It was supposed to usher in a bold new era of out-of-town shopping in the capital - but, as is often the case, Mother Nature waltzed in to put a dampener on proceedings.
In echoes of the downpour that caused flooding at the new St James Quarter a fortnight after it opened last summer, Cameron Toll Shopping Centre witnessed its very own deluge within weeks of opening.
In the late afternoon of November 3, 1984, hours of heavy rain caused the Braid Burn to burst its banks, flooding the shiny new shopping centre and leaving 100 cars submerged up to the seats in the car park.
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With the water rising, the power was switched off to prevent further hazards and the shopping centre was plunged into darkness. Knee deep in water, Saturday shoppers at the Lady Road landmark waded in the dark and used wooden pallets to get to safety, as buggies, trolleys and empty skips floated by.
It was a terrifying experience for Moira Lamont, who was at Cameron Toll that afternoon with her young son.
She said: "My son and I had been to Savacentre and all of a sudden the doors at the big customer exit going on to Lady Road burst open, and quite a crowd of people were immediately up to their calves and knees in dirty fast moving water.
"It was awful with children screaming, elderly people panicking, and trolleys and push chairs floating against our legs and knocking us aside."
Hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of stock was ruined by the flood water in the state-of-the-art shopping centre's 35 new stores, which included a Safeway supermarket and the giant Savacentre megastore.
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Cars belonging to customers and staff were also wrecked, as Margaret Innes, whose brother-in-law was an employee at Cameron Toll at the time, recalls.
She told us: "My brother-in-law was a shop fitter and was working on a shoe shop. All the stock was binned because it got wet.
"His car was parked near the security room at the loading bay and was hit by a skip that was floating around. It was devastating for the centre at the time."
Costing £33 million to build, Cameron Toll was the first out-of-town shopping centre in Scotland. It had only been open for a little over four weeks when disaster struck.
Among the many affected units at Cameron Toll was a TSB bank that had made headlines as being the first in the UK to open on a Sunday. It was suggested by some that opening shops on the Sabbath had incurred the wrath of God. Others, meanwhile, said that building a large shopping complex on a known flood plain had perhaps not been the best idea.
It later emerged that flood prevention measures implemented during the shopping centre's construction had been insufficient. Engineers had been aware that the Cameron Toll site was in a natural hollow that was prone to flooding in heavy rain and culverted the Braid Burn so that it flowed underneath the shopping centre.
On the day of the flood, it's understood that one of the culvert inlets had become clogged, causing the already over capacity stream to burst its banks and water to rapidly spill out into the car park. Contemporary weather reports record that 44mm of rain fell at Edinburgh Turnhouse within a matter of a few hours.
With much of Cameron Toll under three feet of water, the fire brigade attempted to divert water into drains on the opposite side of the road. This would prove to be another major blunder, as local resident Ralph Swinton recalls.
Ralph, 67, says he had not long moved into his house at Cameron Toll Gardens when the shopping centre first opened.
He says his house had initially been unaffected by the flood - until firefighters started to divert water into nearby drains.
He told Edinburgh Live: “The firefighters ran the pumps down into our street, thinking that the drains would deal with the flood water, but instead the water just continuously flowed down our street.
“I opened my front door and the water was up to my knees. I watched all sorts of things floating down the street - it was quite devastating.”
Leila Williamson, a former resident at Cameron Toll Gardens, was aged just 10 in November 1984 and recalls sandbags being used to protect against the devastating flood water.
She said: "Everyone in the street got handed out sandbags to help stop the flood waters. I remember hearing that were televisions floating about in Savacentre."
Roy Douglas was employed as a night watchman at the shopping centre and arrived after much of the damage had been done. He recalls staff giving customers piggy-backs out of the centre and the sorry state of the stores after the flood water receded.
He said: "I had to wade through the water to reach the staff entrance which was luckily up a flight of steps and above the flood level.
"In the upstairs staff restaurant there will still a few customers who had been taken there for warm drinks and food. These customers were then taken down to the staff entrance where our warehouse staff gave them piggy-backs to the dry level area of Lady Road.
"I was checking all the fire doors had been secured after the water was swept out, and on closing the doors that exited onto Safeways loading bay, I recall seeing a metal skip floating about in their yard.
"My biggest recollection from the following days clean up was that the stores carpeted area in the textiles department, a very large area, the carpeting had all shrank leaving two inch caps where the joins had been."
Following a series of floods in the 1990s and early 2000s, a major flood prevention scheme was initiated along much of the length of the Braid Burn in 2004 at a cost of £43 million. It involved the construction of new walls, embankments and the creation of wetlands to capture excess water and temporary flood storage reservoirs at the Inch and Peffermill.
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