapers, antiquarian books, the Books of the Old Edinburgh Club, etc. One wonders if it was the diligent work of Charles Boog Watson, semi-official custodian of the city’s place name heritage from 1908-47, that had anything to do with the name still being remembered in some City Chambers filing cabinet when it came to naming the housing in the 1970s. Edinburgh Corporation Transport, as it was, launched the Number 30 bus to Clovenstone in January 1972, and for the last 51 years that bus (and the number 3) have shown this intriguing name on their westbound destination blinds.

The Clovenstone neighbourhood actually sits almost slap bang on top of the old Wester Hailes Farm, 287 acres of which were acquired by the Edinburgh Corporation way back in 1963 for the purposes of building a new housing scheme. This was controversial at the time as it was already designated as green belt land. But Edinburgh was desperate for new housing at the time (sound familiar?). The city was trying to cope with an energetic new wave of slum clearance in the wake of the collapse of the Penny Tenement, coupled with the life-expiry of thousands of the temporary post-war prefabs which had been rapidly built in a short period of time and so all needed replaced in short order. But it would take years of political wrangling within the council and with the Scottish Development Department to get the project going. The Wester Hailes scheme was controversial enough that Midlothian County Council opposed it – they did not want development on green belt land, they felt it was too close to the proposed outer ring road (what would become the City Bypass) and they worried it would swamp nearby villages like Juniper Green, which at that time were not within the jurisdiction of the City of Edinburgh. The residents of Juniper Green agitated against it, as did the Wester Hailes Smallholders – there were many smallholdings in the area as part of a post-WW1 scheme set up in the 1930s under the terms of the Agricultural Smallholdings (Scotland) Act, 1923.

Wester Hailes farm, possibly 1960 – source unknown.

The scheme got going in 1968 finally at Dumbryden but its scope had grown by this time. It was initially intended to be of 3,500 houses but was expanded after the Corporation lost a long and bitter local and national political fight – which culminated in a public enquiry – to build 4,000 houses at Alnwickhill. As a result, it had to get more out of the Wester Hailes scheme and increase the density to try and provide dwellings for 17,000 persons. As such it was one of the biggest schemes in all of Scotland.

Aerial photo from the Scotsman, December 29th 1969, showing progress at Wester Hailes. Drag the slider to overlay the neighbourhood boundaries on top.

It was said by its opponents, before it was even built, that nobody would want to live in Wester Hailes; the peripheral housing schemes built by the council in the 1920s, 30s and postwar had proved unpopular on account of their distance from the city centre and employment and on account of the lack of facilities provided in them. But the scheme’s problems did not end with its difficult gestation and it faced a swathe of planning and construction issues from the offset. Costs vastly increased due to inflation – by 31% in a few years. At the same time, the Scottish Development Department (the same department that specified the housing standards) refused to increase its yardsticks for calculating funding – the local authority found itself squeezed financially by having to meet a specification that the specifier would not pay for, and so cost-cutting was needed everywhere. Oversight, workmanship and construction quality suffered as a result.

Boys playing at Clovenstone in 1985, with the primary school behind them. Where are they now, I wonder? They would be pushing 50 years old by now. Photo by Kevin Walsh, © Edinburgh City Libraries

Other classic mistakes of peripheral council housing schemes were repeated. Neighbourhoods were carved up and cut off by dual carriageways in an area with low car ownership, with many of the few crossing points being unwelcoming underpasses. The shopping facilities were concentrated almost entirely in a central mall – this wasn’t completed until 1973, after most of the housing was built and a whole 5 years after houses started completing. A railway line ran through the middle of the scheme, which would provide quick transport to employment centres in Edinburgh, West Lothian and Glasgow, but no station was opened until 19 years after the first houses went up. Although primary schooling had been well provided for, high schooling had not. Wester Hailes Education Centre did not open until 1978, by which time neighbouring Forrester High was overcapacity, with almost twice as many students as it was designed to cope with and was bursting at the seams. To compound matters WHEC (as it is universally called) was built too small. As early as 1974, before the scheme was even complete, it was highlighted as “an area of potential deprivation” on account of the lack of public and commercial facilities and services and public transport

Wester Hailes Education Centre (Creative Commons, via digital Wester Hailes Sentinel)

To increase the housing density of the scheme, many multi-storey flats were planned at Westburn, Wester Hailes Drive and Hailesland. These were criticised as unlettable – something which proved to be partially true. The Ronan Point Disaster disaster of 1968 highlighted the structural flaws of the Large Panel System multi-storey flats and well and truly put the public off them. Many of the multi-storey flats planned for Wester Hailes were to be built on the Bison System and the Corporation had just completed new Skarne System flats nearby at Sighthill. Build quality in these flats was so poor that they were plagued with damp, walls ran with condensation and mould was endemic. An unskilled workforce, under pressure to deliver, was found to have simply cut off the fixing points of the poorly-fabricated wall modules when they couldn’t get them to fit; many were being held up simply by gravity and their own weight! Obsolete before they were even built, they were literally falling apart and fundamentally condemned within 10 years, when repairs were estimated at over £10 million. Nearly all were demolished within 20 years of construction.

Bison System multistorey flats at Hailesland, demolished in the 1990s

As a result of the failures of the multis, Clovenstone was respecified while under construction and was built entirely of mid and low rise stock, from 2 to 5 storeys. Reducing the density pushed up construction costs further and also the rents, but the housing was at least more attractive to tenants and so it slowly filled up.

Scotsman, 25th October 1972, reporting on the reduction in the height of the blocks at Clovenstone

But I don’t want to make this thread all too negative though – the faults and problems of the scheme in construction and design are not a reflection on its residents, who have found themselves fighting against the failure of the authorities since the get go. They have amply demonstrated a resilient ability for local organisation and self-improvement in the face of official indifference. Much of the estate has been rebuilt or renovated in the last 20 years, through no small part of local activism. It is testament to that, that when the multis started coming down at Westburn in 1993, they were replaced by low rise, lower density housing provided by the Wester Hailes Community Housing Association, a local organisation set up as an alternative to the Council as a housing provider, and which now controls nearly 900 homes in the area.

Demolition at Westburn in 1993, from the Wester Hailes Sentinel no. 228. Creative Commons.

It might seem like the unlikely setting for a movie, but Wester Hailes is the backdrop to the excellent 1985 coming-of-age adventure film “Restless Natives“, where Ronnie and Will break free from their monotonous lives on a housing scheme by becoming modern-day highwaymen. Many of the scenes are shot around the wider estate, including in Clovenstone. I recommend you watch it, if you haven’t already

A still from “Restless Natives”. Ronnie and Will on their motorbike distribute their proceeds to the needy, having robbed from the rich.They are riding through Clovenstone, towards the Primary School, with the flats on Clovenstone Park in the distance

You can read more about the other bits of the Wester Hailes housing schemes, where they got their names and just how bad much of the building quality was over at this thread.

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#1960s #1970s #Clovenstone #CouncilHousing #Dumbryden #Edinburgh #Houses #Housing #Multistorey #Murrayburn #Planning #politics #publicHousing #Sighthill #Suburbs #Toponymy #TownPlanning #Westburn #WesterHailes