Summerhall: The Dick Vet and the Road to Dolly

Why is it significant?

You arrive at a big, rambling stone building with a fine early twentieth-century frontage, where posters for plays, gigs and exhibitions crowd the doors. Today Summerhall is one of the busiest arts venues in the city.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You arrive at a big, rambling stone building with a fine early twentieth-century frontage, where posters for plays, gigs and exhibitions crowd the doors. Today Summerhall is one of the busiest arts venues in the city. But look closer at its courtyards and long wings: it was built for animals... and for the people who healed them.

The story begins with William Dick, the son of an Edinburgh farrier, who studied at the veterinary college in London and came home convinced that Scotland needed one of its own. In 1823 he began teaching veterinary medicine in Edinburgh, and his school grew into the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College. In 1916 it moved into these buildings at Summerhall, with dissecting rooms, stables, laboratories and lecture theatres.

For most of a century, generations of vets learned their craft here, from treating the working horses of a city that still ran on horsepower to the science of farm animals, dogs and cats. Around 2011 the school completed its move to a modern campus at Easter Bush, south of the city, and these buildings were reborn as Summerhall, with performances staged in former lecture theatres and exhibitions in old laboratories.

And here the walk closes a circle. At Easter Bush the Dick Vet now works side by side with the Roslin Institute, today part of the University of Edinburgh, the same institute where Dolly the sheep was born. From anatomy theatres supplied by grave robbers to a cloned sheep in a glass case, the Southside has watched almost the whole story of modern medicine and biology unfold.

Think back over the walk: the surgeons' first hall, the women pelted with mud at Surgeons' Hall, Darwin running from the operating theatre, Bell reading strangers like books, Nightingale's nurses and the children of Sciennes. The Meadows are just round the corner... a good place to sit on the grass and let it all settle.