The Exactitude of Craft

I love tenements so much I even live in one. They have a grandeur and style lacking in more modern structures.

Take the ones in Marchmont to the south of the Old Town of Edinburgh (where Rebus lives). Street upon street, terrace upon terrace, row upon row of four-storey Victorian pink and Edwardian blonde sandstone tenements. These were built deliberately for the better off of Auld Reekie, and very possessive of them they are too (they recently attempted to lessen the numbers of 'itinerant' residents ie students so annoyed are they by their cheeky, temporary presence).

Hippolyte Blanc designed some of them. I only mention this because I like to see his name in print.

Soot-stained and blackish-grey, the tenements of pre-70s Gorbals in central Glasgow housed poor immigrants from Ireland and a community of Jews, many escaping pogroms in Russia, Lithuania or Latvia. These tenements were vastly over-populated though the decision to pull them down in the 1960s and 70s to be replaced by vast, dark tombstone monoliths was not a universally popular one. That both character and community were lost is undeniable; a population cut from 90,000 to just 10,000, many cast to the outer darkness of new-built estates like Easterhouse and Drumchapel.

Battlefield and Langside are still little ‘tenement towns’: the large rooms and high ceilings are popular and the prices tempting for first-time buyers and young families. Again, these areas housed a strong Jewish community who have subsequently moved out to places like Giffnock and Newton Mearns. Row upon row of red and blonde three-storeyed sandstone constructions; like platoons of stone soldiers on parade, standing straight to attention in faultless symmetry; clean and glistening in the ubiquitous rain. These buildings were made for wind and wet, fair weather and foul.

Tenements are not exclusively a Scottish phenomenon. They’re known as ‘walk-ups’ in New York – the lower-east side of Manhattan to be more specific. (think of the cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Physical Graffiti’ album). There’s even a Lower East Side Tenement Museum which tries to replicate living conditions of the late C19th.

Berlin has mietskaserene, Buenos Aires conventillos.

In Mumbai they’re called chawls.

The exactitude of craft is exemplified in the lines and angles of tenements. Exact and true, there is beauty and function in the design. They’re all around us but we rarely notice them in their ageing Victorian and Edwardian splendour.

They’re pretty dandy….when you think about it!