Thursday July 17th 2025
Dalkeith Water Tower
Written by Midlothian View Reporter, Liam Eunson
A Victorian water tower in Dalkeith constructed in 1879, that served the people of Eskbank, was turned into a bespoke home in 1989 by Susan and Gerry Goldwyre.
Moving from Edinburgh, Susan Goldwyre and her husband Gerry Goldwyre, architect and former two time Masterchef winner, acquired the abandoned and hollow tower in 1988 from the old Dalkeith Community Council, taking 18-months to transform the Victorian water storage tower into a bespoke home.
After meeting through sports, the couple both grew interested in dilapidated old buildings with Gerry dreaming of building a home on a bridge. Scanning through the news one night when the two lived in Edinburgh, Susan came across the iconic Dalkeith Water Tower up for sale, after setting architect Gerry on a mission with a dream of turning the abandoned building into what it is today.
Susan explained, “Scanning through the evening news, I came across an article that said a water tower was up for sale and I jokingly said to Gerry, ‘Look at that, that’s really interesting’ and Gerry then went off on a complete mission”.
The tower was constructed by the Victorians to supply water to the Eskbank area, using gravity to allow the water pressure to pump water to the nearby homes. It didn’t serve Dalkeith but it did serve homes in Eskbank. Water being delivered to homes from gravity meant that the homes the tower supplied water to could only have bathrooms on the ground floor.
It was a successful water tower but became non-functioning during the 2nd world war, leaving it abandoned until Susan and Gerry set their eyes on it. Prior to the war, there were complaints from locals regarding the water quality, leaving it abandoned after World War 2.
Dalkeith Water Tower
“I don’t think the board of decommissioning came into things in those days. They just shut the door and didn’t go back”, Susan explained, “So it sat there all that time. I mean, goodness knows what people thought of it before they eventually decided to sell it in 1988”.
After being gifted to the Dalkieth and District Community Council by the Midlothian Council, the original plan was to turn it into a Camera Obscura or another public building. Creating designs and ideas, they then realised it wouldn’t be possible due to the tower’s layout and the state it was in after being left empty for years.
After realising they couldn’t follow through with their plans due to expenses and logistics, the community Council decided to get a lawyer and sell the tower, this is when Susan and Gerry stepped in.
“So it went up for sale and we met the community councillors given the task of selling the tower. They put it on the market, we put in an offer, we didn’t get it. We were unsuccessful”, Susan explained. Another couple from Glasgow were the successful bidders.
Despite being unsuccessful the first time around, they were still able to buy the tower after the previous buyer pulled out almost a year later.
“We bought it from the Dalkeith Community Council and Gerry established occupancy. I was working and Gerry had a full-time job renovating a water tower.”
On day one after purchasing the tower, Gerry moved in and established occupancy by putting a phone line in the building.
Gerry Goldwyre at the top of the tower after renovation
Gerry explained the initial process of acquiring the building, saying, “It was a complete mission but I could see in my head how it could work. I thought if we don’t get permission, then we’ll put floors in and then rent the building out. That was my fall back position.”
“The council at the time were absolutely helpful. Kirsty Towler was the planning officer at the time. She said if you’re not going to do it then nothing is going to happen and the building will just fall into despair.
It became the couple’s job to renovate in 1988 and they finished in late 1989, taking around 18-months for the renovation, including planning and building control.
The building was empty when given up by the Community Council, and Gerry understands that Midlothian Council took away the water tank at the top of the tower, cutting it into sections and dropping it down to the ground floor prior to its sale.
The water tank constructed by the Victorians was 12-foot deep and sat on the top floor. Caretakers weren’t able to easily walk up and down the tower in order to read the water level in the tank. Instead, there was a gauge on the wall just above ground floor level with a easily readable indicator painted on the wall. The tank must have held a float attached to a long piece of material with a weight that came all the way down the tower. When the water level was low the float sank lower in the tank and the attached weight then rose up. The indicator on the wall reads “Empty” at the highest readable point on the gauge. The gauge was preserved during the works to convert the tower and it can be seen on the walls on the first and second floor bedrooms.
The tower’s basement was the same size as the water tank as the Victorians future proofed the tower so if the water tank burst the basement could contain the water. The basement exists today and is a useable space.
With Gerry being an architect and visiting a replica tower in the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, he began his mission of transforming the historic abandoned building into the bespoke home we see today. Selling Susan’s Edinburgh flat for the money to renovate, the couple moved in with her mother during the renovation, focusing their time in transforming the property.
“There wasn’t really any features inside to preserve, it was just bricks and pigeons”, Susan highlighted, “No floors, nothing at all. There were no floors when we bought it, there was just a steel beam.”
The first step in renovating was getting rid of the hundreds of pigeons that lived in the tower. Susan did highlight that ‘it took ages to clean out the mess they made’.
Gerry explained that the most difficult part was installing the new floors and a spiral staircasing, saying, “I tried everything in my power to get the staircase right because a staircase over 6 or 7 floors takes up a lot of space. We started on the staircase and put these two steel columns in but they don’t manufacture columns 17 metres long, they only make them half that length.”
“So we made new columns but if you think about it, when we got past the second floor, how would we have got the columns up for the second part of the staircase? So even before we began the staircase, we had to have all the steel columns brought in and just left in the house.”.
“So we got a blacksmith and he had gone for quotations but it was extortionate. I said to the blacksmith, could you make 25 steps for another job? Now that you’ve made them can you stick them to these columns? He got up to the 1st floor and said, ‘I’m building a spiral staircase aren’t I’, and it was for an absolute fraction of the cost.”
The Water Towers spiral staircase after renovation
The original tower had columns in each of the eight corners (due to the tower being an octagon) so the water pipes could be protected from weather. These were preserved and acted as steel support for both the staircase and floors that were installed.
The couple explained that the hardest part of the process was the sequencing of the floors.
Susan said, “We spent a long time working out, what would you like to do when you get home from work? Where would you like the bedroom, your kitchen, and your bathroom? It took us a long time to decide all of that.”
This decision, alongside issues with window placement, allowed the couple to organise the finished floor plan with the first and second floor being a bedroom, the third being the kitchen, fourth the master bathroom (there are toilets in the bedrooms), the top floor being the living room that has a 360 degrees balcony.
“The external balcony is new”, Gerry explained, “At one stage someone from historic buildings once said, ‘we don’t want a balcony because it will ruin the industrial nature’. What? Now everybody says, ‘That’s nice, how long has the balcony been there?’, we say 1988, we put it on.”
The process of planning the floors was made difficult due to the tower having no windows, only openings for ventilation, and Historic Scotland were refusing to allow any changes to the external appearance.
Despite this, they allowed Susan and Gerry to create windows by knocking some bricks out of the wall and bricking up some of the previous ventilation openings. This forced a room with floor height windows to become the bathroom.
“So in doing all that, we ended up with a room, given the floor heights, where the windows were going to be floor level”, Susan explained surrounding the window issues, “There are not many rooms in your house where you’d like floor level windows, so that became the main bathroom.
“So we put the bathtub in there and then worked out everything from there. So below it were the bedrooms and the kitchen and above it was the living room.”
After the renovation, the couple lived in the tower for 28-years before building a house next to the tower in 2009. In that 28-years the tower went through another renovation due to a burst pipe in 2010 flowing down the floors and ruining the interior, causing a major mess that forced them to re-do everything.
The process of purchasing the historic tower and taking 18-months to renovate has allowed Gerry and Susan to grow a close bond with their project.
“Now, I think, we are known as the water tower people”, Susan said, “At the time I thought, I didn’t want to come live in Dalkeith. Gerry went off and got so excited about it and just thought, ‘I don’t want to live out in Dalkeith.”
“So the idea that it might become a plumbers merchant store or, I even thought at the time, it could become a document store because I was working in an industry where we were looking to store lots of paperwork. I thought, for the money we paid for it, it could just become a really big store.”
“In the end, we moved in, now we are embedded in Dalkeith I would say, much more than we expected to be. This is why we find it hard to think about selling the tower because it’s our post box, it’s our address, I still consider it my home”.
Despite this, since moving into a property next to the tower, Dalkeith Water Tower has been made available for short-term rental on AirBnB, showing great success, being almost fully-booked during the summer months.
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