A project for a new street on the site of Halkerston’s Wynd, leading
by a bridge to the grounds of Mutrie’s Hill, where a suburb might be
erected, was formed before the end of the seventeenth century.[2] It
was a subject of speculation to John, Earl of Mar, during his years
of exile, as were many other schemes of national improvement which
have since been realised—for example, the Forth and Clyde Canal. The
grounds to the north lay so invitingly open that the early formation
of such a project is not wonderful. Want of spirit and of means
alone could delay its execution. After the Rebellion of 1745, when
a general spirit of improvement began to be shown in Scotland, the
scheme was taken up by a public-spirited provost, Mr George Drummond,
but it had to struggle for years with local difficulties. Meanwhile,
a sagacious builder, by name James Brown, resolved to take advantage
of the growing taste; he purchased a field near the town for £1200,
and _feued_ it out for a square. The speculation is said to have ended
in something like giving him his own money as an annual return. This
place (George Square) became the residence of several of the judges
and gentry. I was amused a few years ago hearing an old gentleman in
the country begin a story thus: ‘When I was in Edinburgh, in the year
’67, I went to George Square, to call for Mrs Scott of Sinton,’ &c.
To this day some relics of gentry cling to its grass-green causeways,
charmed, perhaps, by its propinquity to the Meadows and Bruntsfield
Links. Another place sprang into being, a smaller quadrangle of neat
houses, called Brown’s Square.[3] So much was thought of it at first
that a correspondent of the _Edinburgh Advertiser_, in 1764, seriously
counsels his fellow-citizens to erect in it an equestrian statue of
the then popular young king, George III.! This place, too, had some
distinguished inhabitants; till 1846, one of the houses continued to
be nominally the town mansion of a venerable judge, Lord Glenlee. We
pass willingly from these traits of grandeur to dwell on the fact of
its having been the residence of Miss Jeanie Elliot of Minto, the
authoress of the original song, _The Flowers of the Forest_; and even
to bethink ourselves that here Scott placed the ideal abode of Saunders
Fairford and the adventure of Green Mantle. Sir Walter has informed
us, from his own recollections, that the inhabitants of these southern
districts formed for a long time a distinct class of themselves, having
even places of polite amusement for their own recreation, independent
of the rest of Edinburgh. He tells us that the society was of the first
description, including, for one thing, most of the gentlemen who wrote
in the _Mirror_ and the _Lounger_. There was one venerable inhabitant
who did not die till half the New Town was finished, yet he had never
once seen it!
The exertions of Drummond at length procured an act (1767) for
extending the royalty of the city over the northern fields; and a
bridge was then erected to connect these with the elder city. The
scheme was at first far from popular. The exposure to the north and
east winds was felt as a grievous disadvantage, especially while houses
were few. So unpleasant even was the North Bridge considered that a
lover told a New-Town mistress—to be sure only in an epigram—that
when he visited her, he felt as performing an adventure not much short
of that of Leander. The aristocratic style of the place alarmed a
number of pockets, and legal men trembled lest their clients and other
employers should forget them if they removed so far from the centre
of things as Princes Street and St Andrew Square. Still, the move was
unavoidable, and behoved to be made.
It is curious to cast the eye over the beautiful city which now extends
over this district, the residence of as refined a mass of people as
could be found in any similar space of ground upon earth, and reflect
on what the place was a hundred years ago. The bulk of it was a farm,
usually called Wood’s Farm, from its tenant (the father of a clever
surgeon, well known in Edinburgh in the last age under the familiar
appellation of _Lang Sandy Wood_). Henry Mackenzie, author of the _Man
of Feeling_, who died in 1831, remembered shooting snipes, hares, and
partridges about that very spot to which he alludes at the beginning of
the paper on Nancy Collins in the _Mirror_ (July 1779): ‘As I walked
one evening, about a fortnight ago, _through St Andrew Square_, I
observed a girl meanly dressed,’ &c. Nearly along the line now occupied
by Princes Street was a rough enclosed road, called the _Lang Gait_ or
_Lang Dykes_, the way along which Claverhouse went with his troopers
in 1689, when he retired in disgust from the Convention, with the
resolution of raising a rebellion in the Highlands. On the site of the
present Register House was a hamlet or small group of houses called
_Mutrie’s Hill_; and where the Royal Bank now stands was a cottage
wherein ambulative citizens regaled themselves with fruit and curds and
cream. Broughton, which latterly has been surprised and swamped by the
spreading city, was then a village, considered as so far afield that
people went to live in it for the summer months, under the pleasing
idea that they had got into the country. It is related that Whitefield
used to preach to vast multitudes on the spot which by-and-by became
appropriated for the _Theatre Royal_. Coming back one year, and finding
a playhouse on the site of his tub, he was extremely incensed. Could it
be, as Burns suggests,
‘There was rivalry just in the job!’
James Craig, a nephew of the poet Thomson, was entrusted with the duty
of planning the new city. In the engraved plan, he appropriately quotes
from his uncle:
‘August, around, what PUBLIC WORKS I see!
Lo, stately streets! lo, squares that court the breeze!
See long canals and deepened rivers join
Each part with each, and with the circling main,
The whole entwined isle.’
The names of the streets and squares were taken from the royal family
and the tutelary saints of the island. The honest citizens had
originally intended to put their own local saint in the foreground; but
when the plan was shown to the king for his approval, he cried: ‘Hey,
hey—what, what—_St Giles Street!_—never do, never do!’ And so, to
escape from an unpleasant association of ideas, this street was called
_Princes Street_, in honour of the king’s two sons, afterwards George
IV. and the Duke of York. So difficult was it at the very first to
induce men to build that a premium of twenty pounds was offered by the
magistrates to him who should raise the first house; it was awarded to
Mr John Young, on account of a mansion erected by him in Rose Court,
George Street. An exemption from burghal taxes was granted to the
first house in the line of Princes Street, built by Mr John Neale,
haberdasher (afterwards occupied by Archibald Constable, and then
as the Crown Hotel), in consequence of a bargain made by Mr Graham,
plumber, who sold this and the adjoining ground to the town.[4] Mr
Shadrach Moyes, when having a house built for himself in Princes
Street, in 1769, took the builder bound to rear another farther along
besides his, to shield him from the west wind! Other quaint particulars
are remembered; as, for instance: Mr Wight, an eminent lawyer, who had
planted himself in St Andrew Square, finding he was in danger of having
his view of St Giles’s clock shut up by the advancing line of Princes
Street, built the intervening house himself, that he might have it in
his power to keep the roof low for the sake of the view in question;
important to him, he said, as enabling him to regulate his movements in
the morning, when it was necessary that he should be punctual in his
attendance at the Parliament House.
[Illustration: ROUPING-WIFE.