Environmental history workshop

The environmental history group I started has developed a life of its own. I had suggested visiting the Edinburgh Room of the central library as a starting point for sources, and Rynagh, following up this suggestion, got talking to the librarian Carol who suggested we come for a workshop.

I'd been working in Stirling on the day, so I dashed in to find everyone looking at a selection of old books. I was fascinated by the nineteenth-century "Flora of Edinburgh" - how would it compare to the current official list of flowers for Edinburgh? But the most exciting thing was the old maps:

We also got to explore behind the scenes, always fun in a library, especially one with the typical collage-style building of Edinburgh institutions, with bits dating from different eras patched together in strange refurbishments.

It was also fun to be reminded how rapidly the world has changed. When we were young, card-indexes and slides were perfectly ordinary tools of scholarship: now they seem evocative historic artefacts in themselves.

Perhaps the most striking environmental point for the group was the scale and recentness of urban development. Areas we have always known as covered in streets and houses, like this area around Burdiehouse Burn where we met at the weekend, were open fields in 1940:

It brings home the importance of bringing trees, greenspace and wildlife corridors into the modern city.

Many thanks to Carol and the Edinburgh Central Library for the workshop.

For future activities follow the Wild Reekie Meetup Group.

Eleanor Harris