The High Street | lothianlives.org.uk

Penicuik Co-operative Association war memorial

Recently, there has been a lot of publicity about the theft and destruction of war memorials. Uncaring and unscrupulous people have been stealing memorials and selling them for scrap metal. This is a particularly insensitive crime which insults the brave men and women who gave their lives for our freedom and destroys irreplaceable aspects of our history.

Happily, it’s not all bad news and in Midlothian Local Studies we can report that a lost memorial will soon be returned to its spiritual home.

Some time after the end of the First World War, the Penicuik Co-operative Assocation unveiled a memorial plaque to a dozen of their workers who had lost their lives in the war. It seems that the plaque was originally sited in the Society buildings on Penicuik High Street.

Penicuik Co-operative Society building

Many years later the Co-operative closed and the building was converted into dwelling houses. During this time, the war memorial was removed and was almost sold for scrap when, by chance, it was rescued by a collector based in Leith. Via a friend-of-a-firend, the memorial has recently been passed to Midlothian Local Studies and will soon be re-sited in Penicuik with the help of the Penicuik History Society.

The memorial records tweve men from the Penicuik Co-operative Assocation who were lost in the war:

Peter Baxter
James H Cairns
George Downie
Robert F Frame
Thomas H Hamilton
David Jack
Henry Kerr
Robert Logie
William R McFeat
Andrew McNulty
William P Richardson
John Spiers

The memorial is made from solid bronze and is extremely heavy.

Midlothian Local Studies is pleased to rescue this important piece of local heritage and to prerserve it for future generations.

: Linlithgow High Street, 1890s

Linlithgow has always been a retail and service centre. Its situation on the main road from Edinburgh to Stirling and the North, and its association with the Royal Palace, will have provided a living for a wide range of traders ever since the Middle Ages. The early temporary stalls and booths must have quickly made way for more permanent structures – the first proper shops.

Shop fronts as we know them, with glass windows for the display of goods, appeared from the 18^th century; some had probably changed relatively little when the first photograph of Linlithgow High Street (copyright of St John’s Church, Bathgate) was taken, around 1890. The shops are small in scale, without elaborate frontages, and the names are simply painted on the stonework of the building. Visible shops include a clothier and a flesher (butcher), both typical establishments in a town like this.

Erskine’s bakers shop, also in Linlithgow and pictured in 1910, has a decorative painted wooden signboard and a small hanging sign as well; there is a carefully arranged display of sweetie jars in the window to tempt passing trade. We can see the progression towards the shop front designed as advertising, although this shop is still in the tradition of local independent retailing.

With William Low’s grocery establishment in Bathgate we are firmly in the realm of the chain store. Although modest by modern supermarket standards, we have a store proclaiming its corporate identity, in the severe Moderne style of the late 1930s. The glass and metal front suggests hygiene and efficiency, and contrasts with the Victorian stonework above. The change from a vernacular high street, with shops blending in with domestic structures, to modern shop fronts designed as bold statements, is almost complete.

Today, Linlithgow High Street is surprisingly unchanged, thanks to its status as an historic town. In many other high streets the newer shop fronts are less sympathetic to their surroundings. However, there has been a shift to leisure and luxury retailing. Smaller shops selling everyday necessities have been largely replaced by supermarkets and retail parks.

High street photographs like these have informed the current BBC series “Turn Back Time- the High Street” http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00v7p71 . Do you have any old high street photographs? Why don’t you upload your pictures and your high steet memories to the BBC’s Turn Back Time Flickr site? http://www.flickr.com/groups/bbcturnbacktime/

To view the images featured in this blog, click on the links below: