Scottish History
The Centre for Scottish Urban History

The Centre was established in 1994 when the then Department of Scottish History at Edinburgh won the contract with Historic Scotland to produce the latest series of Burgh Surveys.

These Surveys are short books, undertaken principally with planners and conservationists in mind, giving advice on what is archaeologically or historically sensitive within a specific town. They are also of interest to historians and to the local people.

Pat Dennison is the Director of the Centre and historian to the Burgh Survey project. She is assisted by archaeologists, including Russel Coleman of Headland Archaeology and Gordon Ewart of Kirkdale Archaeology. A number of the postgraduates and postdoctoral researchers in the School also have close links with the Centre. A great deal of documentary research takes place before the writing of a Survey, and Pat has benefited from the excellent palaeographic skills of the researchers who have been involved in the Centre's work.

Projects

A recent major project breaks new ground by adding input from local volunteers. This is the Dunfermline Burgh Survey Community Project. With over sixty volunteers assisting with research into subjects such as cellars, graveyards, re-use of medieval abbey stone, watercourses and the town marches, Pat and Simon Stronach of Headland Archaeology have produced a Burgh Survey of Dunfermline. Another Survey in preparation is that for Galashiels; the main historian working on this is Dr Martin Rorke.

The Centre also undertakes other commissions. Under the auspices of the Centre a multi-disciplinary conference on 'Conservation and Change in Historic Towns' was held and resulted in the publication of a volume of the same name in 1999, edited by Pat Dennison, published by the Council for British Archaeology. A three year joint project with colleagues in Germany to consider best practice in urban conservation was funded by the British Council. Pat was also the official historian to the archaeological excavations of the site of the new parliament of Scotland.

Current work

A major ongoing project is a Historical Atlas of Edinburgh, to be co-edited by Pat, who has published a book on the capital’s neighbouring burgh of Canongate, Holyrood and Canongate: a Thousand Years of History (2005) and Professor Michael Lynch, who has written extensively on early modern Edinburgh. They were invited by the British Committee of the International Commission for the History of Towns to undertake a GIS-driven study, based on the first Ordnance Survey Map of Edinburgh (1849-53). The Atlas will be published by Oxford University Press.

Next: Burgh Survey volumes