Mary King’s Close in Old Town

On Thursday we went on a tour of Mary King’s Close in Old Town Edinburgh. Old Town was the center of business and community up until the 1700’s. As the bus approached Old Town I could see more and more of the building centuries old. Just before the bus reached our stop I saw the Edinburgh castle, built in 1130, to my left, magnificent. Our bus stop was on the popular tourist road called the Royal Mile. 

The Royal Mile

A “Close” is an alley or narrow road and they’re located everywhere in Old Town every 12 feet or so between the old and new buildings. Closes were named after prominent businesses or people from the time and Mary King was a successful business merchant in the 1600’s with tenement houses in that Close. 

One of the many Closes

Edinburgh was a walled city so as the population increased, buildings were built up because there was no room to spread out. The buildings in the Closes were as high as eight stories with the poor living in the basement level and the wealthier living in the upper floors. The Bubonic plague ravaged the city in 1645 killing 50% of the population. In the 1700’s Edinburgh’s Old Town was losing business to New Town so a decision was made to build the Royal Exchange. The location selected was directly over the tenement houses in some of the Closes. The residents were displaced from the designated buildings with some of them razed while others, like Mary King’s, had the top floors removed and the lower buildings used as a base for the new Royal Exchange. Some businesses continued to operate as a literal underground market with the last one being evicted in 1902 for expansion of the exchange. In 2003, archaeologists found daily life from the mid 1600’s could be recreated from the covered builds and the site became a popular tourist attraction, that’s why we were there.

Our tour guide, Tom, was a theatrical and comedic young man providing us the information and directions in a very entertaining manner. Mary King’s Close has been carefully reconstructed adding wooden flooring and increasing the height of the bottom floor ceiling to accommodate modern tourists. The road on the close was very steep leading to the Loch Ness, North Lake, at the bottom. The steep roads were utilized for drainage and every day at 07:00 and 22:00, the church bell rang alerting residents of the buildings it was permitted to pour their slop buckets and chamber pots, a bowl kept in the house and used as a toilet throughout the day, from the windows into the street where it would ooze down the slope into the loch. Built into the sides of the buildings were small kiosks where merchants sold their goods. In the warm months the inhabitants walked the close in ankle to knee deep muck. In the winter, the road would freeze making walking treacherous causing a less sure-footed person to fall. Consequently, that person would slide down the road sometimes knocking unsuspecting people down on the journey all ending in the loch, which we now know was full of muck! Many of the faces grimaced after hearing that story.

We went to one room on the bottom floor that was perhaps ten feet wide and 20 feet long and Tom explained up to 16 people would inhabit that room. Before Edinburgh expanded past its’ walls, the concentration was 30,000 people per square mile. In the U.S. today there are only four cities with a greater density than Edinburgh in 1650 and NYC has a density of less than 28,000. Edinburgh included farm animals in rooms of the bottom floors of the tenement buildings. The crowded conditions and their proximity to animals made conditions of squalor with rats impossible to contain. Listening to Tom explain the conditions the people had to endure was difficult to the point of being almost unimaginable.

St Giles church

But seeing the actual living quarters and streets with Tom’s explanations of what life was like was amazing. The location of the Royal Mile is a must see with the old and new buildings side by side. The sidewalks are wide and busy with people, with many shops, restaurants, bars and a 500 hundred year old church, St Giles. The only complaint is it is difficult deciding where not to take photos with so much amazing scenery.

We are both planning to take the bus back to Old Town to people watch and take some more photos. 

Cheers from Edinburgh!

John

NOTE: Unfortunately, we were not able to shoot photographs in Mary King's Close. The Close is under a federal building which prohibits photographs.