The City and the Capital

In 1660, the ‘Guid Toun’ and royal burgh of Edinburgh was very compact. Its nine hundred by five hundred metres has been called ‘a city without streets’, clustered in deep narrow closes round the spine of the Hie Gait/Street, divided from the burgh of regality of the Canongate at St Mary's Wynd; Leith, a separate burgh effectively subordinate to Edinburgh, lay further off. From the heights of the Hie Gait and its buildings, remote views could be seen, but ‘the city had no formal vistas’. The capital's cityscape was largely a series of intimate spaces, miniaturised public environments, accessed through close stairs and courts, some closed off for privacy. Each ‘land’ or high flatted dwelling had a separate address, with tenants or owners usually on different floors, sometimes sharing a floor (though this became more unusual with the passing of time). Property in tofts or strips ran down the closes, while the more public street front faced the main Hie Gait or Canongate. There were some three hundred closes or wynds off what would come to be known as the Royal (Scots) Mile in a configuration of ancient date (the Scots mile is roughly 1,800 metres rather than 1,600). Despite much new building, the infrastructure of the past remained. As Richard Rodger notes, ‘Reincarnated, medieval merchants would have been able easily to find their way around eighteenth-century Edinburgh.’

In 1751, there were 6,845 houses in Edinburgh proper (some of huge size and occupied by many families), with a further 2,219 in the Canongate, which was the location for many of the city's ‘Bawdy Houses’ which threatened the infection of ‘Canon-Gate Breeches’. This eastern burgh, which ran down to Holyrood Palace, was also traditionally the residence of the nobility and of some of the foreign embassies. Nobility with seats in the provinces might also retain a town house in the Canongate or elsewhere in or near Edinburgh. Following the Union, Canongate declined, and ‘growing poverty’ was being recorded in the burgh in the 1720s. However, in that decade a number of the lesser nobility began to drift back to the Canongate, which thereafter retained a strong upper- class enclave until at least the end of the 1760s.