Posh suburb where sex is something else entirely
WHA’S LIKE US? An irreverent, wry look at Scottish Icons This week:
MORNINGSIDE is Edinburgh’s equivalent of Glasgow’s Kelvinside, which I will analyse authoritatively in a later article. It’s probably a bit better known, rightly or wrongly, as emblematic in Scotland of pretentious snootiness and speaking in a “pan-loaf” accent.
The Sunday Times noted in 1999: “Edinburgh is the least Scots place. That Morningside accent sounds like a Swede trying to talk Surrey.”
And, in 2002, writer and broadcaster Simon Fanshawe told The Herald: “The difference between a Morningside accent and a Kelvinside accent is that Glasgow is a funny city where people are very demonstrative, and Edinburgh is a very undemonstrative city where there’s not much humour.”
The accent is usually summed up in the Morningside definition of sex: “bags used for carrying coal.”
As for being well-heeled and genteel, that’s true if not too outrageously obvious on the main traffic-heavy thoroughfare, Morningside Road, which is flanked by by tenements and not much different from Leith Walk or Easter Road.
There’s a Waitrose, of course – Lidl for the aspirational – and a Marks & Spencer Foodhall for the more discerning and educated.
The long street also boasts a plethora of coffee shops, charity shops, specialist food outlets (including a recently opened Dutch cafe-bakery) and pizza places.
The Canny Man’s pub, formerly the Volunteer Arms, was famous for having a nutty owner who barred nearly everybody, and certainly anyone he thought lower class or “not quite good enough”.
Set the bar
I WAS an occasional visitor before his time and remember it being a claustrophobic place, its walls festooned with bric-abrac and curiosities that might start to spin and create a surreal, hallucinatory experience for the zonked gentleman.
I think there’s still a brass plaque outside on the wall that warns: “No smoking; no credit cards; no mobile phones; no cameras; no backpackers.” No kidding. A lesserknown weird place, down an alley just off Morningside Road, consists of several Wild West facades originally created for a furniture store and designed with help from Euro Disney engineers.
The store has long since closed but the facades remain, like a cowboy ghost town.
Away from the main street, and into the southern Edinburgh suburb proper, the real wealth is probably concentrated on what is more accurately The Grange, where the biggest, most solid, villas are. Further up towards the Braid Hills and Fairmilehead, there are more modern (as in early to mid-20th century) villas, some of them gigantic.
In some parts of Morningside earlier this week, unfortunate residents found themselves targeted by eco-activists letting down the tyres on their swanky SUVs.
Plagued with debt
BIT of pre-eco history: the original village has its origins on part of the Burgh Muir, which King Davey 1 gifted as common ground to Edinburgh in the 12th century. In the 16th century, the toon cooncil feued part of the land to finance fighting the plague.
Part of the Burgh Muir was used as burial sites for victims. A pleasant little public garden at the top of Morningside Road is said to be one such.
The origin of the name “Morningside” is obscure. Some say it refers to the district’s pleasant south-facing or morning aspect, others that it was just an estate owner’s fancy.
At any rate, the name first appears in a map of 1759 when, in the words of 19th-century historian James Grant, the village consisted of just, “a row of thatched cottages, a line of trees and a blacksmith’s forge”. That village grew into a residential suburb in the 19th century, after developments in transport such as the South Suburban railway, long gone sadly, and a tram service to the city centre.
Morningside remains well supplied by buses. One of these, the number five, I believe, carries an image of Maisie MacKenzie, the Morningside kitten in the lovely children’s books by the late Aileen Paterson, whom I’d the pleasure of interviewing a couple of times. I should add, incidentally, that I’m not the only one with a peculiar, almost cosmic fondness for the 23, which runs from Morningside to Trinity.
Some local landmarks: the art moderne-style Dominion Cinema, operated by the same family since 1938 when it opened with Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie; the Old Schoolhouse, with its little clock tower, built in 1823 and now a gospel hall; the public library, once named the busiest in Britain and childhood haunt of Muriel Spark, author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; the Renaissance-style or neo-classical (I dinnae ken) Church Hill Theatre
The Canny Man’s pub, formerly the Volunteer Arms, was famous for having a nutty owner who barred nearly everybody, and certainly anyone he thought lower class or ‘not quite good enough’
designed originally as a church by Hippolyte Blanc; the octagonal Braid Church, now a Pizza Express; Robert Lorimer’s Italianate St Peter’s Church which, as you would expect, features a canted apse, slender campanile and lugged gables.
The church also has ashlar mullions, but I think you can get a cream for that nowadays.
Billed gates
ST Peter’s is on Falcon Avenue, one of a number of streets bearing that name, after Falcon Hall, once the grandest joint for miles around, built in 1780 and demolished in 1909. The gates survive at Edinburgh Zoo. Visitors are requested not to feed them.
Morningside also abounds in biblical names such as Canaan Lane, Egypt Mews, Eden Lane, Jordan Lane, Nile Grove, which are possibly connected to the former Little Egypt Farm, itself supposedly named after a camp established in the area after Romanies were expelled from the city in 1540. Romanies were thought to have come from Egypt.
Just room to squeeze in a few more features: the Bore Stone, a pillar said to have been the muster point for the Scottish army prior to the Battle of Flodden in 1513 (disputed by historians, natch); the Morningside Clock, created by the Saracen Foundry in Glasgow and sitting on a cast-iron pillar near the old railway station; and the Hanging Stanes.
These last, embedded in the the surface of Braid Road, mark the spot where the last public executions in Scotland for highway robbery took place. The name is controversial in Morningside. “Stanes” indeed. How common. Besides, nobody got hanged in Morningside. They got henged.