This talk offers a different account of urban reform in Edwardian Edinburgh and explores the many women – doctors, mothers, nurses, kindergartners, philanthropists – who worked together to change the living conditions of the communities in the city’s Old Town.
This talk offers an insight to the project entitled The Heroines of the Canongate. This aims to produce an inclusive, innovative and inter-disciplinary history that sees the significant role played by women of all classes in reforming urban environments and their formative contributions to debates about the form – social and spatial – of modern Scotland. It focuses on the voluntary social activism of a diverse group of Edinburgh-based women and foregrounds hitherto not-seen protagonists, rather than discussing state-led slum-clearance programmes, or the reform work of the urbanist Patrick Geddes, as most existing scholarship has done. It shows how New-Town-based elite and middle-class professional women worked collectively alongside working-class women. Together they developed a distinctive approach to the re-use of existing buildings and spaces, and created new medical, educational, welfare and domestic environments which would enable the Old Town’s population, young and old, to lead fuller lives and participate fully in Scottish society.
Dr Elizabeth Darling is Reader in Architectural History at Oxford Brookes University. Her research focuses on gender and reform, inter-war English architectural modernism, social housing and very often the intersections among them all. Her publications include Women and the Making of Built Space in England 1870-1950 (Ashgate, 2007) and Suffragette City: Gender, Politics and the Built Environment (Routledge 2019). This spring she has been Senior Anniversary Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
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