By Bill Rectangle
We are happy to publish this article describing how M. G. Judge, writing as Bill Rectangle, has created a volume detailing his childhood in the Stenhouse estate, combining personal memories and archival sources. You can find several documents about Stenhouse in APE here
When people think of Edinburgh, they often picture the Castle, the Royal Mile and the city’s famous skyline. My own Edinburgh began somewhere much smaller: a house on Stenhouse Drive, local parks, school playgrounds, football pitches, bus routes, records, cassette tapes, early computers and the streets that children turned into their own geography.
Those ordinary details became the basis of STENHOUSE: Growing Up in Edinburgh and Beyond, my first independently authored and self published memoir, a book of roughly 69,000 words covering my childhood from around the age of three to sixteen through the 1980s and into the early 1990s.
The primary source for the book was my own memory. I treated my lived experience as the single source of truth, while using publicly available information, photographs, surviving personal material and conversations with friends and family to help verify chronology, trigger memories and add context. Memory is personal and imperfect, so I did not want external material to replace it. I wanted it to test, support or sometimes challenge what I remembered.
Before publication, around six trusted family members and friends reviewed the manuscript and gave feedback. My partner and I then carried out a final end to end review while on holiday in Gran Canaria. We listened to my own audiobook recording chapter by chapter, discussing every section as we went. Hearing the memoir aloud exposed continuity, tone and detail in a different way from reading it on a screen.
Privacy was equally important. All personal names were changed to protect the individuals behind the memories. Public names of places, streets, neighbourhoods, parks, schools, churches and other public locations were retained where appropriate because they provide real geographical context, atmosphere and a sense of place.
Place itself became a source. One useful example was Saughton Park, which I knew as “the big park” growing up. I used my memories and older photographs to reconstruct how I experienced it, then compared that with publicly available information and my own contemporary drone footage. The park’s later redevelopment was also documented publicly, including by Beechgrove. Bringing those layers together allowed me to compare remembered landscape, documented change and present day visual evidence without pretending that any one source told the whole story.
The audiobook added another layer of preservation. Because I narrated it myself, it records not only the words but my own Edinburgh voice, accent and pronunciation. Written text preserves one kind of cultural record; spoken voice preserves another.
STENHOUSE was also a deliberate personal experiment in AI and modern technology from the outset. My aim was to test how far one person could take a substantial, authentic creative project when their own knowledge and lived experience remained the validation authority. AI and digital tools could assist with organisation, continuity, spelling, grammar, structured follow up questions, checking, production and workload, but they could not supply the memories or decide what those memories meant.
I was interested in the limitations as much as the successes. If an AI generated suggestion conflicted with my memory, appeared invented or could not be supported, I rejected it, corrected it or researched it further. The experiment was therefore not about accepting AI output. It was about testing it against a human source of truth.
The benchmark extended far beyond writing the manuscript. In my own spare time, completely outside my Monday to Friday 9 to 5 employment and around family and other personal commitments, I took the project through writing, editing, independent publishing, paperback and Kindle production, an author narrated audiobook of more than eight hours, website development, visual material, drone footage, promotional production, marketing, outreach and audience building.
Producing the full STENHOUSE advert became another experiment in the complete production process. I spent a considerable amount of personal time editing it and learning from the process. It was enjoyable and challenging, although by the end I was very pleased to finish it, and equally pleased not to see the editing timeline again for a while.
That wider benchmark is still running. I continue to measure what attracts genuine reader, reviewer and media engagement, what produces little response, and what fails completely. Successful and unsuccessful approaches both matter because they help refine how I use AI, how I target outreach and how the wider White Hat Media author, publishing and readership platform develops. For me, this first book is not simply a title uploaded to Amazon. It is an evolving publishing ecosystem.
What I most hope survives, however, is not the technology itself. It is the cultural record: old technology, fashion, music, youth culture, the ways children socialised, and the contrast between an analogue childhood and the later digitally connected world. I am not interested in claiming that one generation was better or worse. I want somebody looking back fifty years from now to have enough evidence to see how everyday life differed.
That is the central lesson STENHOUSE has given me: ordinary personal memories, when carefully preserved, checked and contextualised, can become valuable social history evidence for future generations.
RELATED STENHOUSE FEATURES AND INTERVIEWS:
Living Memory Project
https://livingmemory.live/
Personal testimony, family photographs, place and the importance of preserving ordinary lives and memories.
My Random Musings
https://www.myrandommusings.
A personal author interview covering the source of truth principle and the AI and technology experimentation behind the wider project.
Cultura Magazine
https://cultura.me.uk/2026/09/
Explores STENHOUSE as social and cultural history and the transition from analogue childhood to the digital era.
Brindle Books
https://www.brindlebooks.co.
Discusses memory, photographs, family stories, chronology and the process of checking independently verifiable period details.
The Book Hook Online
https://thebookhook.online/
Provides broader independent author and publishing context around STENHOUSE.
The 90s Rewind Report
https://the90srewindreport.
A spoken interview exploring my personal history and the cultural transition from the late 1980s into the early 1990s.
Aerial view of Stenhouse. Photograph by the author. CC BY-SA 2.0.