Twentieth Century
1900: Construction of new Midlothian County Buildings begins, replacing old County Hall of 1817; Stockbridge gains a library and hall; character actor Alastair Sim is born; Robert Younger's Abbey Brewery begins brewing
1901: University appoints its first Professor of Scottish history; the Royal High School has 350 pupils; first use of the name 'Royal Mile' to describe the main thoroughfare of the Old Town
1902: New Waverley Station completed, covering 70,000 square metres; the North British Hotel is also built
1903: Caledonian Hotel opens
1905: Moray House in Canongate becomes a teacher training centre
1905–1906: King's Theatre is built at Tollcross
1907: Work begins on constructing the Edinburgh College of Art
1908: Scottish National Exhibition held in Saughton Park
1910: First electric trams run; Bank of Scotland has 169 branches
1910-1913: Zoological Park laid out at Corstorphine
1911: The Empire Palace Theatre, now Festival Theatre, partially burns down during The Great Lafayette's final act. 10 people die, including The Great Lafayette, and the theatre is closed while the stage is rebuilt and reopened in 1913; Palladium Cinema opens
1911–1914: Usher Hall is built
1912: La Scala Cinema opens
1914: Sixteen players of Heart of Midlothian F.C. enlist for active service in the Great War; seven players from the first team are subsequently killed in action
1915: Funeral and burial of victims of the Gretna rail disaster at Rosebank Cemetery
1916: Zeppelin raid causes 11 fatalities; Bank of Scotland has first female employee
1916–1918: Tanks are built by Brown Brothers in the city
1920: Leith is incorporated into Edinburgh
1921: Garrick Theatre in Grove Street burns down
1923: Edinburgh Corporation Tramways operates its last cable-hauled tram; last hanging takes place at the Calton Gaol (executions continue at Saughton Prison)
1925: The National Library of Scotland is formed from the former Advocates' Library; Murrayfield Stadium opens
1928: The inaugural non-stop Flying Scotsman train hauled by the Flying Scotsman locomotive - regular journey time between Edinburgh and London cut to 7 hours 30 minutes; the city's first traffic lights are at Broughton Street
1928-1939: Edinburgh's first Speedway track operates at Marine Gardens, Portobello
1929: Statues of Wallace and Bruce unveiled at the castle as part of sexcentenary celebrations to mark the granting of Robert the Bruce's burgh charter; Playhouse cinema opens
1930: Actor Sean Connery born in Fountainbridge
1932: George Watson's College moves to Morningside
1932–1935: Edinburgh has headquarters for BBC Scotland
1934: Royal visit of King George V and Queen Mary; several people injured in disturbances when Sir Oswald Mosley addresses a Fascist rally at the Usher Hall
1934–1937: Construction of Sheriff Courthouse (now the High Court of Justiciary) in the Lawnmarket
1935: Ross Bandstand replaces the Victorian bandstand in Princes Street Gardens
1936: 17 per cent of Edinburgh's houses are overcrowded
1939: The Bank of Scotland has 266 branches; the headquarters of Edinburgh Savings Bank is built
1943: The North of Scotland Hydro-Electric Board is created, with its headquarters in Edinburgh
1946: A telephone upgrade takes place, allowing all-city dialling; major fire at Theatre Royal, Broughton Street
1946–1947: Electric trams in the city carry 16 million passengers a month
1947: The Edinburgh International Festival is launched; Turnhouse aerodrome becomes Edinburgh's civil airport; restoration of the Canongate begins
1948: First Military Tattoo performed at the castle (becomes an official part of the Festival in 1950)
1948-1954: Speedway racing revived at Meadowbank Stadium, home of Leith Athletic F.C. (and again between 1960 and 1967)
1949: The Abercrombie Plan proposes a six-lane highway through the city and ring road, but the plan is abandoned after public opposition and legal challenges
1950: Tram system begins to be run down; the first Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo on the Castle Esplanade attracts around 6000 spectators
1951: Two central (manual) phone exchanges handle over 9,500 lines
1952: Bank of Scotland takes over Union Bank of Scotland, giving 453 combined branches
1953: First royal visit of Queen Elizabeth following her coronation
1954: Last judicial execution (by hanging) takes place at Saughton Prison
1955: Museum of Childhood, the world's first museum dedicated to childhood, opens
1956: Edinburgh Corporation Tramways operates for the last time on 16 November; National Library of Scotland opens; USSR premier Nikolai Bulganin and Communist Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev visit Holyrood Palace and Scottish National War Memorial
1958: Queen receives last debutantes
1959: Old Town population declines to 2,000
1960: Infirmary Street baths are damaged by fire
1961: Muriel Spark's novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie appears
1962: State visit of King Olav of Norway; the Union Canal, having fallen into disuse, officially closes
1963: Evening Despatch and Edinburgh Evening News merge; Gaumont Cinema closes after fire (building demolished three years later); Empire Theatre becomes bingo hall
1965: Princes Street railway station closes
1966: Heriot-Watt gains university status
1968: Palladium Theatre fails, and becomes a disco
1968–1969: The Royal Bank of Scotland takes over National Commercial Bank of Scotland
1969: Bank of Scotland absorbs British Linen Bank; Tollcross Bus Depot closes
1970: The Commonwealth Games are held in the city; the St James' Centre, including a new St Andrews House, is completed
1971: Tom Farmer starts Kwik-Fit
1972: A youth hostel opens at Eglinton Crescent; Bell's Mills are destroyed by an explosion
1975: Local government reorganisation replaces Edinburgh Corporation with Lothian Regional Council and the City of Edinburgh District Council; Balerno, Currie, Newbridge, Kirkliston and South Queensferry are included within the city boundary
1976: A new Fountain Brewery is built by Scottish & Newcastle (the last of its buildings demolished in 2012)
1980: Debenhams open a Princes Street store
1980s: Restoration of houses in the Old Town leads to a population increase in the area
1981: Royal Insurance Group headquarters moves to Glasgow
1984: Mikhail Gorbachev, Chairman for the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Soviet Union, stays at Holyrood Palace during his visit to Scotland
1985: The population of the city is 440,000; Edinburgh University institutes a Chair of Parapsychology
1986: The 13th Commonwealth Games are held in the city
1989: National Gallery of Scotland renovated
1990: Edinburgh Castle is first, and Holyrood Palace eighth, in ranking of paid Scottish tourist attractions
1993: First Edinburgh Hogmanay Street Party held as an organised event
1994: Murrayfield Stadium renovated
1996: The City of Edinburgh Council is created, replacing the former District and Regional Councils. Infirmary Street baths close.
1998: The Museum of Scotland is built as an extension to the Royal Scottish Museum.
1999: The Scottish Parliament is opened by Queen Elizabeth
Read more about this topic: Timeline Of Edinburgh History
Famous quotes related to twentieth century:
“In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final saturation with absence.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid- twentieth century.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“In the twentieth century one of the most personal relationships to have developed is that of the person and the state.... It’s become a fact of life that governments have become very intimate with people, most always to their detriment.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)
“Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It’s another part of the twentieth-century mind. It’s the world seen from inside. We’ve come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film.... You have to ask yourself if there’s anything about us more important than the fact that we’re constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.”
—Don Delillo (b. 1926)