The Maybe File: Three Tollcross Schemes That Never Got Built

Tollcross is a place that feels settled. The buses swing round the junction, the King's Theatre glows on Leven Street, the Usher Hall holds the corner at Lothian Road, and the whole thing reads like a piece of city that simply happened. Look a little closer, though, and you find a shadow Tollcross: a version that was drawn, consulted on, rendered and then quietly filed away.

Every neighbourhood has a maybe file. Tollcross's is unusually thick. There was a time when this junction was going to be a civic quarter, a time when it was going to be a shopping precinct, and a time when it was going to be a European-style square with trees and café tables. None of it happened. What remains is a useful lesson in how a place can absorb grand schemes and still stay stubbornly itself.

The civic centre that would have swallowed the junction

In the post-war decades, Edinburgh Corporation was thinking big. Across the city, planners were sketching ring roads, precincts and civic centres — the kind of concrete-and-confidence thinking that reshaped places like Glasgow and Birmingham. Tollcross, sitting between the Old Town, the Meadows and the West End, was an obvious candidate for something grander than a traffic junction.

The scheme that surfaces in old maps and newspaper reports was a civic centre anchored by the Usher Hall: concert-hall logic, office blocks, maybe a hotel, all arranged around a junction reimagined as a roundabout. The King's Theatre, which we now treat as a fixture, would have been a very different neighbour in that arrangement. The idea was to turn Tollcross from a crossing point into a destination — a place where the city's cultural business could be conducted at scale.

It never happened. Money moved, fashions changed, and the plans that looked inevitable on paper began to look like overreach. But the civic-centre dream tells you something about how Tollcross was seen by the people who held the pens: as a hinge between Edinburgh's formal centre and its southern suburbs, a place worth organising. What they missed, perhaps, is that Tollcross already had an organising principle. It was the mix. The theatre, the hall, the pub, the bus stop, the chip shop, the tenement stair — none of it needed a masterplan to work.

The shopping centre that wanted to be a mall

By the 1980s, the grand plan had changed shape. This was the decade of the covered mall, the anchor store and the multi-storey car park, and Tollcross was not immune to the sales pitch. Plans did the rounds for a retail scheme that would have pulled the junction's commercial life into a more controlled, weatherproof environment — the sort of place where the shopfronts face inward and the street becomes a service entrance.

On paper, it made a certain kind of sense. Tollcross has always had a practical retail role: the kind of shops you need rather than the kind you photograph. A mall would have tidied that up, given it a logo and a car park, and probably a fountain. But the scheme never got past the drawing board, and the Tollcross that survived is the one made of small doors, odd corners and shops that seem to have been there for ever.

That is not just nostalgia. The failure of the mall plan reveals something about the local economy: Tollcross works because it is porous. People pass through on foot, on buses, on bikes, and they pick things up along the way. A sealed centre would have interrupted that rhythm. The fact that the plan never happened is one reason the junction still feels like a piece of city rather than a piece of retail strategy.

The square that was going to tame the traffic

More recently, the maybe file acquired a third entry: the civic square. In the 2000s, as Edinburgh got more confident about pedestrianisation and public realm, Tollcross was floated as a candidate for a proper plaza — a place where the gyratory could be calmed, trees planted, benches arranged and the whole junction made to feel less like a roundabout with ambitions.

Renders were produced. Consultations were held. The idea of a Tollcross square had obvious appeal: somewhere to sit, somewhere to meet, somewhere to make the junction feel like a place rather than a problem. But the plan was shelved, and the junction stayed a junction.

In 2026, that feels like a smaller loss than it once did. Tollcross is genuinely useful as a crossing point. The buses need it. The theatre crowd needs it. The people walking between the Meadows and the West End need it. A square might have been lovely, but it would have had to compete with the fact that Tollcross is, by nature, a place of movement. The abandoned plan is a reminder that not every successful neighbourhood needs a centrepiece. Sometimes the centrepiece is the crossing itself.

What the maybe file tells us

The Tollcross that never was is not a story of failure. It is a story of correction. Each of these schemes — the civic centre, the mall, the square — was proposed by people who thought they were improving the place. Each was dropped for reasons that were partly practical and partly instinctive. Local memory, the kind you get in queues and on benches, tends to remember the traffic rather than the plans. But the plans are still there in the archives, waiting to be read.

What they reveal is a neighbourhood with a strong immune system. Tollcross has absorbed trams, buses, theatre crowds, students, office workers and late-night chip-shop queues without ever becoming a single thing. The grand plans failed because they wanted to simplify a place that is useful precisely because it is complicated.

The maybe file is worth keeping open. Not because Tollcross needs another masterplan, but because the abandoned ones remind us that cities are made as much by what they refuse as by what they build. The Tollcross that never was makes the Tollcross that is look less accidental — and a good deal more interesting.