Hay’s Way: The East Lothian town that is home to one of Sir Basil Spence’s more redeeming features

The first building I think of when I consider his name is the Hutchesontown C flats in the Gorbals, Glasgow. 

Partly inspired by Le Corbusier's giant maisonette blocks in Marseille, the building was popular at first with its communal balconies, with people going as far as calling it the ‘Hanging Gardens of the Gorbals’. But it wasn’t long before the design proved impractical, and damp, fungus and structural issues led to the building’s demolition in 1993.

Walking through Dunbar as part of Hay’s Way, however, I came across some of his more picturesque and less reported-on designs today - fishermen’s housing.

The row of white, terraced homes in Victoria Street with attractive arches stretching over the front doors are more inviting to look at than some of Sir Basil’s other works. They were part of a two phase regeneration project for Dunbar’s harbour area. The buildings, which were based round courtyards whose function was net hanging, won a Saltire Society Award for good design in 1951 - an award given to celebrate the diversity of the best in new housing in Scotland.

Cat’s Row, round the corner on the harbour front, was another area the architect’s skills were used as part of the regeneration project.

The former buildings were rundown and demolished as a more general programme of slum clearance in the 1930s, according to information from East Lothian Council. Public health had become a concern, and poor housing was seen as one of the main problems to tackle to improve it.

There’s a sign near these developments reciting ‘a cat’s riddle for Cat’s Row’, which reads:

‘As I was going to St Ives,

I met a man with seven wives,

Each wife had seven bags,

Each bag had seven cats,

Each cat had seven kits,

Kits, cats, bags, and wives,

How many were going to St Ives?’

With some of Sir Basil’s work facing heavy criticism, including from influential journalist and critic AA Gill, who described one of the architect’s buildings - the Hyde Park barracks - as possibly the “ugliest building in London”, I feel the fishermen’s housing in Dunbar is one of the redeeming features in his portfolio.

Sir Basil was born in Mumbai, India, but was educated in Edinburgh. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art before landing his first architectural job in the office of Edwin Lutyens, who was known for works including the Cenotaph in London.

Many of Sir Basil’s own buildings were unashamedly modern in style. However, in the years before he died in 1976, ‘modernism’ started to become unpopular and suffered a backlash, with ‘post-modern’ architecture becoming the new movement in the 1980s.  The cavalry barracks that overlook St James Park, built in the late 1960s, gave Sir Basil’s reputation a serious battering. It has been reported he was attacked in the House of Lords for defacing two royal parks.