A reeking slum filled with prostitutes and thieves or an ugly car park and rear-end of a train station. The area around the bottom of Calton hill hasn't ever been a salubrious area, but at least the scene on the left is sort of pretty.
The pictures show the foot of Leith Wynd in 1818 and 2010. The only surviving features are the wall of the Old Calton burial ground and the monument to David Hume that sticks up above it—the neighbourhood in the valley was demolished when the railway went in.
Leith Wynd was a steep, narrow street of tenements that ran from the top of the Canongate to Leith Street—starting at the crossroads just below the Netherbow (where the World’s End pub is) and progressing under the Regent Bridge that joins Waterloo Place to Calton hill.
Here’s a description of the street from a letter to The Scotsman in 1850:
“From a precipitous, narrow, and filthy close, you look up to the heights of huge mansions, honeycombed into the receptacles of a hundred inhabitants; and at a height which it makes the head giddy to look up to or to look down from, you see two or three heads of children projecting, or the filthy and squalid figures of their mothers, or of the other female inmates.
“You ascend through dirt and darkness, stair after stair, every stair leading you in succession to a floor in which every miserable room contains a household, and where, by opening doors and barring up doors, and from the absence of sufficient light even in the day time, you hardly know when you turn yourself whether you are coming or going out of or going farther into the labyrinth. Into these places, parties in recent times have been dragged, forcibly stripped of their clothes, and flung out again; and innumerable crimes have been committed of which the world remains in ignorance.”
Wait—if the world remains in ignorance of these innumerable crimes, how come this letter-writer knows about them? Never mind; you get the point. The street was horrible, like the rest of the old town at that time. Leith Wynd was held to be worse than the rest of the streets off the Royal Mile, though, as it contained three notorious towers of vice: the Holy Land, the Happy Land and the Just Land, which are described in “An Enquiry Into Destitution, Prostitution and Crime in Edinburgh”, published in 1851 by A Medical Gentleman.
“On the east side of the wynd … there are three tenements, we may say, wholly tenanted by prostitutes and thieves. These tenements are known to the initiated as the Holy, Happy and Just Lands, the inhabitants of the last styling it simply “No.24”. The Holy and Happy Lands closely resemble each other, and are tenanted by prostitutes and their fancy-men [pimps], there being about one man to every two or three women, to all of whom he is useful when any robbery is “up,” either by frightening the victim or, perhaps, by absolutely choking him, to keep him from crying out, or by making off with and planting the stolen goods in some safe place.
“‘No.24’, on the other hand, got its soubriquet of the Just Land on account of the supposed greater honesty of the girls, who professed to live by prostitution, but not by robbery; and the name we may remark, was given as a term of reproach or contempt by the denizens of the Holy and Happy Lands. In the Just Land, there are no fancy-men, or perhaps we should say, none who regularly stay with the girls and live on plunder.
“The girls in the Just Land, complain bitterly that in consequence of the immense number of robberies committed in the Holy and Happy Lands, it is now almost impossible to get any gentlemen home with them, and the consequence is that they have to go to one of the brothels in the New Town, and thus the girl loses both “the price of the room” and the profit on the drink—this is a very considerable source of profit, the charge for all sorts of liquors being at least 100 per cent above the cost price.
“All these lands or tenements are sub-let to the girls, mostly in single rooms. We were surprised to find cases of sisters living together, and together plying their filthy trade. But shocked as we were at this, it apparently was looked on quite as a matter of course by their neighbours, who quickly enumerated three or four similar cases, and mentioned, in particular, one where the mother and two daughters, all prostitutes, lived together and walked the streets together!
“In the Holy and Happy Lands, the stairs are steep and narrow, and in a ruinous condition, gradually becoming worse the higher you ascend. Almost all the doors are split and broken, which they accounted for by saying, ‘O, Jack came home the other night drunk and kicked it in,’ or, ‘I lost the key when I was out drinking and had to break it open.’ Often, too, the officers of police, in search of suspected persons, burst open these doors, and that without the slightest ceremony.
“In one of the rooms, a girl insisted on our drinking a glass of whisky, and on our refusing, roundly swore that we should before we got out. Another, however, interfered, saying that perhaps we were a teetotaller, but on our confessing that we were not, only that we never drink in the forenoon, the whole three in the room joined against us, and we were told that we were ‘too proud’, that they supposed we were ‘too good to drink with the like of them.’ However, we regained our lost ground with them by taking a cup of tea.
“We found the greatest difficulty in getting them to speak seriously on any subject, but happening to mention emigration, they all in a breath declared that they should so like to emigrate, and they mentioned several of their class who had already done so.”
And from www.rebridgethegap.org I found the above map and this description..
Before the draining of the Nor Loch and the development of the New Town, the primary route from Edinburgh to Leith was to exit the burgh via the eastern Nether Bow Gate and turn left down Leith Wynd. You can see Leith Wynd on the right side of the map below, just north of the Nether Bow. This led to Calton Road, noted on the map below as ‘The Western Road to Leith,’ which proceeded down to Leith roughly along the route of the current Leith Walk. There were no routes from Edinburgh to Leith further west as the Nor Loch prevented crossing from Edinburgh to the land that was to become the New Town.
On Edgar’s 1742 map below, generally agreed to be the first accurate scale map of Edinburgh, you can see that St Mary’s Street (St Mary’s Wynd in 1742), the High Street, and the Canongate are all in the same place as they are today. Calton Road roughly follows the same route as today though it was moved slightly to be closer to the crags during Waverley’s redevelopment in the 1890s.
You can also see Trinity College Hospital & Church (including the Orphan Hospital) which was demolished, along with its physic garden, and partially moved when the original Waverley Station was built in the 1840s.
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