FOR generations, living in a Scottish tenement has meant more than simply sharing a building.
From chalking the edges of freshly cleaned stairs to carefully allocated washing days, communities developed their own rules and rituals to make life work while families lived practically on top of one another.
Historian Peter Gilchrist says that culture of cooperation was born out of necessity, and fears the rise of short-term lets, on sites like Airbnb, is beginning to undermine it.
“Tenements are a delicate ecosystem of community that requires everyone to live by putting their best foot forward and making sacrifices,” he told The National.
“If somebody comes in who does not abide by that code of conduct, who does not care about that community in the same way, it disrupts everything.”
While forms of tenement housing existed much earlier, the buildings became fundamental to the growth of Scotland’s cities during the rapid urban expansion of the 19th century.
As populations grew, building upwards allowed far more families to live on the same patch of land, helping accommodate the workers and families displaced by the Highland Clearances.
But packing households into multi-storey buildings brought its own challenges.
Particularly in west coast tenements, Gilchrist said families lived around a shared central stairwell and back court, often with relatively little separating one household from another.
That proximity fostered a distinctive culture in which the behaviour of one household could have an immediate impact on everybody around them.
Gilchrist said: “You know that the people that you share a wall with and a ceiling and a floor with can make your life a nightmare if they decide that you’ve pissed them off or if there’s any animosity at all.
As a result, rules developed around the use and maintenance of communal spaces.
Gilchrist said when it was a household’s turn to clean the close, residents would mop from top to bottom before taking chalk to the sides of the stairs.
The practice created the appearance of a border around the freshly cleaned steps, mimicking the tiled closes found in more affluent tenements.
Even hanging out the washing could require coordination between neighbours.
“You would agree your day or your half day with your neighbours for your time on the rope,” Gilchrist said.
“It was all about living within this very strict code of conduct.”
A family could expect to live beside the same people for years, meaning disputes could not simply be forgotten the following morning.
People also had to accommodate changes in one another’s lives, from someone starting night shifts to a neighbour having a baby.
Gilchrist said: “If you’re going to live in a tenement for 10 years, you need to think about everything that could go wrong in the next 10 years or everything that you’re going to need to ask favours for.
“You need to have everyone on your side and cultivating that sense of community is what allows you to survive living in small spaces in close proximity.”
Although traditions such as chalking the stairs have largely faded, Gilchrist argues the basic bargain remains.
Residents still share walls, gardens and closes, while decisions over communal spaces require neighbours to work together.
But when families are replaced by short-term lets hosting Airbnb guests, the long-term relationships on which that system depends are frayed
Instead of knowing the person next door, residents can find themselves sharing their close with a succession of visitors who may be there for only a night or a weekend.
“You cannot have a code of conduct with someone who stays there for 12 hours,” Gilchrist said.
He stressed that this did not mean visitors were necessarily badly behaved.
Rather, the expectations of somebody on holiday are fundamentally different from those of somebody who knows they will be sharing a building with the same neighbours for years.
“There’s a lack of repercussion,” Gilchrist said.
“People are slightly drunker, stay up a little later, leave a little earlier, and your priority is yourself and your holiday, not necessarily the people around you that you’ll never see again.”
The result, he argues, is a clash between two different uses of the same building.
Tenements were designed to house large numbers of people, but their communities evolved out of a necessity to make the most out of a historically cramped space.
Gilchrist argues that short-term accommodation introduces people into those same communal spaces without the long-term relationships which historically helped regulate them.
Over time, he said, that can weaken the sense of collective ownership which traditionally kept communal spaces functioning.
“How long are you going to keep cleaning up other people’s rubbish before you just give up?” he said.
Operating a short-term let in Scotland requires a licence. However, concerns have been raised that enforcement of the legislation is patchy and that the rules do not go far enough to reduce the number of short-term lets.
Tenants’ union Living Rent previously told The National it is preparing to launch a campaign in Leith calling for stronger action against short-term lets in the area.
A spokesperson for the group said: “The unchecked surge of short-term lets over the last decade has decimated communities in Edinburgh and forced long-term residents and tenants out of the city they call home.”
Gilchrist agreed that greater protection was needed to preserve tenement communities from the proliferation of short-term lets.
“There are very special and distinct parts of life in a tenement.
"They are a delicate ecosystem of community and without properly enforced legislation, we risk losing them."
