LAND PRICES IN EDINBURGH, 1952‐67:
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9485.1974.tb00177.x |
| Author | Joan Vipond,R. A. Furbey,Harry W. Richardson |
| Date | 01 February 1974 |
| Published date | 01 February 1974 |
Smtiish
Journal
of
Political
Economy
Vol.
XXI,
No.
1, February 1974
LAND PRICES IN EDINBURGH,
1952-67:
A STUDY
OF
EDINBURGH CITY CORPORATION
LAND
PURCHASES
HARRY
w.
RICHARDSON, JOAN VIPOND
AND
R.
A.
FURBEY
This paper examines the land purchases made by Edinburgh City Cor-
poration, primarily for public housing development,
in
the postwar period.
The particular objective of the research
is
to shed some light on the deter-
minants of unit land prices with the aid of data obtained from the Scottish
land register-the Register of Sasines, Edinburgh.l
I
DESCRIPTION
OF
THE
DATA
AND
ITS
CHARACTERISTICS
Basic
Data
The data base is given in Appendix Table
I.
This presents the informa-
tion available on the
51
land purchases made by Edinburgh Corporation
since the
war.
These all took place between
1952
and
1967.
For all but five
of the purchases it was possible to extract information from the Sasines
Register
on
date of purchase, seller, price and size of parcel. Although the
Register specifies the approximate location of the land areas involved, it is
difficult to locate them precisely in space. However, for all but four of the
sites it was possible to identify the purchases by distance zone and by sector.
The distance zones were constructed by means of annular rings from the city
centre (taken to
be
the junction of Princes Street and the Mound) at
quarter-mile intervals,2 while sectors were made up of eight pie-slices
of
equal base angle radiating from the centre.
Prior to the unit price determinant analysis, it may be helpful to present
some general comments on the distribution of the data.
1
This research is one outcome of a much wider project on residential property
prices and land values in the City of Edinburgh and in Scotland as a whole financed
by the Social Science Research Council. We are very grateful to the Council for its
financial support. Subsequent papers will deal with
intw
uliu
private land purchases,
the determinants of residential property values in Edinburgh spatially and over time,
Scottish house prices and their determinants, inter-city comparisons
of
property
values, the changing social composition of buyers and sellers
of
residential property,
and other topics. This work would not have been possible without the generous
co-operation of the Keeper of the Register, Mr.
G.
Black, Mr. R. C. Fulton and the
research assistants who extracted the data. We thank them all.
a
It was impossible to obtain greater accuracy in the distance measures, partly
because of the imprecision in the locational descriptions given in the Register,
partly because some
of
the
sites were quite large and would have overlapped two
or
more rings if Ithe bands had been narrower.
67
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