Twenty-one photographs accompany this guide to the forms of Scottish public and social housing and their predecessors. The examples range from an eighteenth-century mill village and nineteenth-century co-operative schemes to municipal suburbs, high-rise blocks, new towns and recent mixed-tenure neighbourhoods.
Read the chronological account in Public and Social Housing in Scotland: Homes, Plans and Changing Lives. Photographs can be selected for a larger view. Image dates identify the stage of a development shown.
Before municipal housebuilding · The interwar municipal suburb · Post-war building systems and the long block · Comprehensive redevelopment and new towns · Recent housing and the reuse of established types
Plan, section and tenure
A plan describes the arrangement on one floor; a section shows how rooms and dwellings relate vertically. A tenement, cottage flat or terrace is a building type. Its occupants may rent from a council, a housing association or a private landlord, or own their home. The descriptions below distinguish original provision from later changes.
| Type | Arrangement | Shared elements |
|---|---|---|
| Tenement | Several flats within a multi-storey building. | Usually a stair, roof, external walls and backcourt. |
| Colony house | Lower and upper homes entered from opposite sides. | Party structure; external stairs and small gardens shape the lanes. |
| Cottage flat | Separate homes on different floors of a low-rise building. | Roof and structure; access arrangements vary. |
| Maisonette | One home extends over two or more levels. | In a block, decks, stairs and lifts may serve entrances. |
| Slab block | A long building with repeated homes along its plan. | Access decks or corridors, vertical cores and services. |
| Point block | A compact tall building around a core. | Lifts, stairs, services and surrounding open ground. |
| Perimeter block | Buildings line streets around an internal space. | Stairs and a communal garden or court, depending on the scheme. |
Before municipal housebuilding
1. The mill village: New Buildings, New Lanark
Type: multi-storey workers’ tenements within an employer’s planned settlement. Period: late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Provision: mill ownership; later conservation and housing-association use.
New Buildings presents a long, formally ordered façade, with a central pediment and bellcote giving the housing a collective architectural identity. Windows repeat across the sandstone wall, while changes in ground level affect the apparent height. The original tenements were two rooms deep.
The relationship between homes, work, education and management shaped the village. David Dale’s development and Robert Owen’s later programme preceded municipal housing. HES documents restoration of New Buildings from 1978 into the early 1980s for housing-association tenancies and visitor-centre uses, linking the industrial settlement to a later conservation programme.
Source: HES, New Buildings, LB37045. Related record: Caithness Row and the Counting House.
2. The model-housing quadrangle: Rosemount Buildings
Type: courtyard flats with open gallery access. Period: circa 1860. Provision: purpose-built improved working-class housing before the municipal programme.
The street frontage and inner court reveal different parts of the design. Brick bands, pilasters and taller corner elements give the exterior a regular public face. Inside, open galleries connect upper dwellings, making doors, movement and the shared ground part of the courtyard’s daily use.
Common access and drying space allowed many homes to occupy a compact plot. Their maintenance required shared arrangements. The design offered an alternative to Edinburgh’s usual stone tenements while retaining a dense urban form. HES gives 1860; Edinburgh Libraries gives 1857, a discrepancy explained in the full record.
Read the Rosemount Buildings record and sources.
3. Co-operative colony houses: Stockbridge
Type: one dwelling above another, with separate entrances on opposite sides of the row. Period: from 1861. Provision: Edinburgh Co-operative Building Company; homes offered for purchase or rent.
An upper dwelling is reached by an external stair, usually from the opposite side to the lower dwelling’s entrance. The roof can contain part of the upper home. This section gives each household a front door while avoiding a common internal tenement stair.
Narrow lanes, garden plots and repeated stairs create a close-grained layout. The river view shows how the ensemble also forms a continuous settlement edge. The co-operative company’s investment and building arrangements belong to a different history from a later collectively managed rental co-operative.
Read the Stockbridge Colonies record and sources.
4. Philanthropic courtyard housing: Well Court
Type: workers’ flats around a court, with a communal hall and factor’s house. Architect: Sydney Mitchell. Patron: John R. Findlay.
The clock tower gives this dense group a prominent shared focus. Gables, projecting windows and changing roof heights vary the repeated accommodation. The court provides enclosure, while the river frontage relates the housing to Dean Village.
Findlay’s scheme combined improved accommodation and shared facilities with conditions governing tenants’ conduct. The factor’s house and common hall belonged to that social organisation. The architecture expresses both provision for collective life and the paternalism found in some Victorian housing projects.
Read the Well Court record and sources.
5. Homes and collegiate life: Ramsay Garden
Type: related residential buildings with student accommodation, studios and communal rooms. Period: principal development 1892–94. Initiator: Patrick Geddes.
Harled walls, projecting bays, towers and steep roofs accommodate a dense, sloping site. The composition combines older buildings and new work by Capper and Mitchell & Wilson. Individual homes and communal rooms were arranged through several related designs.
Ramsay Garden extends the range of housing experiments considered here. Its student and professional households, private finance and educational purpose differ from the later council programme. Geddes’s larger work connected housing renewal with gardens, learning and close study of the existing city.
Read the Ramsay Garden record and sources.
The interwar municipal suburb
6. The garden-city street and shared services: Logie
Type: low-rise municipal housing around a boulevard and curving streets. Period: 1919–20. Client: Dundee municipality.
The photograph shows how brick detailing, roof forms, doors and planted boundaries give repeated housing a consistent scale. The wider plan uses Logie Avenue as a central planted route, with streets sweeping across it.
Logie’s original communal heating and hot-water system linked housebuilding with investment in shared infrastructure. The council’s descriptions of three- and four-apartment homes count principal rooms, rather than bedrooms. The plan, services and terminology help explain what improved domestic provision meant in 1920.
Read the Logie record and sources.
7. Garden suburb and cottage flats: Mosspark
Type: terraced, semi-detached and flatted cottages. Period: 1920s. Client: Glasgow Corporation.
A cottage flat places separate homes on different floors within a low-rise building. Groups of these, together with whole houses, could provide a suburban scale while accommodating different household arrangements. Mosspark’s streets follow the hillside and make trees and gardens prominent.
The photograph emphasises the neighbourhood’s street and landscape structure. High construction standards and generous planning brought relatively high rents; early allocation consequently favoured households with steady incomes. The relationship between design standards, public subsidy and affordability shaped who gained access to the new homes.
Read the Mosspark record and sources.
8. Repetition across a large planned neighbourhood: Knightswood
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Type: two-storey houses and cottage flats within a large municipal suburb. Period: from 1923. Client: Glasgow Corporation.
The houses share a low roofline and repeated scale, with changes in doors, finishes and gardens showing later individual occupation. Streets and open ground are as important to the estate’s form as the details of a single house.
Knightswood’s original programme included shopping centres, schools, churches and recreation. Municipal delivery involved both the dwelling and the neighbourhood. Riddrie, another early Glasgow scheme, combined cottage housing with three-storey tenements, showing that interwar public building used several densities and forms.
Read the Knightswood record · Compare Riddrie’s mixture of cottages and tenements.
9. Granite courtyard housing: Rosemount Square, Aberdeen
Type: four-storey municipal flats enclosing a semi-oval court. Design: Leo Durnin under City Architect A. B. Gardiner, 1938. Completion: 1947–48 according to HES.
The photograph shows the long granite frontage turning a corner, with tall stair windows interrupting the horizontal rhythm of the flats. Arched passages connect the surrounding streets to the court. Entrances to the homes and concrete balconies face the inner space.
The ensemble combines Aberdeen’s established stone with a large municipal housing programme. Its composition links pre-war design to post-war completion and provides a lower, enclosed comparison with the freestanding slabs that followed. Read the corrected Rosemount Square record and sources.
Post-war building systems and the long block
10. The prefabricated bungalow and its plot: Moredun
Type: single-storey homes on individual plots. Context: rapid post-war housing provision and subsequent alteration.
The shallow building profile, separate entrances and fenced plots contrast with the dense tenement and slab block. A bungalow gives rooms direct access at one level, while using a comparatively large area of land per dwelling.
The photographer identifies these plots with Edinburgh’s post-war prefab programme but notes uncertainty over refurbishment versus replacement of the buildings shown. The image demonstrates the surviving low-rise plot pattern; it cannot establish the original construction system of each house. System-built houses varied greatly in materials and design life.
Image evidence: Richard Webb’s original description.
11. The curved early high-rise slab: Westfield Court
Type: curved slab with grouped stair and lift access. Architects: Williamson & Hubbard. Completed: 1952. Original client: Edinburgh Burgh Council.
The long concave elevation makes Westfield Court’s boomerang-like plan visible. Repeated balconies and windows emphasise the curve, while vertical cores organise the 88 flats into smaller access groups.
This was an early stage in Edinburgh’s move towards taller municipal housing. The concrete structure, panels, shared services and exposed elements also form part of its maintenance history. The full record distinguishes the design from the council’s current condition reports and acquisition and redevelopment proposals.
Read the Westfield Court record, including the reported 2026 listing decision.
12. Deck access and a bending plan: Cables Wynd House
Type: deck-access housing in a long curved slab. Architects: Alison & Hutchison & Partners. Period: 1963–65. Original provision: municipal housing.
Communal decks connect entrances along the block; vertical cores provide stairs and lifts. The design separates routes to front doors from private rooms and outdoor recesses. The photograph shows the strength of repetition at the scale of windows, concrete bands and balconies.
The curve gives the large building a degree of enclosure around open ground. Such designs invested heavily in collective elements: decks, cores, lifts and landscape. Their upkeep and management have direct consequences for the homes they serve.
Read the Cables Wynd House record and sources.
13. The straight slab as an urban edge: Linksview House
Type: straight deck-access slab. Architects: Alison & Hutchison & Partners. Period: 1964–67. Original provision: municipal housing.
Linksview’s straight form provides a comparison with the curve of Cables Wynd. The vertical access element interrupts the repeated horizontal pattern. The block helps define the edge of Leith’s redevelopment precinct.
Both buildings bring a large number of homes into a relatively small footprint. At this scale, the arrangement of entrances, shared circulation, open ground and neighbouring shops determines how the building works as part of the town. Their Category A designations also bring post-war public housing into the history of building conservation.
Read the Linksview House record and sources.
Comprehensive redevelopment and new towns
14. Family maisonettes at great height: Hutchesontown C
Type: high-rise maisonettes. Architect: Basil Spence. Original client: Glasgow Corporation. Period: post-war Gorbals redevelopment.
The deep double-height recesses make a larger rhythm within the repeated windows. Maisonettes arranged accommodation on more than one level, while the tall blocks concentrated 400 dwellings into a pair of buildings. The photographs show how balcony depth, structure and access contributed to the domestic design.
Hutchesontown comprised Areas A–E, with several architects and different housing types. Spence’s Area C was one part of that programme. Subsequent demolition and rebuilding must be related to the correct site: Crown Street’s principal regeneration occupied former Area E.
Read the Hutchesontown record and the distinctions between Areas A–E · Crown Street regeneration.
15. Point blocks and industrialised height: Red Road
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Type: very tall point and slab blocks. Context: Glasgow’s large post-war municipal building programme.
The elevated view reveals the relationship between the buildings, roads and spaces below. Compact point blocks group homes around a vertical core; a slab extends accommodation along a longer plan. Both depend on lifts and extensive shared services.
The scale and repetition made industrialised construction prominent in the city skyline. An architectural account also needs evidence about homes, maintenance, allocation and residents’ experiences. The archive view preserves the arrangement before demolition and enables comparison with the lower forms used elsewhere.
Sources: University of Edinburgh Tower Block UK archive photograph; University of Glasgow housing and wellbeing research.
16. Low- and medium-rise new-town housing: Carbrain
Type: linked low- and medium-rise housing groups. Context: Cumbernauld’s publicly planned new-town development.
The photograph shows how different heights, flat roofs, short building groups and curving ground routes fit together. The lower building presents doors and windows at a domestic scale, with taller accommodation nearby.
New-town housing included much more than towers. Development corporations planned homes alongside roads, employment, schools and landscape. Layouts could separate through traffic from local access and pedestrian movement. The present view includes later finishes and alterations; the original commissioning history and current tenure of an individual home require separate evidence.
Image: David Bremner’s Carbrain photograph. Background: Public Bodies and Architecture in Scotland.
17. The distributor road and the wider estate: Wester Hailes
Type: large-estate infrastructure and housing setting. Context: Edinburgh’s later twentieth-century expansion and subsequent change.
This photograph shows the space allocated to the road, pavements, verges and planting, with homes set back from the carriageway. A housing estate’s design includes these distances and connections as well as the plan of a flat.
Comparing this view with the narrow colony lanes or the dense court at Rosemount makes differences in land use and movement visible. Mature trees and later alterations also change how an estate looks and functions over time. A dated streetscape is evidence for one stage of that development.
Image: Barbara Carr, Geograph 3569209.
Recent housing and the reuse of established types
18. A mixed-tenure neighbourhood after a major event: Dalmarnock
Type: low-rise housing within the former athletes’ village. Period: Commonwealth Games development and post-2014 conversion. Provision: mixed tenure across the village.
The panorama shows short building groups, varied rooflines and the relationship between the street, boundary walls and houses. A low-rise framework can accommodate repeated dwellings without presenting a single continuous façade.
The Games village was adapted for permanent occupation after the event. Glasgow’s subsequent monitoring reported 400 social-rented homes and 300 private homes across the village. That development-wide mix does not identify the tenure of each house in the photograph. Public investment, housing providers and private sale shared one planned neighbourhood.
Source: Glasgow City Council, strategic-plan implementation monitoring.
19. Perimeter blocks and the return to streets: Crown Street
Type: street-based perimeter blocks with communal inner gardens. Period: 1990s regeneration. Framework: CZWG masterplan and several architects.
Crown Street reorganised former Hutchesontown E land into connected streets, mainly tenement-like blocks and defined gardens. Public street elevations and more sheltered internal spaces have different roles and management responsibilities.
Social-rented and private housing share the framework. Community participation and the assembly of land were part of its delivery. The approach can be compared with the freestanding tall blocks in the archive photographs above.
Detailed Crown Street record and source illustrations.
20. A contemporary colony section: Leith Fort
Type: ground-floor flat with a two-storey duplex above. Completed: 2017–18. Architectural teams: Malcolm Fraser Architects for initial planning, Collective Architecture for completion.
The scheme returns to the independent doors and external access of Edinburgh’s colonies. Ninety-four homes occupy a site within the old fort walls, with a central communal green. Separate gardens and stairs distinguish households within a relatively dense low-rise plan.
The original development combined 32 council homes for social rent and 62 mid-market-rent homes through the housing association’s subsidiary. Its historic walls have a separate designation history from the new houses.
Detailed Leith Fort record and source illustrations.
21. Fabric, energy and different household sizes: Dunbeg and retrofit
Types: terraces, cottage flats and flats in new developments; upgraded existing tenements in retrofit programmes.
Dunbeg Phase 3 provides a rural and small-settlement comparison with the city examples. Elder + Cannon’s 300-home scheme combines several house types with enhanced insulation and air-source heat pumps. Its tenure mix includes social rent, shared equity and mid-market rent.
Retrofitting an existing tenement poses a different design problem: improving warmth, ventilation and services within inherited rooms, walls and shared ownership. At Niddrie Road in Glasgow, the published evaluation considers technical performance alongside residents’ experiences. These examples extend housing design into the operation and continued use of homes.
Dunbeg Phase 3 record · Niddrie Road retrofit case study.
Photographs and further study
Each photograph carries its creator, source and reuse licence. The photographs retain their supplied composition; web renditions may be resized. The final three sections link to full records and project illustrations. These are occupied residential places: views from public routes allow comparison while respecting homes, gardens and communal entrances.
Further reading: Housing history · Builders and architects · Building conservation · National heritage records and public access.