About The White House

The B-listed building originally designed by William Innes Thomson was opened as a road house in 1936 – a cross between a pub and a hotel where people went to play billiards or skittles, take tea or have a drink.

It is in the Craigmillar/Niddrie neighbourhood of Edinburgh then on the city’s outskirts, and, built in an international / modernist / art deco style, is category ‘B’ listed (reference LB30325).

The White House is one of Edinburgh’s last surviving roadhouses of which there were once seven, developed before concern about drinking and driving in response to the growing motorist market, coupled with the challenge of securing liquor licences in central Edinburgh.

Purpose-built on the advent of the motor car, it was “one of the very few Edinburgh roadhouses to reflect the new type of building in an explicitly modern design”. From the late 1950s it declined, acquiring a terrible reputation as a place where people went for a “pint and a fight”, and indeed the whole of Craigmillar was seen as a place of severe deprivation until on being refused violin tuition for her son because of where he lived the late Helen Crummy launched the Craigmillar Festival Society.

After closing and falling into disrepair in the early-2000s, the White House was comprehensively refurbished in the early-2010s, and officially opened in 2013 by Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing, Alex Neil MSP.

The building is now owned by PARC Craigmillar Limited (a subsidiary of the City of Edinburgh Council) and leased out for use as a community café and hub.

Photo  credits, with thanks: Geograph, M J Richardson / The White House;  Richard F