The House That Art Built: St Margaret's Closes Its Doors
Updated: Oct 7
AI illustration for the4pegs.com, in our So Scottish palette.
The news landed quietly on a Monday: St Margaret's House, the tower block on London Road that has been Edinburgh's most unlikely art factory since 2008, is closing. The owner has served notice, vacant possession is targeted for January 2027, and around 150 artists, makers and community groups have been told to find somewhere else to be.
I've been chewing on it all week, because the question underneath the news is the interesting one. Not 'isn't it a shame' — it is — but: where do 150 creative people actually go? Because this city is full of artists and painfully short of the old-fashioned, generous, cheap spaces that art needs to happen in.
What We're Losing
First, the scale of it. St Margaret's House — run by the charity Scot-ART, formerly Edinburgh Palette — isn't a few studios above a shop. It's nine floors and 200 studios, used by about a thousand people every single week, fully occupied with a waiting list even now.
Inside: a printmaking studio, a ceramics studio with kilns, a recording studio, a theatre, rehearsal rooms, a cinema room, a martial arts dojo, a library, a swap shop and more than 11,000 square feet of gallery space. And it wasn't only artists — charities like Upward Mobility, which supports disabled adults, and Care for Carers worked from there too.
The tenants' voices say it best. 'That's around 150 artists and community groups without a place to go now, myself included,' wrote Calum MacDonald of animation studio Gibbet FX. 'Just getting kicked out with no alternative offered,' said Marion Moreau of Upward Mobility.
Where Do 150 Artists Go?
The honest answer is: onto waiting lists. Every established studio provider in this city is full.
Wasps Studios, the big provider, runs a registered waiting list. Its newest Edinburgh building, Riverside House, offers 80 studios over six floors — a 173-square-foot studio costs around £297 a month, and you'll want your name down early. Coburg House in Leith, a former rubber mill turned home for 70-plus artists and makers, opens its doors to visitors on weekends and has its own waiting list. Leith Makers rents desks and studio space from around £300 a month.
Scot-ART itself still manages other sites — Lochside View and Summerhall here in Edinburgh, and the West Kirk of St Nicholas in Aberdeen — so some tenants may get first refusal there. But there is no obvious lifeboat with 200 seats. Anyone who tells you Edinburgh has enough studio space hasn't tried to rent any.
The Kitchen Table Option
For many, the studio will simply come home. That's the cheapest answer and the quietest one: the spare room becomes the print room, the dining table becomes the workbench.
I say that with love, because I've made work from kitchen tables for years — and it's no substitute. There's no kiln in a New Town stair, no gallery down the corridor, nobody to show a half-finished thing to. The whole point of a building like St Margaret's was the collision of a thousand people's creative lives. A home studio has better tea and far worse company.
Some will do what Jen Skedd of Artisan Stitch is doing — bow out of in-studio teaching after 13 years, but keep the occasional workshop and the online courses. The home pivot works, if you let go of the community part. It's the community part that made the work good.
How About Buying the Churches?
And then there's the thought I can't shake, so I'll just put it out there: the Church of Scotland is selling churches. Roughly a hundred historic buildings are on the block — too few worshippers, too many costly roofs — and they're listed openly on the Kirk's own properties-for-sale page.
Have you seen the prices? A derelict former Free Church at Skerray in the far north went up for offers over £40,000. Even the lovely ones go for less than a one-bed flat in Marchmont. Meanwhile 150 artists in this city are about to be paying studio rent to someone. Do the arithmetic with me: a collective, an arts trust, a community buyout — one building, many small rents, one mortgage. It's not a new idea; it's how half the studio buildings in this city got started, artists clubbing together in the unfashionable spaces nobody else wanted.
Look at what a kirk actually offers: towering volumes, stone walls, and those tall windows flooding the inside with exactly the cool, even north light painters chase around the world. The nave is a gallery. The vestry is a kiln room. The hall is the teaching studio. Old-fashioned spaces — churches, schoolrooms, mills — are what art has always lived in, because art needs space more than it needs polish.
The church on Blenheim Place — spire and all, up for sale right now. Photo: Sharon McMenemy Khan.
And this isn't a thought experiment from the property pages. There's a church up for sale on Blenheim Place right now — walk past it any day of the week. If ever there was a sign that the idea has found its moment, it's a kirk standing empty at the exact moment 150 artists are standing in the street outside their old studios wondering where to go.
It wouldn't be easy. Heating a church is a project in itself, listed-building consents move at their own pace, and somebody still has to stump up the deposit. But when the choice is between a community scattering to kitchen tables and a hundred stone buildings standing empty across Scotland, the sums start looking less like madness and more like the most obvious thing nobody has done yet.
A Quick Guide for Artists Hunting a New Home
If this is you — one of the hundred-odd people at St Margaret's, or just an artist watching the studio squeeze get worse — a few practical steps:
Join the Wasps Studios waiting list now, before you need it (info@waspsstudios.org).
Ask Scot-ART about its other sites: Summerhall and Lochside View in Edinburgh, and the West Kirk of St Nicholas in Aberdeen.
Tour Coburg House in Leith — it's open to visitors every weekend, and makers' studios there come up more often than most.
Keep an eye on the Church of Scotland's properties-for-sale page, and on property auctions — former halls and kirks appear there quietly.
And if a kirk calls you: take a surveyor with you before you fall in love. The romance is real, and so is the roof.
The owners say the building is decades old and no longer meets the standards needed for its long-term future. Fair enough. But the community inside it was built to last — and communities like that don't need a perfect building, just a next one. Edinburgh has the artists, the empty churches and the imagination. It needs somebody to put the three in a room together.
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