James Calbraith (@jamescalbraith.co.uk)

The thread about the Singing Street; skipping, hopping, dancing and birling through the backgreens and streets of 1950s Edinburgh This thread marks a double milestone for Threadinburgh, it is the 300th post since the first in September 2022 and the visit counter just ticked past the 500,000 mark! I'm marking this occasion by finally chalking something off my to-do list that has been there far too long. Perhaps by providence, I recently acquired a little booklet self-described as "a Merry-Ma-Tanzie of Skipping, Hiding, Hopping, Birling, Stotting, Playing and Dancing Rhymes". The Singing Street, to give it its name, was the accompaniment to a 1951 amateur film with the same title. Described by The Scotsman as "a wonderful picture of Edinburgh - as true perhaps as has ever been put on the screen", it turns seventy-five next year. It's all too easy to treat its "astonishingly evocative scenes" as a pure nostalgia trip back to an Edinburgh which has disappeared into living memory, but this was never the intent of the film. It is so much more than just a skip and a hop down memory lane, so let's celebrate it by telling the tale of how and why it came to be and by recognising its importance as a piece of a wider archival work. Once that is out the way shall we step scene-by-scene and song-by-song, back to the streets of 1950s Edinburgh to compare them with the present day. https://threadinburgh.scot/2025/11/27/the-thread-about-the-singing-street-skipping-hopping-dancing-and-birling-through-the-backgreens-and-streets-of-1950s-edinburgh/?utm_source=bluesky&utm_medium=jetpack_social