A while back I mentioned that I had taken lots of pictures of the demolition of North Merchiston Church in 1988.
I got a scanner to scan them, in much the same way that all these years ago I bought my first 35mm camera to take the pictures, an Olympus Trip.
As you can see, I was a bit late in getting to the demolition site. The top part of the church was gone as was most of the interior, including the business end where the altar and pulpit were.
Here’s a picture of what was the entry to the church, on Slateford Road, taken pretty much from the top of the street where I live now.
Behind that pinky/orange double door were several steps leading up to the vestibule of the church.

The picture below is taken looking up Hermand Crescent and shows that the back end of the church was already gone. The door to the vestry was just at the end of here.
I did manage to salvage a small pane of glass from the stained glass windows at the top of the picture.

Standing about the same place, but now looking toward the top of Robertson Avenue…the building across the road is no longer there.

Always the thinking man’s idiot, I ignored the sign warning me of danger and went inside to get some pictures (a real, ecclesiastical Tim Page, me.)
The wall on the right here has the Slateford railway line on the other side of it and I’m looking toward Slateford Road from the area about where the vestry would have been, about half way up the start of Hermand Terrace. The yellow/pink fire door at the far end was the escape route from the church hall.

This is what was left of the interior of the church, taken from about where the altar would have been. In this picture and the one below, we can clearly see where the balcony was, although I don’t think that’s actually the correct church-architecture word for the raised seated area at the back.


The interior of the church hall.

This was taken just before a big lump of stone fell a few feet away from me…again, the back of the church.

The organ was about here and that’s the inner door leading to the vestry on the left…

I seem to have managed to get the remains of the back of the church and a bit of the vestibule here, again, looking toward Slateford Road.

When the church was levelled, the new building which replaced it was a GP’s surgery for a while, but was thereafter converted into flats.