Column: Going home to Wester Hailes to find a grassy scrubland

I went home for lockdown – back to my roots in Edinburgh.

For three months, I walked miles around its empty, silent streets and discovered so much of it for the very first time.

And then, I went home to Wester Hailes.

It’s the part of Edinburgh everyone has heard of by reputation, but few have actually ever visited.

It doesn’t sit on the tourist trail of bagpipes and castles. It’s not the ‘nice’ middle class image Auld Reekie likes to project as it guides visitors to the same statues and landmarks, and delivers the same stories to folk who then leave with identical experiences.

We moved into Wester Hailes when I was at primary school. We were allocated a flat seven floors up in Cobbinshaw House in the Calders, one of three multi-storey blocks which still dominate the skyline.

From the kitchen we watched shifts clocking in and out of Burtons’ biscuit factory. From the living room we looked across the entire estate, and on to the majestic Arthur’s Seat.

The fabric hasn’t changed, but it has become much greener. The places we hung out were made of concrete slabs. Today they are scrubland – overgrown grassy carpets, and trees everywhere.

The building had two lifts, one with a space for luggage. Locals said it was to slide coffins in after folk died, otherwise they had to be carted out at a 45-degree angle until they reached the ground floor. I still want that story to be true.

Today, the giant concrete stilts at either end have been bricked in, and the walls we stotted a ball off after doing our homework have gone. Our fun usually ended when someone fed up of the noise reverberating around the buildings, threw open a window, and told us to shut it because they were on nightshift.

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One of my earliest memories of living so high up was going to the cinema to see Towering Inferno. There’s a scene when the fire chief explains his ladders can only go up to the seventh floor. I headed home strangely re-assured…

Walking round the front of the multi-storey brought back memories of the bin chute which ran the height of the building. You tipped your rubbish in seven floors up and, if it stuck – which it often did – you got your broom, turned it upside down and rammed it in until something gave and everything plummeted into a giant, rancid metal box at the bottom.

The multi-storeys have all been given facelifts - the new cladding adds colour to a landscape of peeling plasterwork and tired streets, but the shops remain as grim as ever.

The side of the chippie used to have a message declaring “John Lenin lives” – scrawled by a confused Communist fan of the Fab Four, I always imagined. It has gone, and a huge chunk of the row is concreted shut.

The main shopping centre is now a plaza; a nonsensical re-branding by people who don’t live there.

But the scheme is home to some 10,000 people, and everything it has today is because they scrapped and scraped for it. It’s 50 years since we moved into the Calders.

Going back for the first time sparked nothing but many memories of good times with good friends …

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