[c.1980 Maoist benefit concert]
>> This was an earth-floored room deep underneath the South Bridge. Before
>> we broke through to it, it hadn't been used since WW2, when it was a bomb
>> shelter, and before that as a bottle-and-glass store for a distillery in
>> the 1930s; we dumped a couple of skipfuls of glass when clearing it. The
>> most conspiratorial venue imaginable.
> That's interesting. What did you do for electricity and light, and how
> did you manage to escape detection by the bridge authorities?
Authorities? What they?...
The South Bridge is what's termed in architect-speak a "megastructure" -
it's got 22 arches with only the lowest one having a road going through
it, the rest are filled up with buildings. Since the bridge is quite
wide, and the walls get thicker as you go down, the bottom level is a
line of poky shops fronting the alleys on each side with lightless
basements behind and a tunnel up the centreline of the road. We had one
of the poky shops, and the basement we found was directly behind, so all
we needed to do was run an extension cable.
That was a bizarre episode. We found two of the abandoned rooms; at about
the same time another bloke was appropriating chambers from the lowest
arch upwards, to make into his pub (Bannerman's), doing almost all the
work himself with a shovel and wheelbarrow. And a shop a couple of doors
above us got wind of what was happening and started excavating cellars
down towards us. It was a bit like WW1 trench warfare. We were only
renting the shop, but as the cellars had been abandoned, under Scots law
we could have claimed title to them. Or I could have done it myself and
become the proud owner of 2000 square feet of 200-years-old-and-hardly-
seen-a-candle mouldy nitre-dripping stonework like the setting for Poe's
"Cask of Amontillado".
They do tours up the middle of it now, as "The Underground City". The
only place I've been that was at all like it is the black cells in the
basement of Spilberk in Brno, the ultimate horror for political prisoners
in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From Kropotkin's description, I imagine
the ravelins of the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg must have
been much the same. In my personal psychic geography of Edinburgh, that
place is the absolute centre, down in the bowels of the old city with
the Enlightenment and the LRT buses sixty feet above. James Connolly
was born round the corner a few yards away.
The original North Bridge had similar hidden arches. The city fathers
at first wanted to turn them into a bridewell (prison for beggars and
debtors). Fortunately it fell down.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jack Campin * 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
tel 0131 660 4760 * fax 0870 055 4975 * http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/
food intolerance data & recipes, freeware Mac logic fonts, and Scottish music
Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To
subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
