Background to the New Building
In Edinburgh and the country at large, the beginning of the twentieth century was a time of great change. Queen Victoria's passing in 1901 had marked the end of an era and with King Edward on the throne the country was rapidly developing new technologies which were taking travel, communication and leisure to new heights. The railway had been coming to Colinton since 1874 (it was possible in 1906 to commute the four miles to the centre of Edinburgh in fifteen minutes, faster than today) and with it had come the new homes of the well-to-do city businessmen.
The old Colinton, an isolated village with a manufacturing centre around the mills of the Water of Leith and surrounding countryside gathered around country estates, was giving way to a suburbanised community.
In 1903, the growing and changing congregation of Colinton (St Cuthbert's) Parish Church called a dynamic, young new minister, the Revd Norman McLean (who would later go on to be Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland). Under his leadership the Kirk Session in 1906 considered the congregation's future. Although there had been a church on the site for over 800 years, the then building dating from 1771 was not up to standard and could meet the needs neither of its growing and increasingly sophisticated membership, nor those of its vigorous new minister. The building was basic. It had no lights, no heating, no vestry and insufficient capacity. In the deep winters of the time, the minister had to make his way from the Manse to the church in his preaching garb and in the dark evenings the Beadle collected tallow lamps from local homes. In the rapidly developing Edwardian environment, that would not do.