When Edinburgh locals were trapped in floods at Cameron Toll just weeks after it opened
| Author | David McLean |
| Published date | 28 June 2022 |
| Publication title | EdinburghLive (Scotland) |
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.
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...
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