24 CONTEXT 181 : SEPTEMBER 2024 JOCELYN CUNLIFFE The maintenance challenge of urban housing in Scotland Apart from health and safety risks associated with falling masonry from tenements, any energy efficiency measures are pointless if the building is not in a good state of repair. ‘The tenement is the traditional form of urban housing in Scotland and it found its highest expression during the nineteenth century in Glasgow, in the great period of industrial expansion. Glasgow is a city of tenements.’ So wrote Frank Worsdall in his 1979 book The Tenement: a way of life. At a time when large areas of the city had been demolished, his aim was to record the excellence of ‘the long street-vistas’ of tenement housing and the life they represented. His study, which ends in 1975, does not mention the work of the community-based housing associations which were established in the early 1970s, spearheading a different approach, of tenement rehabilitation rather than comprehensive redevelopment. There are different systems of land law in the Scots and English legal systems. Historically Scotland had a system of feudal land ownership. All land was ultimately held by the Crown and the ‘owner’ was not the ultimate ‘owner’ but a ‘vassal’. The grantor of each feudal right was called the superior and the grantee the vassal or feuar. This enabled the feudal superior to retain control over the use of the land and receive annual payments known as feu duty. This system was abolished in 2004 by the Abolition of Feudal Tenure (Scotland) Act 2000. The A tenement in Roseburn Terrace, Edinburgh, showing areas requiring repairs: leaking gutters, rusting downpipes, slipped slates and vegetation in gutters. The building is within the Coltbridge and Wester Coates Conservation Area. (All photos by Jocelyn Cunliffe) current proprietor became the outright owner and feu duty was abolished. The term ‘tenement’ originally referred to land and the dwelling-house erected on it. By the nineteenth century it was used with reference to a specific type of building – a domestic building of more than one storey where the houses (ie flats) are reached by a common entrance and stair. While the word ‘tenement’ conjures up images of the Victorian tenements of Scottish cities, a tenement is defined in the Tenements (Scotland) Act 2004 as ‘a building or part of a building which comprises at least two related flats which are, or are designed to be, in separate ownership and are divided from each other horizontally.’ A tenement can include both commercial and residential properties, and the ownership can be complex, including owner occupiers, social landlords, private landlords and so on. In Scotland there are around 895,000 properties legally defined as tenements. Of these around a third were built before 1919, another third between 1919 and 1982, and the remaining third after 1982. A key finding of the Scottish House Condition Survey 2022 was that 49 per cent showed disrepair to critical
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