Fountainbridge

Fountain Park Centre

Prior to the mid-18th century (when a sweet-water well, or "fountain" was erected near Grove Street), the area was called Foulbridge: a name relating to a bridge crossing the Foul Burn, a rivulet connecting the Burgh Loch on the Meadows to the Water of Leith but largely operating as a sewer. The name Foulbridge appears in several older documents from at least 1512. From around 1760 the bridge was rechristened Fountainbridge. The bridge disappeared when the stream was culverted (as a sewer) around 1820 but by then the name had attached to the wider area.[1]

The name "Fountainbridge" appears on John Laurie's A plan of the County of Mid-Lothian of 1763.[2] According to the Edinburgh Evening Courant newspaper in 1774 the name derived from the Foullbridge Well of "singularly sweet water". The Foul Burn is still marked as a "common sewer" on maps until at least 1784.[3]

Fountainbridge was extended as West Fountainbridge in 1869, renamed Dundee Street in 1885.[4]

From the early 19th century until the late 20th century Fountainbridge was home to two of the city's major industries and a mixture of working-class tenement housing, which in part degenerated into some of the worst of the city's slums between the 1930s and the 1960s. Before being elected Prime Minister in 1964 the then Labour Party leader Harold Wilson toured the area and promised major redevelopment under a Labour government, though this did not take place for another generation.

In 1856 a wealthy US entrepreneur, Henry Lee Norris, established the North British Rubber Company in the buildings of the former Castle Silk Mill alongside the Union Canal. The company's Castle Mill premises eventually covered 20 acres (8.1 ha) of land in the area and employed thousands of workers over five generations in manufacturing a variety of products from galoshes and rubber Wellington boots to solid rubber wheels for Thomson steam traction engines (after 1870), pneumatic tyres (after 1890) and hot-water bottles. The company's design for trench boots, which was officially chosen by the War Office during the Great War, led to a lucrative government contract which saw the firm supplying up to 2,750 pairs a day, reaching a total of 1.2 million pairs by the end of the war. Similar contracts resulted in the production of 1/4 of a million pairs of gymshoes, 47,000 pairs of heavy snow boots for the French Army, 16,000 tyres and 2.5 million feet (760,000 m) of hosepipe.

The Second World War brought another boom with the production of millions of civilian gas masks and barrage-balloon fabric. In 1958, the company produced Britain's first traffic cones for the M6 motorway. The United States Rubber Company gradually took control of the company. The United States Rubber Company was renamed Uniroyal in 1961 and North British took on this name when eventually taken-over in 1966. In that year, Uniroyal relocated the tyre manufacture to Newbridge, then outside Edinburgh.[5] In 1957 Castle Mills began the production of Royalite thermoplastic sheeting. In 1967 Royalite production was moved to a new factory adjacent to the tyre plant at Newbridge. The manufacture of PowerGrip drive belts was relocated to the former Arrol-Johnston factory at Heathhall, Dumfries around 1970. All that remained at Castle Mills was the hose factory which continued until its closure in late 1973.

Another company which established itself in Fountainbridge in 1856 was McEwan's Brewery. The site on the north side of Fountainbridge and Dundee Street was chosen because of its proximity to both the Union Canal and the new line of the Caledonian Railway. Within five years, the firm's annual turnover was £40,000 and it went on to become one of the market leaders in the Scottish brewing industry over the next century. In 1973, as a result of a £13 million investment, a new Fountain Brewery was opened on the south side of Fountainbridge on the former site of the North British Rubber Company's premises while the hose factory was converted to a bottling plant..[6]

In 1886 Cooke's Royal Circus was built in East Fountainbridge for John Henry Cooke (1837-1917). It was demolished and the Palladium built on the site in 1911, operating at first as a cinema and later as a theatre.[7][8]

Redevelopment of the area began with the construction of the Fountain Park leisure centre on former brewery ground on the north side of Dundee Street in 1998. This multi-purpose complex includes a multiplex cinema and ten-pin bowling.

Closure of the Fountainbridge brewery was announced in 2004 with the entire 22-acre (8.9 ha) site gradually decommissioned and demolished between and 2006 and 2011[9] as part of a wider redevelopment and regeneration programme which had begun with Edinburgh Quay at the Lochrin Basin on the canal in 2004.

In 2012, construction of new student accommodation for Edinburgh Napier University began on the south side of Fountainbridge opposite Fountain Park. Four concrete frame buildings contain 777 bedrooms in clusters of 4-8 bedrooms, each with a communal kitchen and dining area.

Sean Connery plaque

• Sean Connery was born and grew up here. His former production company was known as Fountainbridge Films. He later shut down the company after a series of disputes with a business partner.[10]

• Bartholomew's Chronological map of Edinburgh (1919)