Our aspirations for the Doors Open Days programme this year were twofold:

• Engaging Edinburgh’s Youth in Heritage by expanding youth engagement opportunities,

• Championing the Edinburgh community, its heritage, and its diversity.

Our priority for the weekend was ensuing that every venue participating in Edinburgh Doors Open Days felt supported by us. We sought to be friendly faces and helping hands throughout the weekend. We brought together a team of ten to go out and about over the weekend, visiting about ten venues each: our four staff members, our Chair and Vice Chair, and four dedicated volunteers from the Edinburgh community. In doing so, our team was able to visit the majority of the venues open this year and meet their staff, volunteers, and community members as well as participate in the fantastic activities and events the 125 venues across Edinburgh and East Lothian had tirelessly prepared for the weekend. Our Doors Open Days team found this to be a highly rewarding experience. In the spirit of Doors Open Days, we all got to see parts of the city we may not have explored before and walk into buildings we had previously just passed by. We all got to hear fantastic stories and anecdotes about our wonderful city and its people, as well as meet the kind, enthusiastic people who care and contribute to the vibrancy of Edinburgh.

As we reflect on the joy of this past weekend, our Doors Open Days Coordinators, Anna Dowling-Clarke and Kara Bohn, contemplate their experiences and how we were able to accomplish our aspirations for this year’s programme.

Who Looks After Our Heritage Next?

By Anna Dowling-Clarke, Membership & Engagement Manager

Doors Open Days is often described as a chance to discover the inside of buildings that are usually closed. However, it is also a chance to see who looks after them, and to imagine who will do so in future. That question stayed with me as I visited venues across Edinburgh, and it came into focus in Cramond Village, where one story stood out.

My first stop was Cramond Kirk, which sits on the site of a Roman fort. The oldest part of the building today is the church tower, dating from the fourteenth century. Inside, the first thing that stands out is the smooth wooden ceiling, installed in the 1911 renovation and which stretches over the whole space. It is hard not to think of the wooden fort that once stood here. The wooden ceiling is echoed in the pews and raised seating platforms. On one of these, Queen Victoria sat during a service whilst visiting her mother at Cramond House. The blue velvet chair on which she sat has been preserved and stands out against all the wood, as do the richly coloured stained-glass windows.

Opposite, the other platform leads to a narrow stairwell, an invitation to anyone without claustrophobia to imagine climbing up to see the seventeenth-century bell in the tower. Dutch in origin, it was lost briefly when Cromwell’s troops stole it in 1651, though it was returned after much deliberation.

Cramond Kirk bell, dating from the 17^th century

One volunteer, Lesley, pointed out a thick booklet titled Cramond Kirk and Kirkyard: Monumental Inscriptions and Burial Records. It records monument inscriptions from 1608 and burial lairs from 1853, and a more up-to-date edition is in the works. This booklet came up again at my next stop, The Maltings Museum, run by Cramond Heritage Trust.

The museum is a trove of information, and an hour spent there won’t suffice. A day trip to Cramond built around a proper visit is well worth it. For Doors Open Days, the archive room was open for viewing and searching. Volunteers were on hand to explain how they reordered and indexed most of the documents and created an online index so researchers can more easily conduct research from home.

On the main table in the archives room, among the displayed objects, was the same booklet I had seen at Cramond Kirk. Ian, the Chair of the Trust, asked whether I knew where it came from before taking out an archive box from the shelves. Inside was a collection of grey jotters from the 1960s, the handwriting immaculate. It was the work of a local 14-year-old girl who had taken it upon herself to record the tomb inscriptions. The reason why she did it is unknown, but the work recorded in her jotters is still in use today.

One of the grey jotters alongside Cramond Kirk and Kirkyard: Monumental Inscriptions and Burial Records

These grey jotters and the information recorded in them are small objects with a large point. It seems no one asked the girl to pursue this project, and yet sixty years later researchers still rely on it. That is the case for involving young people in heritage: not only to pass knowledge down but to show them that the places around them are theirs to look after.

This year’s Doors Open Days put that idea into practice through our partnership with Impact Arts. Young people aged 14 to 19, taking part in the Impact Arts’ CashBack to the Future programme, visited eight participating venues and responded to what they discovered in a range of artworks, which were displayed at St Michael’s Parish Church in Slateford. They also designed a monochrome Doors Open Days map which was printed and distributed to some of the venues.

The Cockburn Association invited Primary School children, through the schools, and to visit Doors Open Days venues with their families. They could collect the map and a box of colouring pencils, colour the map in and enter an art competition, with prizes generously donated by National Galleries of Scotland, Filmhouse and Camera Obscura.

These young people were therefore makers as well as visitors, and the map they designed gave younger children an additional reason to visit Doors Open Days venues and consider the places around them. Colouring it in, the children took on a creative role of their own, engaging with these buildings through something they made themselves.

It will be a long time before we know what comes of this early engagement with heritage. The seeds sown this year may take decades to show, but some of these young people may find that the experience shapes the work they choose, the issues they care about most, and perhaps the campaigns they will one day lead to protect and preserve their natural and built heritage.

Art, Heritage and Community through Doors Open Days

By Kara Bohn, Membership and Administration Assistant

Doors Open Days is made for and by the community. As an organisation that emphasises the importance of community engagement and the way it relates to Edinburgh’s heritage, environment and civic amenities, connecting with our Doors Open Days community was paramount. Over the course of the weekend, I got to visit a wide variety of neighbourhoods across Edinburgh. I visited a variety of venues across the city, going to Leith, Corstorphine, New Town, Dalry, Gorgie, and Fountainbridge to visit businesses, community organisations, churches, and cultural institutions. The theme for this year was Heritage at Risk: Resist, Revive and Reimagine. I came to find that while many venues created activities or content related to the theme, it was a consistent unintentional theme across the city as well.

On the delightfully sunny Saturday, I ran across New Town and Fountainbridge, ending up in Leith visiting the Edinburgh Open Workshop. Walking up to the workshop, you heard the delightful chatter of children, punctuated by tiny insistent bangs of hammers on wood as children played in the Tinkertown play area outside the workshop. Inside, visitors attended expert tours around the workshop, getting to see a variety of different traditional skills being showcased including woodworking, upholstery and metalworking. As an avid fibre artist, I was most drawn to Edinburgh Open Workshop’s upstairs space, where they were hosting the community organisation, Shrub Sewing and Mending, to showcase their incredible talent in fixing and upcycling clothing. Excitingly for me, they were hosting a little craft table where you could make a hand-stitched pendant using clothing scraps the Mender had kept from previous projects. In doing so, I got to meet their lovely team of dedicated crafters who showed myself and other community members, including children inside from their adventure in Tinkertown, how to hand sew and create our own little piece of art. Sitting and making my wee pendant and chatting with others at my table enjoying their sunny afternoon and a relaxing crafting activity, it was reiterated in my brain how important community is.

As an architectural historian and conservationist and craft maker, I must emphasise the importance of heritage, arts, crafts, and community in Edinburgh. At this moment of the cost-of-living crisis, the importance of community spaces for art is immense. There’s been a continued trend across the city for the loss of artists’ studios and spaces for non-commercialised community art initiatives. This is especially devastating in a city which utilises art to create its identity and culture through its festival programming or its multitude of world-class museums and cultural institutions.

The partnership between Edinburgh Open Workshop and Shrub Sewing and Mending showcases how important community building is and how institutions can support one another and collaborate to showcase community resiliency.

In Fountainbridge, I got the opportunity to speak with Craig Peebles, the founder of Welby & Wright Tiles. The practise specialises in encaustic tilemaking popularised in the Victorian period, which is on the Red List of Endangered Crafts indicating that the crafting technique may go extinct in our lifetime. In Edinburgh, this tile technique dazzles the entryway of many Marchmont and Bruntsfield tenements. By opening the doors to his practice, Craig showed community members exactly how these beautiful floors were made and visitors could step away with knowledge of a new piece of their homes’ histories.

This relationship of arts, history and heritage was also showcased at Custom House in Leith, owned by the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust. Currently hosting a variety of resident artists, these art practitioners displayed their incredible art pieces, lining the walls of the beautiful interiors of this listed Georgian building. SHBT is planning on transforming Custom House into a Museum for Leith and invited community members to bring in any objects, materials, or oral stories that they may have to contribute to the museum’s collection. In this way, it was a truly collaborative way to create a piece of cultural heritage for an incredibly important part of the city.

My experiences with Doors Open Days really emphasise the importance of heritage, arts and community building in Edinburgh, as what truly makes this city special is its community, heritage and culture.

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Doors Open Days depends on people who care for the places around them. The Cockburn Association has been doing this for Edinburgh since 1875. If you value that work, join us as a member and help protect the city’s built and natural heritage, for the people who care for it now and for those who will inherit it. Sign up HERE.