The Canongate, Edinburgh Old Town

The Closes and Wynds: Edinburgh's Vertical City

The closes, wynds, and vennels of Edinburgh's Old Town constitute one of the world's most distinctive urban forms — and one of the least understood by visitors who walk through them without knowing what they are looking at. A "close" in Edinburgh is a narrow lane or alley running off the main street, usually named for the family or trade that originally dominated it: Brodie's Close, Anchor Close, Riddle's Court. A "wynd" was a somewhat wider lane, often running downhill from the Royal Mile toward the Cowgate below. A "vennel" was narrower still — barely the width of two people passing.

These names reflect the peculiarly Scottish urban form that developed on the spine of the volcanic ridge between Edinburgh Castle and Holyroodhouse. Unable to expand outward because the ridge's sides dropped steeply, and with the city walls further constraining development, Edinburgh grew upward. The tenement buildings that lined the Royal Mile reached heights — ten, twelve, even fourteen storeys — that were extraordinary by the standards of pre-industrial Europe. And because land within the walls was so scarce and so expensive, the buildings were packed with residents from every level of society, stacked in a vertical arrangement that had no equivalent in English cities: the nobleman on the first floor above the merchant on the second above the craftsman on the fourth above the labourer in the garret, all using the same staircase, sharing the same close.

The social mixing enforced by this vertical arrangement had consequences for Scottish culture that historians have debated for generations. It created — or at least reinforced — a kind of proximity between classes that did not exist in cities arranged horizontally by wealth. It also created conditions of extraordinary insalubrity: the closes, which ran down toward the Cowgate, served as open sewers, and the nightly cry of "Gardy-loo!" (from the French garde l'eau — watch out for the water) warned pedestrians below as residents emptied their chamber pots from upper windows. This was the urban reality behind the Enlightenment salons.

The Reformation and John Knox's Edinburgh

No understanding of the Canongate and the Old Town is possible without understanding the Scottish Reformation, and no understanding of the Scottish Reformation is possible without understanding John Knox. Knox was Edinburgh's own preacher — born in Haddington in East Lothian but formed by the intellectual and religious ferment of the mid-sixteenth-century Church — and he returned to Edinburgh in 1559 to lead the Protestant revolution that would transform Scotland permanently. His house, a beautifully preserved sixteenth-century merchant's dwelling at the junction of the High Street and St Mary's Street, marks what was once the Netherbow Port, the eastern gate of the city of Edinburgh proper before the Canongate beyond it.

Knox's influence on the Canongate and the Old Town was architectural as well as spiritual. The Reformation suppressed the monastery of Holyrood, dissolved the authority of the Augustinian canons who had governed the Canongate as a separate burgh since the twelfth century, and reorganised the religious life of the area around the parish system. Canongate Kirk — still standing on the Royal Mile, its churchyard containing the grave of Adam Smith — was established as the parish church for the Canongate in 1688, when the Canongate's previous church was appropriated for use as the Chapel Royal by James VII. The congregation who built Canongate Kirk were the ordinary people of the lower Royal Mile: craftsmen, merchants, servants, and the families of the Palace households.

Athens of the North: The Enlightenment in the Old Town

The eighteenth century produced what may be the most remarkable concentration of intellectual talent in any city of comparable size in European history. Edinburgh in the decades between 1740 and 1800 was home to David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Joseph Black, James Hutton, and Robert Adam — philosophers, economists, historians, chemists, geologists, and architects who together constituted the Scottish Enlightenment. The city acquired the nickname "Athens of the North," and while the phrase carries a whiff of self-congratulation, it pointed to something real: Edinburgh was, by any measure, one of the great intellectual centres of the Western world.

The geography of the Enlightenment was the Old Town. Hume lived in James's Court, off the Lawnmarket at the top of the Royal Mile, before moving to the New Town. Smith, despite his association with Glasgow University where he taught, was an Edinburgh man who died in Panmure House in the Canongate in 1790 — the house has recently been restored by Edinburgh Business School as a working intellectual centre. The taverns and coffee houses of the Old Town — Johnnie Dowie's in Libberton's Wynd, the Anchor Close taverns where Robert Burns was introduced to the Edinburgh literati in 1786 — were the informal meeting places where these ideas were exchanged, contested, and refined.

For the Scottish diaspora, the Enlightenment has a particular significance. The ideas that emerged from Edinburgh's Old Town in the eighteenth century — Smith's economics, Hume's empiricist philosophy, Hutton's geological theory of the deep age of the Earth — were among the intellectual foundations on which the modern world was built. Scottish emigrants carried these ideas with them to America, to Canada, to Australia, and to India, and the influence of Edinburgh's Enlightenment on the institutions of the English-speaking world has been incalculably large. When Scottish-Americans celebrate their heritage, they are celebrating in part the city that produced the intellectual frameworks within which American democracy, American economics, and American science were initially conceived.

Old Town and New Town: Edinburgh's Great Divide

The construction of Edinburgh's New Town, beginning in 1766 to designs by the young architect James Craig, transformed the social geography of the city in ways that are still visible today. The New Town — the elegant Georgian grid of Princes Street, George Street, and Queen Street, laid out on the ground north of the castle — was explicitly conceived as a place of orderly, clean, rational living: a counter to the chaos, density, and insalubrity of the Old Town. Within two generations, almost every wealthy and middling family in Edinburgh had crossed the valley (now occupied by Princes Street Gardens) to live in the New Town, and the Old Town was left to the poor.

The contrast between the medieval Old Town and the Georgian New Town became one of the defining features of Edinburgh's character and one of the great set pieces of the city's self-representation to the world. Writers from Dr Johnson to Robert Louis Stevenson described it in terms of moral and social allegory: the dark, gothic, layered Old Town against the bright, rational, horizontal New Town, with the castle rock and the valley between them as a physical expression of the contradiction at the heart of Scottish identity — the Calvinist severity and the Enlightenment reason, the medieval past and the modern aspiration, existing in permanent productive tension.