Western Approach Road from Ardmillan

Image: © kim traynor Taken: 3 Apr 2009

A clever part-solution to Edinburgh's relentless traffic congestion in the 1970s was to lay this road along the line of the old Caledonian Railway tracks that terminated at Princes Street Station. Critics argue that this, together with the similar development of turning old railway lines into cycle tracks, has effectively ruled out any realistic prospect of reviving the old suburban circle that functioned up until the 1960s. Like the railway before it, this road is an annoying barrier to direct movement between the South Side of the city and Gorgie and Dalry in the West. "Our period [1860s] was a significant one ... because these mid-Victorian years saw the near-completion of the surface railway systems of the inner urban areas, and thus fixed upon the British city the social geography that has so largely survived into our own day. My own Edinburgh is a notable case in point. Whatever chances it had after the [eighteen] thirties of pursuing the tidy and rational principles of development that had governed it hitherto, were substantially spoiled by the arrival, before the recommencement of large-scale building in the sixties, of a mess of railways and yards, breaking up several logical lines of residential and road development and casting a lasting blight over several large areas which, 'outer-suburban' though they were then, lie now within the inner suburban ring. Edinburgh suffers from this still. -- Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 1971 In other words, the railways screwed up Fountainbridge, Haymarket, Slateford, Abbeyhill, Easter Road and Bonnington, as anyone living in those areas well knows.

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