Housing in Scotland

In the Iron Age cellular houses begin to be replaced on the northern isles by simple Atlantic roundhouses, substantial circular buildings with a drystone construction.

The creation of Scottish Homes in 1989 increased the stock of private housing and reducing the role of the state sector and the direction of planning by local authorities.

The oldest house for which there is evidence in Scotland is the oval structure of wooden posts found at South Queensferry near the Firth of Forth, dating from the Mesolithic period, about 8240 BCE.

[3] Neolithic habitation sites are particularly common and well-preserved in the Northern and Western Isles, where a lack of trees led to most structures being built of local stone.

There is debate as to the role of these buildings, which have been seen variously as regular farming homesteads of Neolithic families and as related to a series of monumental constructions such as barrows.

[7] As bronze working developed from about 2000 BCE, there was a decline in the building of large new structures, which, with a reduction of the total area under cultivation, suggests a fall in population.

[9] At Jarlshof these are oval houses with thick stone walls, which may have been partly subterranean at the earliest period of inhabitation, a technique that provided both structural stability and insulation.

[12] As elsewhere in Europe, hillforts were first introduced in this period, including the occupation of Eildon hill near Melrose in the Scottish Borders, from around 1000 BCE, which accommodated several hundred houses on a fortified hilltop,[13] and Traprain Law in East Lothian, which had a 20-acre enclosure, sectioned in two places west of the summit, made up of a coursed, stone wall with a rubble core.

[14] In the early Iron Age, from the seventh century BCE, cellular houses begin to be replaced on the northern isles by simple Atlantic roundhouses, substantial circular buildings with a dry stone construction.

[12] This period also saw the beginnings of wheelhouses, a roundhouse with a characteristic outer wall, within which was a circle of stone piers (bearing a resemblance to the spokes of a wheel), but these would flourish most in the era of Roman occupation.

They were typically surrounded by a palisade or had a castle and usually had a market place, with a widened high street or junction, often marked by a mercat cross, beside houses for the nobles, burgesses and other significant inhabitants,[26] which were often built in a relatively elaborate style and by the end of the period some would have slate roofs or tiles.

[31] The standard layout of a house throughout Scotland before agricultural improvement was a byre-dwelling or longhouse or blackhouse with humans and livestock sharing a common roof, often separated by only a partition wall, leading to the byre (barn)[32] Contemporaries noted that cottages in the Highlands and Islands tended to be cruder, with single rooms, slit windows and earthen floors, often shared by a large family.

[33] A characteristic of Scottish burghs were long main streets of tall buildings, with vennels, wynds and alleys leading off it, many of which survive today.

Of those that remained many were now crofters: poor families living on "crofts"—very small rented farms with indefinite tenure used to raise various crops and animals, with kelping, fishing, spinning of linen and military service as important sources of revenue.

[38] Many lived in blackhouses with double thickness walls about 6 feet (2 m) high, made of local stone and packed with rubble and earth and thatched with reeds.

[39] Others were forced either to the new purpose-built villages built by the landowners such as John Cockburn at Ormiston and Archibald Grant's Monymusk,[40] to the new industrial centres of Glasgow, Edinburgh, northern England, or to Canada or the United States.

This gridiron plan, building forms and the architectural detailing would be copied by many smaller towns throughout Scotland, although rendered in locally quarried materials.

In Glasgow, the growing workforce was left to the mercy of market forces as sub-urban tenements were thrown up, particularly to the east of the city,[45] like those of the Gorbals to the south, where overcrowding, lack of sanitation and general poverty contributed to disease, crime, and very low life expediency.

[48] The sometimes utopian concept of the new town, aimed at improving society through the foundation of architecturally designed communities, was an important part of Scottish thinking from the mid-eighteenth to the twentieth century.

[50] From 1800, Robert Owen's New Lanark, designed as a self-contained community, combining industry with ordered and improved living conditions, was an important milestone in the historical development of urban planning.

[52]In the twentieth century the distinctive Scottish use of stone architecture declined as it was replaced by cheaper alternatives such as Portland cement, concrete, and mass-production brick.

A royal commission of 1917 reported on the "unspeakably filthy privy-middens in many of the mining areas, badly constructed incurably damp labourers' cottages on farms, whole townships unfit for human occupation in the crofting counties and islands ... groups of lightless and unventilated houses in the older burghs, clotted masses of slums in the great cities".

[54] Residents tended to prefer low-rise solutions to rehousing and there was extensive private building of sub-urban "bungalow belts", particularly around Edinburgh,[56] laid out with squares and crescents.

The result in the first district, George Street/ Canal Street, were low flats built in render and reused rubble around landscaped courtyards, with a 15-storey tower at one end.

[59] As the post-war desire for urban regeneration gained momentum it would focus on the tower block, championed in Glasgow by David Gibson, convener of the city housing committee.

Projects like the brutalist Red Road Flats (1964–69) originally offered hope of a new beginning and an escape from the overcrowded nineteenth-century tenements of the city, but lacked a sufficient infrastructure and soon deteriorated.

[64] On 31 October 2007 Nicola Sturgeon, the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing, announced that she had decided to abolish Communities Scotland as a separate agency and bring its main non-regulatory functions into the core Scottish Government.

There have been increasing attempts to preserve much of what survives from Scotland's architectural heritage, including the great buildings and monuments, and the classically influenced houses of towns such as Edinburgh and Glasgow.

[47] There have also been attempts at preserving the surviving Glasgow tenements, many of which have been renovated, restored to their original pink and honeyed sandstone from the black fronts created by pollution[66] and brought up to modern standards of accommodation.

[71] Since the establishment of a separate Scottish Parliament and devolved government in 1999, there has been a response to homelessness in Scotland that has been distinctive from the rest of the UK, described as a "rights-based approach".