The Stone Tenements of Dundee Corporation
The advent of the Housing, Town Planning, &c Act 1919 (also known as the ‘Addison Act’), initiated
the provision of public housing by local authorities in the UK. In Dundee, this was embraced with great
zeal by the celebrated City Engineer and Architect, James Thomson. His early housing schemes – Logie,
Stirling Park, Taybank and others – were based on the concept of the garden city, primarily utilising
‘four-in-a-block’ dwellings in formal street plan patterns.
Thomson retired in 1924 - his career reaching a controversial end amid administrative upheaval - and
he died three years later. By the end of the decade the housing policy of Dundee Corporation had
begun to take a new direction.
The provision of subsidised council housing was revived by the Housing (Financial Provisions) Act 1924,
popularly known as the ‘Wheatley Act’. The housing constructed by Dundee Corporation after this
date was to move away from the garden city concept and back towards the traditional Scottish form
of the tenement.
Hundreds of such tenement blocks, of
between two and four storeys, were to
become the mainstay of public housing in
Dundee in the inter-war years. In the
1930s
they
almost
exclusively
represented new housing provision by
Dundee Corporation.
Most of these buildings resembled their
contemporaries in other Scottish towns
and cities. Some featured the customary
rendered brick while others, for example
in Caird Avenue, had façades and gable
walls of concrete blocks.
However, one section of this housing
stock – the stone tenements – stands out
as having particular local value and
interest.
Thomson had utilised good-quality
sandstone for his ‘four-in-a-block’ houses
Kilberry Street with Cox’s Stack beyond.
at Taybank. The first stone tenements
built by Dundee Corporation – the pair of
three-storey blocks in Glenagnes Road, Logie – were put in hand just before Thomson’s departure and
completed in the summer of 1924. Featuring hipped roofs, projecting central bays and Baronial
touches around the close mouths, they were of solid and well-proportioned appearance. Similar
buildings soon followed in the Dudhope area, around Kilberry Street.
1
Evidently some of the city fathers liked what they saw. This is suggested by the following statement
made by the Housing Director, in a report to the Corporation Housing Committee in September 1925:
‘It is probably well known that many Members of the Town Council have expressed the opinion
from time to time that we should endeavour to have more stone tenements. With a view to
testing the market we obtained permission under Article III of the Minute of meeting of the
Housing Committee, dated 22nd July, 1925, to take in offers.’
This ‘market testing’ was evidently successful, leading to an extraordinary volume of work for local
stonemasons in what were some of the most economically difficult times ever experienced by the city
of Dundee. In total, over a 27 year period from 1924, no fewer than 238 stone tenement blocks were
to be built. Early examples were on ‘green field’ sites at Byron Street and Strathmore Avenue. The
statutory emphasis on slum clearance from 1930 then led to a number of examples as housing
improvement infill/renewal exercises, notably in the Hilltown area.
The decision to utilise locally quarried sandstone in the construction of so much of its housing was a
deliberate and remarkably thoughtful one by Dundee Corporation. The result was a building form
firmly anchored in the architectural traditions of the place. Most of the stone tenements used the
material for their front elevations and gable ends, with a rear construction of more prosaic rendered
brickwork; although some – notably the early buildings at Logie and Dudhope and some in Clepington
Road – used stone construction throughout.
Responsibility for the designs lay with the
office of the City Engineer and Architect.
From 1931, the new post of Depute City
Architect was held by James McLellan Brown,
who had started his civic service in 1914
under Thomson and whose influence ought
not to be underestimated.
These mellow sandstone tenements, firmly
modelled and well crafted, remain a credit to
McLellan Brown and other civic officials of
their time. The most impressive example
appeared in Queen Street, Broughty Ferry, in
Stone rear elevation in Clepington Road.
the mid-1930s. Here the great arena of
stone-faced tenements, known locally as the
Bull Ring, has since earned Category B listing. Most other examples, typically with four-bay façades
and sets of mullioned windows, are considerably more modest in appearance; but they are distinctly
Dundonian and form a somewhat overlooked element of the city’s texture and character.
The last example of stone tenement construction, its completion delayed by World War II, was the
range of five closes serving 30 houses at Hilltown Terrace. This had been conceived in 1939 as part of
a larger redevelopment scheme encompassing Dallfield Walk and the lower Hilltown. (This objective
was eventually seen through in the 1960s, including the multi-storey blocks, in a vastly different form
from that originally envisaged.)
2
Hilltown Terrace was finished in 1951, the year of James McLellan Brown’s retirement. It is hard not
to draw some connection between this talented man’s period of influence on civic life and the
construction of some of the last traditional stone tenements to be built in Scotland.
Of the 238 stone tenements built by Dundee
Corporation between 1924 and 1951, 232 survive
today. The only casualties were at Carnegie Street
– victim of a re-zoning exercise - and
Hawkhill/Small’s Wynd, where the buildings were
demolished to make way for expansion of the
university. Nearby, the two closes in Cross Row
have actually been incorporated into the
university premises. They make for a quirky and
appealing feature of the campus.
The last stone tenements – Hilltown Terrace (1951).
Admittedly, not all of the inter-war tenement housing
in Dundee was successful. The developments at
Beechwood and Mid Craigie became socially
stigmatised, difficult to let and eventually largely
demolished, but these were exceptions. In general,
inter-war tenement housing has proved more
successful in Dundee than elsewhere - notably
Glasgow, where the form became associated with
inner-city multiple deprivation in locations such as the
notorious ‘Wine Alley’.
The high standard of construction in Dundee probably
played a part in this relative success. Nowhere is this
quality more evident than in the stone tenements, which remain of handsome appearance after some
eighty to ninety years.
Cross Row, now part of Dundee University.
Unfortunately, this distinctive part of the Dundee cityscape now appears to be under threat.
A programme of work to fit external wall insulation to local authority housing is underway in 2015.
This is being undertaken by Dundee City Council in partnership with SSE. It appears that no distinction
is being made between elevations previously rendered (these admittedly need a facelift anyway);
those faced with concrete; and their carefully crafted sandstone counterparts. The ‘new look
treatment’ has already been given to stone tenements in Lochee and the Clepington Road area,
changing their appearance from something distinctively Dundonian to what could be inter-war blocks
in any Scottish town. In contrast to the durable sandstone which wears its patina well, the new finish
is liable to simply become shabby very quickly.
3
Arklay Terrace, showing stone tenement with new external insulation on right and an (as yet) untreated block on left.
The stone tenements were built by a city administration which, although it had no need to do so, took
particular care over the material used to construct part of its new housing stock. They tell their own
story about the twentieth century history of Dundee.
Dundee is about to lose another visual link with its past. The city council has confirmed its intention
to apply external insulation to virtually all of these fine stone tenements during the next five years.
The only exceptions are four sites – two of them Category B listed – which fall within Conservation
Areas at Lochee, West Port and Broughty Ferry. The Trust fully supports the council’s aim of reducing
fuel poverty and securing energy efficiencies; but there must be other ways to insulate these
properties without destroying a distinctive part of the city’s architectural heritage.
Paper to Board of Dundee Civic Trust
By Neale Elder
October 2015
(Revised April 2016)
4
APPENDIX – List of locations of Dundee Corporation stone tenements
Surviving as housing stock:
Site
2 Balgay Street; 2 and 4 St Ann Street, Lochee
48-56 (evens) High Street; 2 Marshall Street, Lochee
2 and 2a Glenagnes Road
3-13 (odds) and 14-24 (evens) Corso Street; 29 to 35 (odds) Blackness Avenue
1-7 (odds) Fyffe Street; 2-10 (evens) Mitchell Street; 1b Benvie Road; 68 and 70 Polepark
Road
30 Cleghorn Street; 22-26 (evens) Benvie Road
Tullideph Street; 7 Tullideph Road; 2-6 (evens) Tullideph Place
42-56 (evens) and 51-61 (odds) Byron Street
Fullarton Street; 7 and 9 and 6-12 (evens) Kilberry Street; 34-40 (evens) Gardner Street; 66
and 68 Gardner Street; 33 Loons Road
52-58 (evens) South Tay Street; 2-16a (evens) West Port (Category B listed)
1b Constitution Street; 61 Rosebank Street
7 Constitution Street; 1 and 3 Ogilvie’s Road
31-35 (odds) Kinghorne Road
28-32 (evens) Hill Street
19 Harcourt Street; 8 Paterson Street
283-299 (odds) Strathmore Avenue
1-11 (odds) and 2-8 (evens) Arklay Terrace
38-48 (evens) Clepington Road
212-238 (evens) Clepington Road; 3 and 4 Caird Terrace
167-173b (odds) Strathmartine Road
21-35 (odds) Hospital Street
Hilltown Terrace
59-69 (odds) Hilltown
201-219 (odds) Hilltown
15 and 17 Forebank Road; 10 and 12 Bonnybank Road
47 and 49 Ann Street
8 and 10 Cotton Road
2 and 4 Dens Road
4-16 (evens) and 9 Maitland Street
2-20 (evens) Fairbairn Street; 6 Arklay Street; 73 and 75 Dens Road
12 and 39 Clepington Street
33-39 (odds) Wolseley Street
27-31 (odds) Arbroath Road
Morgan Place
4 Claypotts Road; 2-8 (evens) and 13-21 (odds) Queen Street, Broughty Ferry (The ‘Bull
Ring’) (Category B listed)
191 and 193 King Street, Broughty Ferry
TOTALS
In other use:
1 and 3 Cross Row (now part of Dundee University)
Demolished:
26 to 52a (evens) Hawkhill and 2 Small’s Wynd
60 and 62 Carnegie Street
No of
dwellings
18
12
12
96
No of
closes
3
2
2
16
72
12
24
84
84
4
14
14
132
22
18
9
15
18
18
12
54
60
36
96
9
48
30
16
15
16
12
12
12
48
104
16
24
18
72
3
2
3
3
3
2
9
10
6
16
2
8
5
2
3
4
2
2
2
8
13
2
4
3
12
60
10
9
1391
2
230