Pat here:
As a lover of Georgian and Regency history, I’ve always been fascinated by Edinburgh. The image of an ancient city crushed together between a fort castle on a hill and a palace a mile away, with the New City slowly forming beneath it, has made me crazy until I could actually see it for myself. And now that I have, I’m dying to write about it. The wynds and the university across the bridge and a towering fortress and a palace are like something out of Pratchett.
The area around modern Edinburgh has been occupied since the early Middle Ages, thanks to the promontories that make for excellent lookouts and secure settlements. By the middle of the 14th century, the old town was already being called the capital of Scotland. New Town was established about mid 18th century, just about the time my first Malcolms showed up in my authorial universe.
Just as a fun factoid—in the 16th century, the Scots built walls around most of the city to prevent an English invasion. That worked well, didn’t it? In the process, what they did was create a city of 140 acres that had to build upward to expand, thus creating the crazy quilt of tall buildings and narrow lanes, in an attempt to cram everyone inside the walls. By the first half of the 18th century, Edinburgh was one of the most overpopulated, unsanitary towns in Europe. Because of this overcrowding, tradesmen, aristocrats, and professionals lived and worked in close proximity, often in the same building, thus creating one of the more egalitarian societies of the time.
Sir Gilbert Elliot described the town in the 1700s:
“Placed upon a ridge of a hill, it admits but of one good street, running from east to west, and even this is tolerably accessible only from one quarter. The narrow lanes leading to the north and south, by reason of their steepness, narrowness and dirtiness, can only be considered as so many unavoidable nuisances. Confined by the small compass of the walls, and the narrow limits of the royalty, which scarcely extends beyond the walls, the houses stand more crowded than in any other town in Europe, and are built to a height that is almost incredible.”
As I said earlier, by mid-18th century this situation became untenable and rafts of architects and engineers began building the New Town to the north of the steep hills of Old Town. Little by little, the professionals moved from the crumbling old city to the fresh new houses, tenements, and landscaped terraces below. The 18th century brought a huge boom in intellectual enlightenment, including the establishment of the famed Faculty of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. The town expanded exponentially.
My interest for the current notion playing in my brain kicks in during the Victorian era. I need to dig in deeper but by 1865, Old Town was a slum so awful that the inhabitants seldom saw the light of day and the citizens of New Town scarcely knew of their existence. But the Scots, being of egalitarian and well-ordered nature, decided the slums had to go. They passed an “improvement” act that resulted in the Victorian buildings that can be seen today. And lo and behold, even then, they realized that new developments needed cheap new housing or they just created more slums.
And this is where I want to start my research.
I’m finding it exceedingly difficult to unearth the details of that slum renovation, but I’ve only just begun my search. I left most of my library behind when we moved to our coastal cottage, so I’m at the mercy of libraries and internet. Right now, I’m simply browsing through Wikipedia, hunting resources, tracing them to Google Books, and cutting snippets for my file. Once upon a time, I would have had to go to the library, check out rafts of books, peruse their bibliographies, order interlibrary loans (that drove my impoverished library insane), then physically copy pages of ancient tomes for my files. I still have file folders of research in my cabinets. Computer files are so much more portable!
The truly frustrating part of doing research by internet is that so many references are obscure publications not online or costing small fortunes just to look at. The internet has vast resources even the library can’t duplicate, but one must be a member of the right organization to enter their domain. But I shall persevere!
Anyone have any recommendations on great books about Old Town Edinburgh? Do you ever do research the internet way?