When I first walked into the basement at 2 Hutchison Terrace, it was derelict, dark, cold and forgotten. But even in that state, the building had a presence. The glazed bricks, the steel beams, the hardened walls, the way the cold sits in the air even on a warm day.
It all told a story.
A real one.
A working one.
For me, it was love at first sight, I adored it immediately. I could see past the dust and the debris and the graffiti. I could see what it could become. Most people would have walked straight back out. I walked further in.
Clients and customers feel the same thing. They arrive at this dark looking industrial building, not quite sure what they are about to see, and then they turn a corner and step into a gallery space that feels like it belongs in a cool city district.
It is unexpected.
It is hidden.
It is special.
You do not know it is there until you are standing in it, a hidden gem and that moment of surprise is part of its magic.
This basement was once the hub of the Scottish Co-operative Society’s fleshing department. And if you stand outside on the road today and look across, you can still see the heart of the old system. The Corn Exchange, the cattle markets, the slaughterhouses. This whole area was the centre of Edinburgh’s meat trade in the early twentieth century. Animals were sold at auction over the road, slaughtered there and then brought across to this building to be carved, processed and prepared for the Co-op’s butcher shops across the city.
There is a cobbled lane that leads directly down to the basement. That lane once carried horse and carts loaded with carcasses, deliveries, supplies, workers. It was a constant flow of movement. A tight, efficient circle. Auction, slaughter, processing, distribution. No long journeys. No waste. Everything happened within a few hundred yards. It was how things should be. Local, direct, purposeful. Nearly field to plate.
Inside the basement, the evidence of that life is still everywhere. The glazed bricks were chosen because they could be scrubbed clean. The steel beams were built to carry real weight. The walls are thick because they had to be and in the back corner sits the old lift mechanism, now boarded over, that once hauled meat up to the ground floor butchery. You can picture it. The pulley, the noise, the rhythm of a working day. This was never a decorative space. It was a grafting space.
And then the building lived another life. In the 1980s and 1990s, when the Co-op no longer needed it and the area was changing, the basement became a hangout for local gangs. The graffiti was still on the walls when I took it on. Names, tags, layers of spray paint. It was rough but it was real. Another chapter in the building’s story.
When I got the keys, I inherited all of it. The industrial past, the dereliction, the graffiti, the cold, the dust, the debris. But underneath the neglect, the bones of the building were still strong. And I knew that if we worked slowly, in stages, we could bring it back to life without erasing its history.
So that is what we did. We peeled it back layer by layer. We cleaned the bricks, exposed the beams, repaired the walls, sorted the electrics, levelled the floors and brought light into corners that had not seen light in decades. Every stage revealed something new. A marking, a fitting, a trace of the building’s past life. We kept what mattered and covered what did not.
And slowly, the space began to breathe again.
What we have now is a gallery that could only exist because of everything the building has been through. It is not a polished white cube pretending to be anywhere. It is rooted in its own story. Industrial, raw, atmospheric and completely unlike any other art space in Scotland.
In a way, the building’s original purpose mirrors what we do now. Back then, it was a tight circle. Local animals, local auction, local slaughter, local processing, local distribution. Nothing wasted. Nothing shipped halfway across the world. A closed loop.
That is exactly what the gallery does with art. We find overlooked work, forgotten work, undervalued work. We bring it in, restore it, reframe it, rehome it. We keep things in circulation. We give pieces a new life instead of letting them disappear. It is a modern version of the same principle. A circle. No waste. No excess. Just reuse, renewal and purpose.
We took a derelict basement, one that had been a butchery, a forgotten storage space, a gang hideout, a cold industrial shell and we turned it, slowly and deliberately, into one of the most unusual art galleries in Scotland and yet the building still feels like itself.
It has not lost its identity.
It has simply found a new purpose.
A new circle.
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