Housing in Scotland

Housing in Scotland includes all forms of built habitation in what is now Scotland, from the earliest period of human occupation to the present day. The oldest house in Scotland dates from the Mesolithic era. In the Neolithic era settled farming led to the construction of the first stone houses. There is also evidence from this period of large timber halls. In the Bronze Age there were cellular round houses, crannogs (built on artificial islands) and hillforts that enclosed large settlements. In the Iron Age cellular houses begin to be replaced on the northern isles by simple Atlantic roundhouses, substantial circular buildings with a drystone construction. The largest constructions that date from this era are the circular brochs and duns and wheelhouses.

In the Middle Ages cruck timber construction was used in cottages, but the most common building material was stone. From the twelfth century, burghs contained the houses of significant inhabitants, but little has survived of the urban housing of the poor. In the early modern era most of the population was housed in small hamlets and isolated dwellings. Most farming was based on the Lowland fermtoun or Highland baile. As the population expanded, some of these settlements were sub-divided to create new hamlets, with temporary sheilings becoming permanent settlements. The standard layout of a house was a byre-dwelling or long house, with humans and livestock sharing a common roof. Cottages in the Highlands tended to be cruder while those from the Lowlands had distinct rooms and were clad with plaster or paint and even had glazed windows. In towns, traditional thatched half-timbered houses occurred beside the larger, stone and slate-roofed town houses of merchants and the urban gentry. In the eighteenth century new farm buildings replaced the fermtoun and regional diversity was replaced with a standardisation of building forms. The Industrial Revolution transformed the scale of Scottish towns. Gridiron plans were used to lay out new towns in Edinburgh, Glasgow and smaller burghs. In Glasgow the growing workforce was lived in squalid sub-urban tenements like those of the Gorbals. New towns aimed at improving society through the foundation of architecturally designed communities, were an important part of Scottish thinking from the mid-eighteenth century.

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