Maintaining a tenement in Scotland can be complicated. There are the pesky plants that love to take root in the stonework and owners that live hundreds of miles away, among other problems that spring up when caring for a building that is hundreds of years old.
But as the custodians of Scotland’s ageing tenements, experts say it’s critical to pay attention early and persuade neighbours to do the same – whether it’s an overflowing gutter or a sliver of slate lying on the pavement.
When you purchase a flat in a tenement building, your responsibilities extend beyond the elevated ceilings and the walls within. There is the roof and the gutters and the outside walls, parts of the building you may never touch or see. But if something goes wrong, you could find yourself in possession of a bill the size of a second down payment.
Fortunately, some of the simplest ways of checking on these obscured areas are pretty simple. You can wait for a miserable wet day, go outside, and look up.
Silke Schneider, head of conservation at Edinburgh World Heritage, says heavy rain can expose blocked gutters and cracks in downpipes. Damp areas on external walls or around wallheads can be warning signs too, as can cracks and pieces of slate or stone found on the ground below. Good maintenance, she says, begins with regular inspection.
Not every tenement dweller needs to be a building surveyor, but learning how to notice when an old building is beginning to change can save you and your neighbours a great headache. In a tenement, small problems can have a way of becoming everybody’s problem.
Water is the enemy
Scotland is no stranger to water, but the frequent downpours and deluges are a serious adversary to our lovely built heritage.
“In a wet climate like Glasgow’s, rainfall is most likely to be the biggest issue affecting a tenement,” said Niall Murphy, director of Glasgow City Heritage Trust.
Keeping water moving safely off and away from a building is therefore among its most important defences. Overflowing or broken gutters and rainwater pipes, gaps where the mortar between stones has weathered away, and patches of damp on external stonework or internal plaster can all be seen without climbing onto a roof.
Murphy recommends having rainwater goods cleaned twice a year and checking them during and after heavy rainfall. Neglect can have consequences far removed from the original blockage: he says poorly maintained gutters can contribute to wet and dry rot and erosion of stone, and even subsidence as water damages the building fabric.
There may also be a less visible cost. When the stone at the top of a tenement becomes saturated, Murphy says it can behave “as a sponge”, drawing heat out of the building.
Schneider recommends annual inspections of roofs, drainage and high-level stonework, particularly ahead of winter storms and heavier rain. Anything requiring access at height, she stresses, should be handled safely, with professional help recommended.
Traditional timber windows need maintenance too. She suggests painting them periodically, generally every five to seven years, and more frequently where they are particularly exposed.
The objective is to keep the shell of the building wind- and watertight.
What is sprouting from your building?
Scotland's stock of tenements is ageing (Image: GT)
There are warnings that are less obvious than water for a traditional building. Buddleia pushing boldly from stonework may provide a picturesque elevated forest along a Glasgow street, but for any conservation aficionado the green and purple flourish signals trouble.
Murphy says its tough, fibrous roots can crack soft lime mortar and force stones apart, creating openings for water. If allowed to develop, he says, the damage can eventually affect structural stability. Removing only the visible plant may not be enough; the roots also have to be dealt with to prevent it growing rapidly back.
Old buildings do not generally improve while nobody is paying attention to them. Schneider says waiting for failure tends to encourage patch repairs instead of properly planned, lasting work, ultimately costing more. And an inappropriate repair can itself hasten deterioration. Traditional stonework requires mortar softer than the surrounding stone, so that the mortar deteriorates sacrificially before the masonry does.
Scotland’s tenements are not alike. In Edinburgh’s New Town, much of the stone is Craigleith sandstone, which Schneider describes as comparatively hard. Glasgow's red sandstone is softer and more susceptible to erosion and decay. The correct repair, in other words, depends on the building.
The roof above somebody else’s flat is still your problem
The physical defect is only half of tenement maintenance. The other half is persuading several households to do something about it.
A leaking roof might reveal itself first through the ceiling of a top-floor flat. But while the greasy pools of damp might be flowering on their ceiling, it doesn’t mean it's solely the top-floor owner's responsibility.
Murphy says owners are generally responsible for maintaining and repairing the wider building, including foundations, external walls, roofs and gutters, because these form part of the common fabric on which the properties depend. The precise division of costs may vary, particularly in mixed-use buildings containing shops, and owners should consult their title deeds.
Tenants who spot problems should contact their landlord or letting agent, he says. He also recommends something decidedly less formal: a residents' WhatsApp or email group. Communication matters because getting everyone in a tenement to agree to major structural repairs can be one of the central difficulties.
How to save your building before disaster knocks
Carl Smythe and his wife bought a top-floor tenement flat in Dundee in the 1980s. Over the years, its owners developed a solution to the familiar cycle in which somebody discovers damp, obtains a roofing quote and then begins asking the neighbours for money. The eight owners began putting money aside regularly.
Their common fund meant that the building did not always have to begin raising money from zero when work arose. In time, the arrangement became their Owners Association Fund. Money paid into it remained with the building when someone sold their flat rather than following the departing owner.
Saving for tomorrow, Smythe discovered, can be more difficult to sell than paying for today.
Some costs are predictable and comparatively small. Others may appear once in five, 20 or 50 years. Smythe says the future level of contributions has consequently proved one of the owners’ most contentious discussions.
What about owners who live somewhere else?
Absentee ownership is often assumed to make this kind of collective management harder. Smythe offers a counterexample.
He no longer lives in Dundee but in Sheffield. Another owner, he said, travels extensively in the Far East and Africa and is rarely in Britain. But for them, distance itself has not been an obstacle.
“It's not a problem at all,” Smythe said. Owners communicate through email, WhatsApp and online meetings. What matters, in his experience, is establishing current contact details and giving owners a way to participate.
The communications problem that might once have involved letters travelling back and forth has changed. “If people are willing to engage,” he said, “it doesn’t take very much time to agree to something by email.”
Of course, willingness to engage is the key part.
Murphy recommends writing to owners who are not participating so there is a record of the communication. Making someone aware of their responsibilities may sometimes help. Where money is the obstacle, he points to Glasgow City Council’s Missing Shares Scheme as a possible source of assistance in some circumstances.
Some conservation work may also qualify for financial assistance. Glasgow City Heritage Trust offers grants for eligible work to listed tenements and those within conservation areas. Schneider says residents elsewhere can approach their local City Heritage Trust, although funding is limited and generally subject to a selection process.
Should Scotland make owners plan ahead?
After decades of doing this voluntarily, Smythe has come to believe that maintaining Scotland's tenements should not depend entirely upon individual groups of neighbours inventing their own arrangements.
He supports legislation requiring some form of reserve fund, removing at least part of the recurring argument about whether owners ought to save for the future. He would also favour periodic professional building inspections. Five-yearly inspections “sound to me like a good idea”, he said.
The question of whether Scotland needs new laws to address its tenement crisis is increasingly part of the wider debate over how the country protects its ageing housing stock.
His ambitions go further. If owners' associations had a formal legal status, he argues, buildings could potentially save collectively and borrow for major works that their reserve funds could not cover. That could become increasingly relevant as owners confront the challenge of improving the energy efficiency of Scotland's older housing stock.
For Smythe, greater structure is not principally about creating more bureaucracy. It is about making the stewardship of a shared building easier. There is something almost counterintuitive about this view of home ownership. We tend to understand buying a property as acquiring something. His experience of the tenement has led him towards thinking about it as something borrowed.
“Although we are owners,” he said, “we’re really just renting it and passing it on to the next generation.”
That future-facing philosophy begins with some mundane acts in the present, from cleaning a gutter or noticing a crack, to just answering an email from a neighbour. Or, the next time the rain begins, putting on a coat, stepping outside and looking up.
Marissa MacWhirteris a columnist and feature writer at The Herald and editor of The Glasgow Wrap*- a free daily newsletter curating the best of Glasgow’s local news, delivered each morning without ads, clickbait, or digital clutter. She can be found on* Instagram*,* X*, and* Bluesky*.*