Hello Everyone.
My name is Elly, and today I’m outside the Banana Flats in Leith, Edinburgh.
My job at Historic Environment Scotland
is deciding which parts of Scotland’s heritage become listed buildings.
We're receiving more and more applications from the people of Scotland
asking us to consider buildings
from the second half of the twentieth century for listing.
However, these proposals often divide opinion...
and some people are even surprised that we consider listing these types of buildings.
So, today I’d like to talk about why we listed the Banana Flats.
The Banana Flats, so-called because of its curved shape
(its official name is Cables Wynd House)
became a listed building in 2017.
It’s also well-known as the home of the fictional character
Simon ‘Sick Boy’ Williamson
in Irvine Welsh’s seminal 1993 novel, Trainspotting.
To find out why these buildings are being listed
I think we need to step back in time to when they were being thought about.
These flats were built between 1963 and 1965.
So when families were moving in here in 1965
we’ve got Tom Jones in the charts singing It’s Not Unusual
and the new Bond film Thunderball starring Sean Connery is in the cinema.
It was a time of relative prosperity and low unemployment.
A time of egalitarianism and social mobility.
There is optimism about the future.
Car ownership increases fivefold between 1950 and 1970
and while we might be much more conscious of our carbon footprint today
owning a car and taking a holiday abroad were aspirations at this time.
Our national health service had now been up and running for nearly two decades
and there is a drive to really improve people’s lives.
The rise of computers is just beginning
and putting a man on the moon is soon going to be a reality.
But it’s very easy to romanticise history
and to only see this time with rose-tinted glasses.
Life wasn’t great for everyone
and in Scotland there were still many people living in very poor conditions.
Tenements are a big part of our social history and a much-loved type of housing today...
... however, some tenements in this period had deteriorated into slums.
Nick Hedges was a photographer working for Shelter in the late 60s and early 70s
and I find this description he wrote about a flat in Edinburgh
as late as 1972 very moving.
He says,
“Mr and Mrs G lived with their four children
in a ground floor tenement flat.
Their bedroom floor was covered in pools of rainwater.
At night they slept with the light on to keep the rats away.
One night they counted 16 rats in the room.”
Things that we might think belonged only to the Victorian era still existed.
In Glasgow, the last gas street lamp
was only extinguished in 1971
and even after this, gas lighting continued in tenement stairwells and closes.
Running water, hot water, electricity...
... central heating, your own bathroom, a flushing loo -
all these were out of reach for the very poorest in society.
So what was the solution to the problem of slum housing?
Different parts of the country had different solutions.
For some areas the focus was on creating New Towns, like East Kilbride or Irvine.
In Leith they chose to rehouse people within the communities they lived
through building mass housing like this
with up to date facilities
using new materials, like concrete, and new building methods.
The Banana Flats was the largest block of flats in Edinburgh when it was built.
So what did you get when you moved into a flat here in 1965?
Well, the building has 212 flats
and all but a handful of these have a balcony to provide light and fresh air.
The deck access system where the flats are entered off long open corridors
was intended to replicate the feeling of tenement streets.
There are lifts to reach the upper floors -
no more struggling with a pram to get to the top floor of a tenement!
There's a refuse chute system to take care of rubbish
electricity, kitchens and bathrooms, hot and cold running water.
This is a world away from slum living.
Another innovation here was parking.
above and below ground parking was part of the vision
it was expected that the people living here would be or become car owners.
The curved shape of the Banana Flats
responded to what was here before
the street - Cables Wynd - is curved.
These flats were deliberately designed not to obliterate that, but to echo it.
Of course, not all mass housing built at this time was a success.
Quite rightly, many schemes have been demolished.
The reasons for this were varied, from failings in the structures...
... to a lack of maintenance...
... or social issues - or a combination of these.
But we are not listing those buildings.
We're listing the best examples of their type
And the Banana Flats continue to provide homes for families today.
There’s a common misconception about listing.
People often think it means that a building can’t change
and it has to stay exactly as it is forever.
This just isn’t true.
Listing was created so that change to buildings
which are of ‘special architectural or historic interest’
(which is the legal definition of a listed building)
can be managed sensitively in our planning system.
Every year permission is given for thousands of listed buildings
to be changed to meet new needs.
In some rare cases, even demolition can be an option.
What listing does is allow for a dialogue about what is interesting or special about a building
to be considered when plans for change are being developed.
Some of you may always find buildings like this one to be ‘eyesores’
or ‘concrete monstrosities’ - and I’m not asking you to like them.
You don’t have to like them for them to be an important part of our history.
While many of us who are my age look at buildings like the Banana Flats
and think of them as ‘modern architecture’
it's very different when I talk to young people.
Young people don’t think of these buildings as being modern
to them they are already a part of our history.
Interest in these types of buildings is growing
and we’re being asked more and more to assess them for listing.
They tell us about our aspirations
and how we lived, studied, worked and spent our leisure time
in the second half of the 20th century.
In 2017 we asked people what types of buildings would you like to see listed
and they told us they’d like to see listed buildings which represent everyone’s lives -
not just the lives of the wealthy and the elite.
And we’re responding to that.
Are you ready to look differently at Scotland’s modern heritage?