Heritage across Europe: how each country treats what it has inherited — Part 9: Scotland
Scotland is not England. This needs to be said clearly, because the two countries are frequently discussed as though they were interchangeable — particularly in heritage contexts where “UK” is used as a shorthand that erases real and important distinctions.
Scotland has its own parliament, its own legal system, its own heritage legislation, and its own national heritage agency — Historic Environment Scotland. Its building traditions, its materials, and its specific conservation challenges differ significantly from those of its southern neighbour.
It also has, in recent years, experienced heritage losses of a kind that demand serious attention.
Edinburgh — the tenement city
Edinburgh’s historic fabric is shaped by two things above all: its dramatic topography and its characteristic building material.
The city sits on a series of volcanic ridges and valleys that have determined its urban form for a thousand years. The medieval Old Town crowds along the ridge from the Castle to Holyrood, its tall tenements — some of the earliest multi-storey residential buildings in Europe — rising six, seven, eight storeys from the closes and wynds that cut down from the Royal Mile. The Georgian New Town, planned from the 1760s onward, occupies the ridge to the north, its ordered terraces and crescents a deliberate counterpoint to the medieval density across the valley.
Both are built predominantly in sandstone — the warm honey-coloured Craigleith stone of the New Town, the darker, harder stone of the Old Town tenements. This sandstone is Edinburgh’s defining material in the same way that Bath stone defines Bath, and it presents similar conservation challenges: appropriate mortar specification, careful cleaning, matching of replacement stone from sources that respect the originalmaterial’s physical properties.
The Scottish tenement — the stone-built, stair-accessed apartment building that housed the bulk of Edinburgh’s and Glasgow’s urban population from the 18th century onward — is one of the most distinctive building types in Europe. Many are in private ownership, subdivided into individually owned flats under the Scottish system of common ownership, where each flat owner has a share of responsibility for the shared fabric of the building — the roof, the stairwell, the external walls.
Glasgow — heritage lost and the question of prevention
Glasgow demands a different kind of attention.
The most recent loss came on 8 March 2026, when a fire broke out on the ground floor of a vape shop at Union Corner, a B-listed Victorian commercial block on the corner of Union Street and Gordon Street, directly beside Glasgow Central Station. Built in 1851 for Orr and Sons to a design by James Brown, the four-storey building predates the station itself. The fire burned through the night; the building’s dome and upper floors collapsed, leaving only the facade standing. Glasgow Central — Scotland’s busiest railway station — was forced to close for several days while crews worked to make the site safe. No injuries were reported, but a Scottish Parliament member described the aftermath as resembling Blitz-era bomb damage. The cause remains under multi-agency investigation, with early reports pointing to a lithium-ion battery as a possible source.
The Union Corner fire follows a series of devastating fires in historic Glasgow buildings that have shocked the heritage community across Scotland and beyond. The most prominent was the Glasgow School of Art — Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s masterpiece, widely regarded as one of the finest Art Nouveau buildings in the world — which suffered a catastrophic fire in 2014, was partially restored, and then burned again in 2018 in a fire so severe that the building’s future remains uncertain years later.
The School of Art was not alone. Other significant historic buildings in Glasgow have been lost or severely damaged by fire in the same period — the Category A listed Victoria Bar, the Mackintosh Queen’s Cross Church, and now Union Corner. The pattern has prompted serious questions about fire safety in historic buildings, about the adequacy of protection measures, and about whether the heritage system is doing enough to prevent loss rather than simply respond to it.
These are uncomfortable questions. The heritage conservation community is, understandably, focused on restoration and maintenance — on keeping what exists in good condition. The fire losses in Glasgow are a reminder that physical conservation is only part of the picture. Buildings can be perfectly maintained and still lost to fire, flood, or other catastrophic events if the systems designed to protect them are inadequate.
For craftspeople, the Glasgow losses raise a specific and painful question: what happens to the craft knowledge embedded in a building when the building is gone? The Mackintosh School of Art contained — contains, in its surviving fabric — specific information about the materials and techniques of one of the most significant architects of the early 20th century. Every fire loss is also a knowledge loss.
Historic Environment Scotland — a serious institution
Scotland’s national heritage agency — Historic Environment Scotland — is, by the standards of this series, a well-resourced and technically serious organisation. Its published guidance on traditionalbuilding materials and methods — including specific documents on lime mortars, stonework, traditional roofing, and timber windows — is among the best available in Europe.
The Engine Shed in Stirling — Historic Environment Scotland’s conservation centre — provides training, testing facilities, and technical advice that supports the broader heritage sector. Its work on Scottish traditional building materials, particularly lime and stone, has produced knowledge that is genuinely useful to craftspeople working across Scotland and beyond.
Scotland also has the Scottish Lime Centre Trust, based in Charlestown, Fife — one of the leading organisations in Europe for lime-based building materials and traditional lime skills. Its training courses, publications, and technical advice have been influential far beyond Scotland’s borders.
A question to the Guild
The tenement ownership model — shared responsibility for a common fabric among multiple individual owners — is a specific challenge that affects not just Scotland but many European countries where historic buildings have been subdivided over time.
Has anyone in the Guild worked on restoration projects where the ownership complexity was itself the main obstacle? How was agreement reached, and what made the difference?
And on the Glasgow fires: has anyone worked on post-fire assessment or restoration of a historic building? The specific challenges of working with fire-damaged historic fabric — what can be saved, what must be replaced, how to document what was lost — seem like important Guild territory.
Next in the series: Ireland — Georgian Dublin, rural stone traditions, and the particular resilience of a country that has had to fight for its own heritage.
RestoreFacade Guild — Heritage across Europe, Part 9 of 14.