If you want to read about the first day of this road trip go and read this post, it contains details about Lancaster Services and the St Peter’s Seminary.
Waking up fresh the next morning, the weather was hot and sunny so my plan to visit Edinburgh was put in motion. I had a short list of places I wanted to see, the first of which required a trip into the city centre.
Three Forths
On the way to the city of Edinburgh though I saw a road sign for the Forth Road bridge and decided that I’d head that way to spend some time examining the engineering miracles spanning the Firth Of Forth. Before I’d left home I’d checked the location and knew of a viewpoint that I could pop to and also that it didn’t show up as restricted for drones in thedronemap.com.
I drove to the marina at Port Edgar, parked up and went for a stroll to the viewpoint that was by the breakwater. I used my Leica Q3 for the photographs from the ground, and my DJI Mini 4 Pro drone for the aerial photographs and video. I was between the newer Queensferry Crossing and the older Forth Road Bridge, with the Forth (Railway) Bridge past that. The sky was amazing with a small breeze so I sent up the drone and flew as far as I felt comfortable with, making sure I still had line of sight to it in the sky. I took a few images of the bridges and of the decks of the two road crossings, the Forth Road Bridge only being used by pedestrians, bikes, buses and taxis nowadays.
Edinburgh? I hardly knew her.
Once I’d finished at the bridges I packed up and went for a walk into South Queensferry with my Q3 before returning to the motor and heading off into the city. I parked at Princes Exchange and walked off towards the National Museum Of Scotland which was a lovely looking building attached to the original older structures. I was here to pick up the City Sightseeing Open Top Bus tour which would take me onto the first of the planned destinations but as I was already here I thought I’d check out the museum. There are some great artefacts in the museum on every subject you could wish to explore. It’s like a real life Encyclopedia Britannica and it was fascinating looking at the science parts as well as the natural history side of it. I didn’t spend more than an hour in here as I had a lot to do but if I return to Edinburgh I think I might spend a good two or three hours in here looking deeper into the different exhibits. I was also taken by surprise at the complexity of the buildings, the one half an old classic Victorian style building and the other a modern building from the late 1980s. The strange places, angles, design features and nooks and crannies were interesting to say the least. I could spend all day in here taking photographs, and some of them would no doubt look similar to the Backrooms photos that are all over the internet.
Hollyrood
Once out of the museum I jumped on the next bus and bought a ticket for the day, I also bought a ticket for the Glasgow version for the Tuesday also as I knew I would also use that. Up onto the top deck in the bright sunshine I took off for stop 11 on the red route. I wanted to see the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood as I’ve seen it on the news a few times over the years and the design of the buildings were of interest to me and whilst not Brutalist I figured that I’d have a look around and capture a few images. The building is covered in shapes that I’ve seen on the TV and did not fully understand what they represented, I thought of asking one of the policeman on duty outside until I noticed the doors were open and you could visit the inside of the building too, I queued up for one minute and going through the airport style detectors and x-ray scanners we were then allowed to go into the building and have a wander around, even to go into the Debating chamber that people see on the news. It was interesting to see how the roof of this chamber was suspended using some serious engineering that reminded me of those tensegrity tables in how it seems to support itself somehow. Ingenious.
Into the museum area and there were a few displays, one of which showed the meanings behind the shapes that feature all around the buildings interior and exteriors. The shape that looks like an anvil to me is inspired by the figure of a skating minister in a famous painting Henry Raeburn’s The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch. It apparently suggests a sense of movement. There were also many weirdly proportioned crosses featured throughout and this called the Twisted Saltaire. The saltire being the Scottish flag of St Andrew for all of you vexilloligists.
It was great to be able to wander around in the democratic centre of Scotland and follows on from having visited the Palace Of Westminster and the Houses of Commons and Lords earlier in the year. Next I guess I need to visit the Senedd in Cardiff.
After exiting the parliament building I wandered around the other side of it to see if there were any photogrnic parts and there were not, for my 28mm lens anyway, so I stopped and had a bite to eat and a drink in Dynamic Earth which is stop 15 on the city sightseeing red route. Once fed up, I went and waited a few minutes at the bus stop before getting on the next bus and continuing on the rest of the tour. I had planned to get off at Stop 6 to visit the Camera Obscura near the Edinburgh Castle gates but it was £25 and looked more like a fun house of optical illusions with a camera obscura so I decided to leave it. Time then to head to the next spot, which was out of town so I headed back to the car and left the city centre in my dust!
Sickboy’s Manor
The next planned stop was Cables Wynd House which is better known as the Leith Banana Block owing to its amazing shape. It is a ten-storey building owned mainly by the local housing association and has 212 flats within. It was designed by Alison & Hutchinson & Partners and was opened in 1965 and is listed as a Class A building meaning it is a highly thought of example of Brutalist architecture.
It features in the Irvine Welsh book Trainspotting as the childhood home of Simon “Sick Boy” Williamson, one of the main characters. There used to be bus tours that stopped outside but these were stopped as it was thought to be tasteless and an invasion of privacy for the residents.
I parked up my car in the spaces outside the block and checked the signs where it said I was ok after 5pm so I grabbed my Leica Q3 and stepped out to take a few quick and dirty photos. I did this in case I felt at risk but I was ok to begin with so walked around the perimeter of the building taking photos. I walked past groups of teenagers listening to loud drum and bass music and just pretended that I knew exactly where I wanted to go. I find that if I look confident then I draw less attention to myself, I had a couple of nods off other residents but even though I was in no danger I did feel that I might be putting myself in harms way so I didn’t spend too much time hanging around.
The flats were interesting to look at though, with a big fire having damaged one of the flats in June 2025 there were many different styles of balcony adornments, satellite dishes aplenty and a load of scaffolding underneath the fire damaged end. There was also scaffolding along the floor level of the first floor as if to stop items dropped from the upper floors killing anyone on the ground floor waling into the flats there. I found a few more photos that I liked the look of and then headed back to my car, I hadn’t drawn any suspicion I don’t think and nobody challenged me so I chalk that up as a win. I’m sure though, that my unease was uncalled for and that the residents of the Banana Flats are decent people who would understand my weird appreciation of concrete buildings. Not quite the same scale but I grew up in the three-storey houses on Abbots Road in Shrewsbury which had a particularly troublesome reputation sometimes and I thin that a whole area or block of flats can gain an unfair rep because of a small group of people who make life worse for everyone else, but this is true whether it’s the Banana flats or a leafy suburb of Berkshire.
Hospital Visit
I was supposed to be visiting my brother, Mike, in Glasgow on this particular night and I was still scheduled to go to the next stop at Western General Hospital so messaged to say that I might be a bit late. I drove over to the hospital and parked in the two level multi-storey car park before debussing and going for a wander to find the Cancer Centre which is a building that was designed by Peter Womersley and opened in 1968 as the Nuffield Transplantation Surgery Unit Centre. It is now painted in a weird orange/yellow paint that lends it an air of something from the future with its odd towering structure seemingly designed for air intake and exhausts. There appear to be many semi-circular cutouts and shapes designed into the structure that have a look of Lego construction kits to me. The building must have looked so strange at the time it was completed and it is still a pleasure to cast the eye over and around. I found a couple of nice reflections in the windows of the surrounding buildings and the sky was a lovely blue colour with hardly any clouds, the sun lit up the strange paint so much that it looks falsely coloured in the photos I made.
Clydebank
Now it was time to head on over to see my brother and family over on the other side of Glasgow, i had a lovely time chatting to them all and spending time with the cat and dog too. We don’t see each other that often, the last time was at Mum’s funeral in June 2025, so it was good to catch up. I also had a responsibility to pick up and courier home, four boxes of PC CD-ROM games for another of my brothers which proved to be a tight fit in the car boot. After loading up and saying farewell I headed back to the Glasshouse to park the car and have a short walk to the Ibis.
Be First to Comment