SCOTTISH HOMES AND SCHOOLS (page 1 )

  ONE OF THE most massive tasks facing Scotland in modern times, and less-than-modern times, was the simple one of housing the people in the expanding cities. Even before the Industrial Revolution, eighteenth century Edinburgh had acquired a dense congestion of slum tenements, some over ten storeys high, and the life of the poor was squalid, diseased and usually short. There is an old Scottish dance tune, The Floo'ers o' Edinburgh, which sounds pretty but whose title is a cynical recollection of that squalor. Hygiene and sanitation in those areas did not exist. Householders disposed of waste, including human waste, by throwing it from an open window into the street, with the warning shout, ''Gardeyloo'', from the French gardez l'eau, look out for the water!. The neglected filth in the streets was what was meant by the flowers of Edinburgh. But the massive congestion of the cities came with the Industrial Revolution, and Victorian Scotland was a welter of city slums, and Victorian Glasgow provided the clearest and worst examples. Until that time, the typical working-class home in the city was a tenement of two or three storeys, often with outside staircases to the upper flats, very much like working-class houses to be found in rustic villages. The city, starting as a fishing village running from the Cathedral down to the river, first spread out to the east, and as late as the nineteenth century the area to the west and to the south of the river was a pastoral community.