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Edinburgh Live
Edinburgh Live
World
David McLean

Incredible colour footage captures Edinburgh life in the 1950s

Captured almost 70 years ago, it shows a bygone Edinburgh of immaculately-attired shoppers, soot-covered buildings and double-decker tramcars.

Available on YouTube is a short film showing central Edinburgh in the 1950s. It's one of more than 80,000 retro clips cleaned up and digitised by dedicated film archivists the Huntley Archives.

The two-minute-long footage gives us a glimpse of familiar locations around the city centre, including Tollcross, Lothian Road and Princes Street. In the first few seconds, we see a double-decker Edinburgh Corporation tramcar emerge from the old Tollcross Power Station tram depot at Ponton Street.

READ MORE: Street photos of Edinburgh in the 1950s and 60s go on show for the first time

Constructed in 1897, the power station originally housed the machinery that gave life to Edinburgh cable-hauled tramways, but was later used solely as a depot when the system switched to electric traction. The historic building was demolished after the city's old trams were scrapped, with Tollcross Fire Station built on the site in the 1980s.

In the next scene, we are at the famous Tollcross junction where six roads once converged. The iconic Tollcross clock can be seen alongside an Edinburgh police box in the foreground. The police box even still has an air raid siren attached to the top - a reminder that the Second World War had only ended a decade earlier.

It's fascinating to see adverts on the sides of the tramcars promoting long lost goods and services, such as Weston's biscuits and the Ediswan electrical company.

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Next up, the viewer is taken to the city's main thoroughfare, Princes Street, where it's abundantly clear that trams were by far the dominant mode of transport in 1950s Edinburgh. In fact, the number of buses on show at any one time can be counted on one hand - a far cry from the scene today, in which Lothian Buses rule the roost over the limited number of modern trams in Edinburgh.

Lothian Road makes an appearance around the minute mark. The construction of Edinburgh's financial centre is still decades away and instead we can see the roofline of Edinburgh's lost mainline railway hub: Princes Street Station to the left of the Caledonian Hotel.

In the final part of the short film, we catch a glimpse of the busy West End junction where Shandwick Place and Lothian Road meet with Princes Street. The scene is bustling with throngs of shoppers going about their business, with a points police officer directing buses and cars as tram after tram casually rolls through the middle of the roadway.

You can watch the incredible footage here.

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