JUNIOR YEAR ABROAD DEPT.

“…Old Edinburgh, so long the most overcrowded and deteriorated of all the world’s cities — yet with its past never wholly submerged, [is] thus one of the most richly instructive, most suggestive to the fresh-eyed observer, to the historic student. [It is] the natural center of the earliest of British endeavors towards the initiation of a school of sociology, with its theories, and a school of civics, with its surveys and interpretations.”

— Patrick Geddes; from CITIES IN EVOLUTION, 1915. The contrast, or the connection, between Edinburgh’s organically rich past, and its stupefyingly subdivided squalor, inspired modern urban studies.

From October, 1984 until July, 1985, my home was in:

Patrick Geddes Hall
Milne’s Court
The Lawnmarket, High Street at the West Bow, just below Castlehill
Edinburgh
Scotland

The Court, and the neighborhood of which it is an integral unit, have played an outsized part in British history, considering its modest obscurity. When Milne built his Court, it was simultaneously an innovation in civilization — urban redevelopment — and an innovation in lifestyle — the apartment house. The six-floor walk-up became copied from Birmingham to Brooklyn to Boyle Heights. 250 years later, when the neighborhood once more had become foul, the Court was saved from a state of near-collapse, becoming a landmark all over again, this time for historic preservation.

“In my visits to these localities, I was much aided by our admirable City Missionaries, whose familiarity with all the corners and crevices of these destitute localities surprised me, and whose well known presence secured me a welcome admission into almost every house. Some of them have furnished me with valuable notes of the condition of the houses in their districts…Mr. Hancock, who visits the north side of the High Street, from North Bridge to Leith Wayund writes: “My district contains about 600 families, of whom only 150 to 200 have decent habitations. In these are included Ashley Buildings, the new building in Chalmer’s Close and Milne’s Court.” [from nearby Carruber’s Close:] “The land is in a ruinous condition, and is at present shored up; and the former entrance has been closed, in consequence of its unsafe state. Rent, 7 pounds 15 shillings; one small room rent, 3 pounds 15 shillings — 12 feet by 6 1/2 occupied just now, by husband and wife; lately occupied by a widow, her two sons, and one daughter, ages from 12 to 16. Several small rooms, where families of from two to four — sometimes taking a lodger besides — live; rents, from 5 pounds to 6 pounds ten shillings.In Elphinstone Ct., one small room, so dark that gas is burned night and day; family of seven; rent one shilling, one penny per week. One small room here, inhabited by a widow, with a grown-up son and daughter, rent, one shilling 3 1/2 pence per week. In the same Court, a family of a widow, with three sons, ages from 21 to nine, and two daughters, ages 18 and ten, sleep and live all in one room. Rent, one shilling 9 1/2 pence per week. In another room and closet, at the same rent, a father, mother and five children — two grown up — live; eldest and youngest sons sleep in a closet without light or air, all the others, in the room. There are about 30 families in this land, nearly all, occupying just one room. Many are shoemakers, using the room also as a workshop. In North Gray’s Close, is a wretched garret, occupied by a father, mother, and five children, paying for it and a light closet, two shillings per week.”

— Report on the Conditions of the Poorer Classes of Edinburgh, and of their Dwellings, Neighborhoods and Families. Prepared by Order of a Public Meeting of the Inhabitants, held in the Council Chamber under the presidency of The Right Honorable The Lord Provost, on the 15th April, 1867. 

The Victorian city fathers studied and evaluated and wrung their hands and collected tithes and prayed for the puir, but it took pioneering town planning genius Patrick Geddes to see that Edinburgh, with all its problems, was the ideal laboratory for social study of the dynamic, living city. He understood that the wrench and displacement of slum clearance — uprooting people’s lives, work and families was its own disease, often as bad as the cough that ran round the tenements.

Throughout the neighborhood there are plaques that mark the Patrick Geddes Trail; you can visit many of the sites of his labor and interest. His spirit certainly walks his trail today — in the 36 years since I was there, much more of the neighborhood has been renovated. Today the crowds in the High Street prove his once-crazy theories: that if you improve the physical fabric of the city, you improve the citizens’ health and happiness, which attracts more healthy citizens, and more wealth to the city.

For instance, the reek-blackened old kirk across the street, which I knew as the derelict Tolbooth St. John, has been refurbished to play once more a leading role in the city, as “the Hub”, or HQ, of the spectacular Edinburgh Festival.

THE BOWHEAD SAINTS:

In 1690, within its narrow walls, the medieval city had been so subdivided and compacted that the elite families were packing to leave. Even the Palace of Marie de Guise, Queen of Scots, had been chopped up for slums. Milne offered healthy and luxurious urban living, near all the action, but set back from the High Street — though he cannily included the lucrative High Street frontage for “mixed use.” In 1745 this wing was seized for a billet of the Highlander bodyguard of Bonnie Prince Charlie in the Young Pretender’s attempt to besiege the Castle. He had taken the “Butter Tron”, or Weigh House, at the top of West Bow, as his base. (Cromwell had done the same thing.)

“The first floor of the large stone land in front of Milne’s Court…was the residence and guardroom of the officers commanding the neighboring post [the Butter Tron]; and the dislodged occupant — a zealous Whig — took his revenge on them after their departure by advertising for the recovery of missing articles abstracted by his compulsory guests.

The court immediately behind appears to have been one of the earliest attempts to substitute an open square for the narrow closes that had so long afforded the sole places of town residence for the Scottish gentry. The main access is adorned with a Doric entablature bearing the date 1690. The principal house adorning the north side of the court [Patrick Geddes Hall] has a handsome entrance, with neat moldings that rise to a peak in the center like a very flat ogee arch. This style of ornament, which frequently appears in buildings of the same period, seems to mark the handiwork of Robert Milne, the builder of the most recent portions of Holyrood Palace, and seventh Royal Master Mason, whose uncle’s tomb, erected by him in the Greyfriars’ Churchyard, records in quaint rhymes these hereditary honors: “Reader, John Milne, who maketh the fourth John, And, by descent from father unto son, Sixth Master Mason to a royal race, Of seven successive kings, sleeps in this place.”

— Sir Daniel Wilson, Memorials of Edinburgh in the Olden Time, 1848.

Milne’s plain facades sketch out a rough form of the Neo-Classical. His Court is a rude, but definite, 17th-century pointer towards the Georgian and Regency complexes of Adam and Playfair over in the New Town. But his idea was not to escape from the Toun, but to make the Toun newly attractive to wealthy sophisticates. Milne and Geddes were brothers across the gulf of Edinburgh’s ages. And the Lawnmarket they both loved was a hurly-burly thing, indeed, in any age:

In the latter part of the seventeenth century, the inhabitants of the West Bow enjoyed a peculiar fame for their piety and zeal in the Covenanting cause. The wits of the opposite faction are full of allusions to them as ‘the Bowhead Saints,’ ‘the godly plants of the Bowhead,’ and so forth…It was in those days [1735] a custom to patrol the streets during the time of divine service, and take into captivity all persons found walking abroad; and indeed make seizure of whatever could be regarded as guilty of Sabbath-breaking. ‘The people about that time,’ says Arnot, ‘were in use to teach their birds to chant the songs of their party. It happened that the blackbird of an honest Jacobitical barber, which from his cage on the outside of the window gave offence to the zealous Whigs by his songs, was neglected, on a Saturday evening, to be brought within the house. Next morning he tuned his pipe to the usual air, “The King Shall Enjoy His Own Again.” One of the seizers, in his holy zeal, was enraged at this manifestation of impiety and treason in one of the feathered tribe. He went up to the house, seized the bird and the cage, and with much solemnity lodged them in the Tolbooth.’ Pennycook, a burgess bard of the time, represents the officer as addressing the bird: ‘ Had ye been taught by me, a Bowhead saint, You’d sung the Solemn League and Covenant, Bessy of Lanark, or the Last Good-night; But you’re a bird prelatic—that’s not right….Oh could my baton reach the laverocks* too, They’re chirping Jamie, Jamie, just like you: I hate vain birds that lead malignant lives, But love the chanters to the Bowhead wives.’

*an archaic and dialectical form of ‘larks’

— Robert Chambers, TRADITIONS OF EDINBURGH

UNESCO: In 1995 the Old Town and the New Town, together, were declared an UNESCO World Heritage Site. The registration specifically cites the city’s importance to the history of urban planning and historic preservation:

The south-facing apartment windows, six storeys tall, get whatever sun Edinburgh affords; while on the other side, maybe eight storeys of windows channeled fresh air right into the corridors off the Firth of Forth. From the point of View of hygiene in the face of respiratory illness (consumption, coronavirus) the fresh air and sunlight made this a new model tenement. High-ceilinged, warmly paneled and gaily painted inside, it was one of the first modern apartment houses.

ten’i-ment, n. a holding, by any tenure: anything held, or that may be held, by a tenant: a dwelling or habitation, or part of it, used by one family: one of a set of apartments in one building, each occupied by a separate family: one of a set of apartments in one building, each occupied by one family: a building divided into dwellings for a number of families (Scot.)

Chambers English Dictionary; 1988. (First published 1901, as ‘Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary’)

Milne’s development was right on the cusp of events. The eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment was just dawning; indeed, since it gave them all apartments to live in, Milne and his imitators helped kick it off. James’s Court, built next door to Milne’s in 1735, ended up housing David Hume, who wrote about how he loved living in the Lawnmarket; and when he left, James Boswell took over his flat, and there hosted Dr. Johnson. Capital was the future, common builders were becoming as important to the urban plan as royal architects had been, and feudalism was dead. Some say the stanes in Milne’s Court were cannibalized from the walls of the crumbling Palace of Marie de Guise, Queen and Queen Regent of the Scots, which had stood next door.
“Lawnmarket” is part of the Edinburgh High Street, aka, the Royal Mile between the Catle and Holyroodhouse Palace. “Lawn” is derived from French “lin,” pronounced nasally, like “lahn.” This was the cloth-market, the linen market. I surmise that the French troops of Marie de Guise, stationed in the Castle — a result of the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France against England — added the faint whiff of garlic to ‘Embro’ dialect.

My house
is granite
it fronts
North,

Where the Firth flows,
East the sea.
My room
Holds the first

Blow from the North
The first from the East,
Salt upon
The pane.

In the dark,
I, a child,
Did not know
The consuming Night

And heard
The wind,
Unworried and
Warm — secure.

— George Bruce (1909 – 2002)

That’s how I felt, bub. And if Jeremy, my roommate, and I went to class and left the windie open and it rained, the North Wind would blow straight from Granton Harbor up the Mound, and shoot through the Pend, and spray into the room with force; and the cleaners would scold us for leavin’ gritty puddles on their nice clean flairs. The cleaners’ moral geo-microclimate — their prime goal, to live, by God, warm and dry on that bare rock exposed to the North Sea — seems central to the Edinburgh experience.

Perilously steep and long, the Pend was both romantic and handy — but also smoky and loud to live above. I myself could never stop from whistling when I tripped it. After a rain, late at night, gritty footsteps echo up and down those 39 steps. (It is a Milne’s Court tradition that these are ‘The 39 Steps.’)

Right at the tunnel, directly under our windie-sool, was a popular spot for drunken lads to sing football songs, or shout curses at their enemies — them bloody wankerrs! When lads stopped to smoke and talk trash, Jeremy and I would fantasize about the old Edinburgh tradition: emptying chamber pots onto the steps, shouting “Gardee-Loo, Gardee-Loo!” (‘gardez – l’eau). But then we would’ae ben rreel bloody wankerrs.

Click for a perfectly mesmerizing 8-minute video of a rainy-day walk around my old World Heritage neighborhood. It starts just outside the Castle gates, then goes down the Castlehill, with Pugin’s Tolbooth St. John’s (now “The Hub) on the right. Then down the Lawnmarket, past Mylne’s Court passage at 1:29, on the left. At 1:35, you’ll spot my pillar box; at 2:35 the phone booth I used to call home; at 2:36 the Old Scottish Parliament; at 3:08 the National Library of Scotland, and from then on down into the charming Grassmarket, where I ate and drank, to take a stunning View back up to the Castle at 8:00. This is how I remember the place — rainy, and cozy, and braw.