Old Edinburgh Part I
I was browsing Flickr the today when I stumbled on one of the features called "tagging". What it allows you to do is add a keyword directly to your picture. They then take all the pictures with a certain keyword and make it so you can search through them. For instance, Seattle has 5077 pictures with that key word (this will change as people add more pictures and add Seattle as a keyword. Well, I put in Edinburgh (1010 pictures) into the Flickr tag search. I started viewing them. Many of them are boring tourist pictures with a few interesting local pictures strewn about.
It was kind of boring seeing Calton hill a thousand times. I kept looking, hoping I would find something interesting. My roommate joined me and we were commenting on the pictures. Well, we hit paydirt. Someone had scanned in pictures from turn of the twentieth century pictures of Edinburgh (some are as late as 1960, however). I have collected some links and I will talk about some of them here.
The first set are from around George Square (I am going to assume that you have looked at the pictures). This picture of George Square is from 1960 before they demolished the left hand side and the top of the picture to put in things like Appleton Tower and David Hume Tower, which I do not have a picture of right now but I have complained about it in the past. This picture was taken just before demolition. You can see the wry Scots humor in the window. This was the North side of George Square, which housed the medical school of the University of Edinburgh. The medical school was just moved to the new Edinburgh Royal Infirmary a few months ago. From 1960 to 2004, it was housed in George Square. The South side of George Square now holds the Edinburgh University Library, which is just as ugly as the rest of the damn buildings around it with the exception of the West side of George Square which is where Celtic Studies is.
Well, I hope you have liked this Edinburgh retrospective. I have a bunch more pictures to show you so stay tuned!
posted by Chris #11:17 PM | 0 comments |
