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Edinburgh Live
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David McLean

The 'seedy' Edinburgh hotel notorious for fighting sailors and working girls

The area around Greenside in Edinburgh has witnessed enormous changes since the Imperial Hotel was welcoming guests.

For well over a century, the 75-bedroom hotel, which was sited at 143 Leith Street, had an air of elegance that gradually faded away as the decades wore on.

Occupying a handsome Georgian tenement block designed by architect William Hamilton Beattie, the hotel had once been one of the swankiest places to stay in the city.

READ MORE: Recalling glory days of Edinburgh's flagship John Menzies store on Princes Street

However, it began to earn a rather seedy reputation in the years after the Second World War as the deprived Leith Street and Greenside area became something of a red light district.

Able to serve alcohol after the local pubs and dancehalls had chucked everyone out, the Imperial attracted visiting sailors and ladies of the night and steadily became known as an establishment of ill-repute. Violence and illegal activities were not uncommon.

Nevertheless, the hotel wasn't all bad and many locals enjoyed a night at the Imperial, which regularly hosted live music and dancing in the 1950s and 1960s.

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By the end of the 1960s, however, it was becoming clear that the Imperial Hotel's days were numbered. The surrounding area was changing fast as work to reimagine Leith Street and the St James Quarter gathered pace.

Much of Greenside was earmarked for removal too, as the authorities sought to improve living conditions for people in the area.

Writing on the Lost Edinburgh Facebook page, Duncan Pitkeathly said: "I used to go to the Imperial with my mates in the early 1960s. The group that played was very good.

"To stay for the last hour you had to pay for supper, which was uneatable, but worth it for the music."

Brian Horne wrote: "I used to go dancing there on a Sunday back in the 1960s when I was in the USAF at Kirk Newton. It was quite a place and lots of fights used to break out. Really wild."

John Zarecki commented: "My late elder brother played drums in the house band there. Many times they had to use mike stands to keep the fighting soldiers, sailors and punters off the stage. It was a lively place by all accounts."

Norman Anderson recalled: "It was a bit of a brothel in the 1950s. I used to see sailors, especially Americans, coming from Fairley's Dance Hall down to the Imperial to round the night off."

Brian Horsburgh added: "I remember it well. It used to be a regular haunt for dances on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights."

Despite being slap bang in the middle of a comprehensive development area, the Imperial managed to hang on for a number of years, but on one night in 1974 it burned down in a spectacular blaze. Extensively damaged, the hotel was quickly razed to the ground.

In the years following the hotel's demolition, plans were afoot to construct a new Scottish headquarters for the BBC on the site. However, the development would never come to fruition and the land around the former hotel would remain mostly vacant until the opening of the Omni Centre in the 2000s.

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