Modernity in Context: The Postwar Revitalisation of Scotland's Historic Small Burghs

Abstract

This brief paper will examine a prominent strand of Scottish modern-vernacular housing design that emerged as a direct result of postwar planned slum-clearance in small historic burghs and towns in the 1950s and 1960s. Rooted in the Patrick Geddes conservative surgery concept, these place-sensitive schemes usually involved retention and conversion of selected historic properties (and in some instances facsimile reconstruction), demolition of nineteenth-century stock, and new housing within that context. Although influenced by the pioneering interwar preservation campaigns to rescue Scotland's historic ‘little houses’ and burgh communities from decay and destruction – such as the National Trust's Little Houses scheme – a new generation of architects saw the postwar need for new planned communities to meet urgent housing needs, as a design opportunity to harmonise old and new within an overall planned ensemble. The architectural and planning context of the late 1940s and 1950s, provided a framework for an uneasy tension between traditionalist architectural solutions, conservation, and the Modern Movement, and enabled the development of notable regional architectural approaches to new social housing in historic burghs. Under the pressure to increase housing production in 1960s and 70s, and with the impact of a growing heritage bureaucracy, it became more difficult to achieve such an architectural compromise between old and new.