Editing Dean Village (section)

===Decline===
The area remained a separate village until the 19th century, but due to the development of much larger and more modern flour mills at [[Leith]], Dean Village's trade diminished.

In 1826, John Learmonth, a future Lord Provost of Edinburgh, purchased the Dean Estate from the Nisbets of Dean with the hope of expanding the Western New Town into the north.

A bridge was needed to access from one side of the high valley to the other (the low-lying village was more or less an irrelevance) to expand the New Town northward. The Cramond Road Trustees discarded plans by other engineers and insisted upon the use of [[Thomas Telford]]. They also insisted that the bridge be toll-free. This was built 1831-2 and opened in 1833 and allowed traffic to bypass the Dean Village altogether.

[[File:The Dean Bridge and Dean Village.jpg|alt=An aerial view of the Dean Bridge and Dean Village|thumb|An aerial view of the Dean Bridge and Dean Village towered over by the town houses of the West End|left|262x262px]]
The four-arched [[Dean Bridge]] spans a width of over 400 feet and is 106 feet above the water level. It carries the Queensferry Road over the Dean Gorge and over the village, and was built at the joint expense of [[John Learmonth]] and the Cramond Road Trustees. The contractors were [[John Gibb & Son]], from Aberdeen. The bridge transformed access westwards from the city and opened up the potential to develop the Dean estate and expand the New Town northward.<ref>Buildings of Scotland: Edinburgh by Gifford, McWilliam and Walker</ref>  The side [[parapet]] of the bridge was raised in height in 1912 as a deterrent to suicides, which were very common here in the 19th century, being more or less guaranteed success.

In 1847 the [[Dean Cemetery]] was created, standing on the site of Dean House. This mansion house, which formed the centre of the Dean Estate, was the one that had been bought by Sir William Nisbet in 1609. It was demolished in 1845 to create the cemetery but some sculptured stones are incorporated in the southern retaining wall (visible only from lower level). Seven surviving panels of the painted ceiling (painted between 1605 and 1627) of the great hall of Dean House are now in the [[National Museum of Scotland]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://nms.scran.ac.uk/database/record.php?usi=000-100-000-625-C |title=Ceiling panel from Dean House, Edinburgh |access-date=2015-01-18 }}</ref> The [[cemetery]], which is one of the few in Scotland run as a non-profit making charity trust (to avoid being asset-stripped), is the resting place of many well-known people, including the [[rail transport|railway]] [[engineer]] Sir [[Thomas Bouch]] and [[David Octavius Hill]].

In 1887 a new bridge called Belford Bridge was built at the foot of the Bells Brae, at the site of an older crossing next to Bells Mill. Between the Belford Bridge and the Dean Bridge, travellers could now effectively bypass the majority of the Dean Village entirely, and the Bells Brae Bridge became much less important as a crossing.<ref name="ravelston"/>

[[File:DeanGallery2009.jpg|thumb|262x262px|The Dean Orphanage, now the Dean Gallery in the West End of Edinburgh, overlooks the Belford part of the Dean Village]]
As the West End and [[West Coates|Wester Coates]] developments expanded north, their buildings began to engulf and surround the old Dean Village. Rows of Victorian crescents were built up to, and around the water of Leith. Two large Georgian properties were built north of the river as part the West End expansion, to the west and north west of the old Bells Mill site. These were the [[John Watson's Institution|John Watson's School]] in 1825 and the [[Dean Orphanage]] in 1834.

The bakers' Tolbooth would be altered in 1900 by Robert Lorimer to become the Cathedral Mission for St. Mary's Episcopal Cathedral.<ref>{{cite web | url=https://canmore.org.uk/site/52613/edinburgh-dean-village-13-15-bells-brae-the-old-tolbooth | title=Edinburgh, Dean Village, 13-15 Bell's Brae, the Old Tolbooth &#124; Canmore }}</ref>

For many years, the village became associated with decay and poverty, and it reached a low point by around 1960.