page_title: Gorgie
section_title: Industry
hierarchical_section_title: Gorgie / History / Industry
caption_attribution_description: English: McVitie &amp; Price's Digestive factory sample, 1870-1900. Manufacturers often produced sample-sized boxes to promote their latest designs and products. Victoria and Albert Museum.
context_page_description: Gorgie is a densely populated area of Edinburgh, Scotland. It is located in the west of the city and borders Murrayfield, Ardmillan and Dalry.
context_section_description: With grain whisky consumption growing in the industrialised and railway connected Victorian era, independent whisky blenders needed access to a high quality and high volume producer of grain whisky spirit. In 1885, major shareholders Andrew Usher, William Sanderson and John M. Crabbie, with numerous other whisky-blenders as shareholders, established the North British Distillery Company, which bought the former pig farm, and began developing a distillery.
  The distillery gained access to the Edinburgh Suburban and Southside Junction Railway, which began developing a railway station in Gorgie. This brought about the 1888 development of Stewart Terrace, Wardlaw Place, Wardlaw Street, and the tenement flats of Tynecastle Terrace and Ardmillan Terrace; although Gorgie, west of Robertson Avenue, did not lose its rural character until the early 1900s.
  McVitie & Price Ltd was established in 1830 on Rose Street in Edinburgh. The firm moved to various sites in the city, before completing the St. Andrews Biscuit Works factory on Robertson Avenue in 1888. Though the factory burned down in 1894, it was rebuilt the same year. It is one of the claimed sites of where the digestive biscuit was invented. The site was closed in 1969, when production ceased and operations were transferred to Levenshulme in Manchester, and Harlesden in London. After closure, Ferranti occupied the buildings as an electronics factory until the 1980s.
  In 1906, pharmaceutical research company T&H Smith Ltd moved from Canongate to the district. Now merged with two other Edinburgh-based medical research companies, they form medicinal-opiate producer MacFarlan Smith.
  The chemical plant of Cox's glue and gelatin works, and the Caledonian Brewery also developed in the area.
caption: McVitie & Price's digestive biscuit tin box
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