Victoria Park

A public park before the camp

The Burgh Council acquired the original park land in 1888 and 1914. The property titles dedicated it to public recreation for the people of Peebles. At Springhill Road, the surviving entrance has cream sandstone gatepiers, iron gates and railings. One pier carries the date 1887 and the other the initials VR. These structures belong to the park’s earlier civic history.

Recreation kept its foothold beside the camp. The burgh acquired ground for tennis courts and a clubhouse at Springhill Road in 1923 and added to it in 1959, so the sporting use brackets the camp years on either side. The main park is registered at Kingsmeadows Road and remains common good property, held for use only as a public park and recreation ground for the community of the burgh.

The Gazetteer for Scotland names the donor and the occasion. It records that the park was gifted to the people of Peebles by Sir John Hay of Haystoun and Kingsmeadows to mark the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1887, and that Peebles Burgh Council acquired further land in three tranches, in 1914, 1923 and 1959. The gift date matches the year inscribed on the surviving gatepier, while the Common Good Register dates the council’s acquisition of the original park land to 1888.

Huts across the park

Historic Environment Scotland classifies the site simply as a twentieth century military camp, site number NT23NE 62, centred on NT 2550 3990 in the parish of Peebles. The camp was identified from RAF vertical air photographs 106G UK 1319, frames 5245 to 5247, flown on 28 March 1946. It consisted mainly of Nissen huts, some set within banks, with several trench systems visible at its south-eastern end.

The camp was larger than the park. The record notes that it extended south-east into what is now a housing estate and north-west onto the adjoining map sheet NT24SE. No operator, unit, capacity or dates are recorded, and the underlying photographs have not been inspected here, so the huts can be described but not counted or dated.

The Gazetteer for Scotland supplies the operator the archaeological record lacks. It states that during the Second World War the park was taken over by the army and Nissen huts were built to accommodate troops, and that these were cleared after the war with no trace remaining. It gives no dates for the takeover or the clearance, and no unit or capacity.

Ukrainian accommodation

Victoria Park appears twice in Peter Kormylo’s work: on his map of Ukrainians in displaced persons and prisoner of war camps in Scotland between 1946 and 1951, and in his appendix of Scottish and northern English hostels that held significant numbers of ethnic Ukrainians. The map’s data is drawn from lists of camps held in the archives of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain and of the Ukrainian Catholic Church in Scotland.

Behind those lists is a priest’s notebook. Father Aleksandr Babij, an itinerant Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest who reached Scotland at the same time as the European Voluntary Workers, set out to identify and visit the camps scattered across the country, recording both the places and the names of residents who gave money towards buying a church building. Kormylo reconstructed his map from the original daybook.

Inclusion in that list carries a specific meaning. Kormylo writes that the camps and hostels it names are those where Ukrainians had registered themselves as formal branches of the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain. Bound files of the newspaper Ukrainska Dumka carry short reports of daily life from these camps, although contributors often wrote anonymously or under pseudonyms because they feared forced repatriation. No such report has yet been traced for Peebles, so what the Victoria Park branch did is not known.

Victoria Park was not isolated. On Kormylo’s map it sits in a Border Counties group alongside Thorncroft Hostel at Selkirk, Burnbrae Hostel at Galashiels and Springwood Park Hostel at Kelso. Across Scotland, he puts the 1947 influx at almost two thousand Ukrainian displaced persons working alongside Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians. That is a national figure and says nothing about how many people slept at Peebles.

After the huts

The huts were cleared after the war. By the 1988 aerial survey examined by RCAHMS, no trace of the camp was apparent. Cleland Avenue and Victoria Park Drive occupy parts of the former camp area, while the park itself returned to public use. In 1965 the council acquired additional land beside Springhill Road to strengthen access to the main park.

The park today

The surviving gates and railings were listed in 1995. Open grass, trees, paths and recreational facilities now define the park. Jim Barton’s 2025 photograph shows a modern curved shelter beside a path, part of the public landscape that followed the camp’s removal.