Edinburgh’s true acropolis is the Castle on its commanding rock. Yet in the Romantic era, when the city became known as “the Athens of the North,” local visionaries seem to have thought two acropolises would be better than one. Soon after shipping the Parthenon Frieze from Athens to London, the Scottish nobleman Lord Elgin (he of the Marbles), along with Sir Walter Scott, Lord Cockburn, and other influential persons, came to the conclusion that what Edinburgh needed was a hilltop temple of its own. Their chosen site was Calton Hill, whose steep slopes dominate the view towards the east end of Princes Street. Here, a memorial to the dead of the Napoleonic Wars would be raised—“a restoration of the Parthenon.” Planned to occupy much of the summit and to sit on a vast, pillared base runneled with its own catacombs, this crowning glory of the Scottish capital would be even grander than its Athenian precursor. Edinburgh being Edinburgh, it might also double as a kirk.
All went well until the money ran out. By 1829, twelve columns topped by an architrave had been erected. To this day, those columns are all that stands of the “National Monument,” designed by William Playfair as “a splendid addition to the architecture of the [British] empire.” It catches the eye, but more as a doomed Romantic fragment than a neoclassical triumph. Also in 1829, Thomas Hamilton’s Scottish Greek Revival, Doric-columned Royal High School was completed at the foot of Calton Hill. Yet Playfair’s unfinished Parthenon above it, that imposing might-have-been, remains dominant. In 1907, there were suggestions it might be completed to celebrate the bicentenary of the Act of Union between Scotland and England. In 2007, when a pro-independence Scottish Government came to power, nobody was suggesting that. Curiously, the partial Parthenon had been earmarked in 1908 as a potential site for a Scottish Parliament; and so, in the later twentieth century, had the Royal High School. Edinburgh took a long time to come to terms with the fact that its second acropolis (which some people had nicknamed “Edinburgh’s disgrace”) was destined to remain forever unfinished, succeeding as a magnificent mistake.
23. Among the buildings on Calton Hill (here viewed from the south) are the tall Nelson Monument with its “time ball,” William Playfair’s Parthenon-like National Monument, and, on the lower slopes, the Doric-columned Royal High School designed by Playfair’s rival Thomas Hamilton in 1829.
This unrealized Parthenon was neither the first nor the last classicizing monument in the Calton Hill area. The coalescing of Romanticism and Classicism in Edinburgh will be prominent in this chapter. In the Old Calton Burying Ground, Robert Adam’s 1777 cylindrical monument to David Hume, the sky starkly visible through a circular aperture in its roof, takes its inspiration from the tomb of Theodoric at Ravenna. Higher on Calton Hill’s slopes is the Robert Burns Monument, which Thomas Hamilton modeled on Athens’s Choragic Monument of Lysicrates and which was built in 1830, just after construction of the would-be Parthenon stopped. Cheekily, in the following year Hamilton’s neoclassical rival, William Playfair, took the same Athenian original as the template for his nearby monument to Burns’s patron, Dugald Stewart, a professor at Edinburgh University and an Enlightenment philosopher. Building these neoclassical structures at the height of the Romantic era may seem odd to us, but terms such as “Scottish Enlightenment” (first used in 1900) and even “Romanticism” are later academic labels. Just as Scott, the mighty novelist of the High Romantic era, was very much a son of the Enlightenment, so what we term the Scottish Enlightenment was shot through—from James Craig’s Rock House on Calton Hill onwards—with Gothic and Romantic dreams. Architecturally as well as in terms of literature and art, Enlightenment and Romantic forms in Edinburgh and elsewhere are not distinct but fused. The New Town was built to provide calmly neoclassical regularity, but also to enable residents to enjoy Romantic vistas of the Castle, Calton Hill, and the Firth of Forth. To stand on the summit of Calton Hill is to be surrounded by neoclassical fantasies, and to sense Edinburgh not just as “the Athens of the North” but as what Walter Scott called “mine own Romantic town.”
Calton Hill can seem, too, a glorious architectural junkyard. The 1807 Nelson Monument, its tallest building, is a quirky Scottish tribute to the victor of Trafalgar whose most famous naval signal opened with the words “England expects.” Rising six storeys above ground level, this slender, battlemented tower is surmounted by a “time ball,” designed to be raised and lowered at noon as a signal to ships on the Forth. Not far off, the old City Observatory lies derelict. By night, Calton Hill can be dangerous; Ian Rankin, Edinburgh’s most famous contemporary crime writer, sets one of his fictional murders there. By day, the Hill commands some of Edinburgh’s finest views. Amateur and professional photographers follow artists such as Turner and Nasmyth, who chose it as their vantage point; after dark, it is distinctly wilder, and of late it has become a venue for the celebration of the ancient Celtic Mayday rites of Beltane. As part of this relatively recent reinvention—Edinburgh’s wildest festival—hundreds of young folk, mostly students, dance around with flaming torches, wearing little more than body paint.
In the nineteenth century, Calton Hill boasted an observatory, a camera obscura, and marvels of optical science, and in the 1840s it was also briefly home to the most famous partnership in the history of photography. At Rock House, Edinburgh artist David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson of St. Andrews set up their studio. Adamson was a chemist and engineer with a taste for Gothic and Romantic fiction; Hill knew no chemistry, but had a reputation as an artist. Many of their early photographs were associated with that mass walkout of kirk ministers in 1843 known as the Disruption. Refusing to be subject to the patronage of local aristocrats and landowners, those clergymen who gave up their homes and salaries rather than compromise their democratic principles were regarded as “modern martyrs.” Adamson and Hill used the recent invention of “calotype” photography to document them in portraits. The two calotypists also photographed Edinburgh contemporaries, from Hugh Miller and anatomist Robert Knox to their own families and friends. Often beautifully composed, their pictures have been described as among the incunabula of photography.
If Adamson’s St. Andrews was the first town in the English-speaking world to have its people, buildings, and natural environment thoroughly documented through the new medium, then the Edinburgh Calotype Club was the world’s first photographic society. Adamson’s early death in 1847 put an end to the partnership, though the Rock House studio was later taken over by photographer Thomas Annan, before he moved west to Glasgow. More than half a century later, some of Hill and Adamson’s photographs were featured by Alfred Stieglitz in his influential journal Camera Work. These Scottish pictures of the fisherfolk of Newhaven near Leith, gunners at Edinburgh Castle, and memorials in the city’s Greyfriars Churchyard became eminently collectible. Examples can be found in major museums, from the Getty in Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum in New York to the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and the extensive photographic collections of St. Andrews University Library.
While working at Rock House, Hill and Adamson photographed the erection of one of Edinburgh’s most important monuments, the Political Martyrs’ Memorial. Their picture shows a vast scaffolding surrounding the ninety-foot stone obelisk on its square plinth, whose foundation stone was laid in the Calton Hill Cemetery in 1844. Planned during the same period as the monument to the Tory Walter Scott, this very different memorial commemorates his political antagonists. It bears the names of five Scottish democratic republicans who had been jailed or transported abroad in the years after the French Revolution. One of them, Glasgow lawyer Thomas Muir, became Australia’s first political prisoner. Muir’s rhetorically forceful words, spoken at his trial in Edinburgh’s law courts on August 30, 1793, are among the inscriptions in capital letters at the base of the monument: “I HAVE DEVOTED MYSELF TO THE CAUSE OF THE PEOPLE. IT IS A GOOD CAUSE—IT SHALL ULTIMATELY PREVAIL—IT SHALL FINALLY TRIUMPH.”
In a late eighteenth-century Scotland, where monarchists and Unionists controlled all the channels of power, expressing sympathy for French Revolutionary liberté, egalité, and fraternité was dangerous. A republican sympathizer, Robert Burns feared he might share “Muir and Palmer’s fate”: transportation to the Australian prison colony of Botany Bay. Thomas Fyshe Palmer, William Skirving, Maurice Margarot, and Joseph Gerrald are the other radical “martyrs” this Calton Hill memorial commemorates. Skirving (said to have christened his son “Citizen” and to have lived on or close to the site of today’s Scottish Parliament) spoke defiant words at his Edinburgh trial: “I know that what has been done these two days will be rejudged.” These words, too, appear on the monument.
By the 1830s and 1840s, increasing pressures to democratize society meant that such men, condemned as criminals when “democracy” was a dirty word in Britain’s corridors of power, might be celebrated by the Friends of Parliamentary Reform in Scotland and England. In the years leading up to the Chartist democratic demonstrations of 1848, this group organized the monument’s construction. The Scotsman reported that a crowd estimated at 80,000 people had assembled on Bruntsfield Links in 1832 to greet the passing of the Parliamentary Reform Bill, which (to a relatively small degree) extended the right to vote. By 1837, when the radical Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine ran a long review headed “Memoirs and Trials of the Political Martyrs of Scotland,” a public meeting of the Reformers of Edinburgh was being told that the “political martyrs” of the 1790s were heroes: “The real offence committed by these unfortunate victims of judicial iniquity consisted in their having combined to obtain, by constitutional means, a Reform in the Representation of the People.”
As pressure for a monument to these earlier victims of “rancorous Tory persecution” grew, money was raised, and by August 1844 the Complete Suffrage Association, only four hundred strong, processed in black clothes “through the Parliament Square (passing the courts where those patriots received their hard and unmerited sentences)” and down the High Street to Calton Hill. Recalling his days as an Edinburgh student during the martyrs’ trials, the radical Scottish MP Joseph Hume complained that “we see monuments to their persecutors.” He quoted Muir’s courtroom speech, which mentioned Thomas Paine, and praised the “glorious cause” of “timely reform.” Hume dedicated the new, radical monument to “the cause of public liberty,” and the public cheered. Three thousand people on Calton Hill heard the Presbyterian minister Patrick Brewster, himself one of the recent Free Kirk Disruption “martyrs,” maintain that “the Government which depended on an aristocracy never could stand.”
All this was far removed from the ideology of Walter Scott, that staunch admirer of the feudal system, but it is the Chartist-supported democratic monument in the Calton Burial Ground, rather than the far better-known Scott Monument, which heralds modern democracy. Soon after its erection, a legal challenge against its tribute to “sedition” was brought by Edinburgh worthies, including the trustees of William Blackwood (late publisher of the widely read Tory periodical Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine). Eventually, they lost. Of all the memorials on and around Calton Hill, none is more redolent of Scottish democracy than the one devoted to the political martyrs.
Fittingly, this starkly democratic monument stands close to the life-size bronze statue of Abraham Lincoln which was unveiled by the tellingly named Wallace Bruce, Edinburgh’s American Consul, in 1893. Europe’s first memorial to the murdered president (one of whose sons was christened William Wallace Lincoln), this monument was created by New York sculptor George E. Bissell. Commemorating Scots who fell in the American Civil War, and sometimes called the Emancipation Monument, it shows a freed slave looking up beseechingly to President Lincoln. In a city where race is discussed far less than religion or politics, this is Edinburgh’s only public statue featuring a black man. The contemporary Scottish poet Jackie Kay, whose portrait bust is one of the herms around the loch at Edinburgh Park, may be the only black woman so honoured.
Glaswegians are often suspicious of Edinburgh because its official rhetoric tends to stress the city’s sense of links to royalty, money, pomp, and grandeur, rather than its heritage of radicalism or political martyrs. Yet, despite the fact that one of the Scottish capital’s favourite green spaces is formally entitled the “Royal Botanic Garden,” hardly anyone in Edinburgh calls it that. Locals refer simply to “the Botanics.” Officially, the “Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh” now extends to four Scottish sites, and together these green spaces hold the second-richest collection of plant species in the world. Three of the sites, however, are elsewhere in Scotland; the main and much-loved Edinburgh garden—“the Botanics”—is at Inverleith, where the herbarium alone, developed from 1839–1840 onwards, includes around three million specimens. These represent between half and two-thirds of the flora on earth. Beautiful, and alive with birdsong, the gardens were recently voted by international botanic gardens professionals as among the world’s top four of their kind, along with the New York Botanical Garden, Missouri Botanical Gardens, and Kew Gardens. Edinburgh’s “Botanics” contain a light and elegant art gallery, located in the 1774 mansion of Inverleith House, where invited exhibitors have included Louise Bourgeois, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. In the surrounding seventy-three acres of grounds, you can forget you are in a city—but every so often, gracefully framed by trees and shrubbery, there are beautiful views of the historic urban skyline. The Botanics are a haven of horticulture and other arts. Their story is bound up, too, with Edinburgh’s place in modern science.
The city’s first Botanic Garden was founded in the seventeenth century by James Balfour and Robert Sibbald, two cousins whose interests united medicine and botany, encouraging the development of Enlightenment thought in Edinburgh and beyond. Working as a physician in St. Andrews, Balfour is said to have “first introduced into Scotland the dissection of the human body.” With Sibbald, he helped to found Edinburgh’s Royal College of Physicians around 1680, and in 1685 Sibbald became Edinburgh University’s first medical professor, publishing his Pharmacopoeia Collegii Regii Medicorum Edinburgensis as well as a survey of Scottish natural history, Scotia Illustrata. Balfour had been fascinated by natural history since his student days at St. Andrews; he went on to collect what was judged Scotland’s finest library of that subject. An eager traveller, he was impressed by the gardens at Blois belonging to the Duc d’Orléans, whose Scottish superintendent Robert Morison was later regarded by Linnæus as the principal pioneer of botanical classification. Morison and Balfour became lifelong friends. When Balfour returned to Edinburgh, he and Sibbald seem to have collaborated on establishing a botanical garden at Holyroodhouse around 1667, though Balfour soon moved many of his plants to a larger “physical garden” on the site of the present-day Waverley Station. That garden’s curator, James Sutherland, dedicated his 1683 catalogue of plants, the Hortus Medicus Edinburgensis, to Edinburgh’s Lord Provost.
Civic-minded, yet also contemplating “other Gardens abroad,” Sutherland was confident that Edinburgh’s garden “runs up with most of them, either for Number, or Rarity of Plants,” some of which he had obtained from as far afield as the “east and west Indies.” Happy among his “Virginian spiderworts” and “great bastard spleenworts,” Sutherland was likewise interested in plant classification: “To make the thing easier for Beginners, I have Planted in One corner of the Garden, the Dispensatory Plants in an alphabetical Order.” Like the work of Balfour and Sibbald, Sutherland’s earthy seventeenth-century enthusiasm involved developing, in Edinburgh, physical and intellectual institutions which these men wished to be regarded as proud aspects of their city’s life. They were enlightened before the Enlightenment.
Beginning in the 1720s, the academic Charles Alston also developed Edinburgh’s botanical strengths, though he attacked Linnæus in his Tyrocinium botanicum Edinburgense (1753). By the mid-eighteenth century his successor as the university’s botanical professor, John Hope, was one of the first people in Britain to teach the Linnæan system. In the gardens, now removed to a five-acre site of light sandy soil “on the west side of the road to Leith,” Hope set up a monument to Linnæus commissioned from Robert Adam. Much transplanted and a little cracked, but still inscribed “LINNÆO POSUIT I. HOPE 1779,” this carved stone memorial now stands among a complex of greenhouses and science buildings at Inverleith. Hope was another Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. With Adam Smith, David Hume, and others, he had set up the Select Society, one of Enlightenment Edinburgh’s several debating clubs. Through teaching, collecting, and correspondence, Hope ensured that botany and natural history as well as medicine were at the heart of the Scottish capital’s Enlightenment learning. Advised by Benjamin Franklin and others, he increased Edinburgh’s plant holdings and built up a school of botanists whose influence stretched as far as India. Through his lectures, he linked botany to physiology and anatomy. He is buried in Greyfriars Churchyard, and a genus of tree is named after him: Hopea.
After Hope’s time, in the early 1820s, when summer botanical lectures were given in its greenhouses, there were plans to move the gardens to a nine-acre site southeast of the Palace of Holyroodhouse; but in 1824, the year before Charles Darwin came to Edinburgh as a student, a twelve-acre site at Inverleith had been taken over. The gardens have since expanded but still include this original ground, which was developed to contain “a commodious well-lighted apartment, but perfectly plain,” where Professor Robert Graham, later first president of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, gave lectures. Along with John Hope’s son (an eloquent Edinburgh chemistry professor), Graham was one of Darwin’s teachers. Darwin’s Edinburgh exploits included the dissection of geraniums and plants from a collection now in the Edinburgh herbarium, and it is probable that while a young medical student he visited Inverleith. He and Professor Graham each made botanical excursions with Robert Greville, whose Flora Edinensis; or, A Description of Plants Growing near Edinburgh, Arranged According to the Linnæan System was published in 1824, and whom Darwin called “the great Botanist” two years later. While working on his Scottish cryptogrammic flora, Greville was accompanied by the teenage Darwin on a voyage to the Isle of May in the Firth of Forth. The teenager found it so funny when the Edinburgh plantsman was discomfited by the screeching of kittiwakes that a fellow student recalled he had “to lie down on the greensward to enjoy his prolonged cachinnation.”
The greensward at today’s Edinburgh Botanics has known many famous visitors. Just over a century after Darwin’s student years, the young Muriel Spark and her childhood friend Frances Cowell liked to roam there. They once buried a jointly written short story full of Celtic Twilight motifs, but it has never been found and the authorities take a very dim view of anyone who digs for it. Even the modern surface of the Botanics has historical interest. Topsoil used to fill some of the 1960s greenhouses was taken from the building site of the Forth Road Bridge, while the earth in the gardens’ oldest glasshouse, a handsome octagonal 1834 Tropical Palm House whose design was supervised by Robert Graham, supports a Sabal Bermuda palm tree which was already mature when transplanted from the Leith Walk site in 1822.
Among the loveliest areas of the Botanics are the Chinese gardens, their pathways bowered with foliage and affording lyric glimpses—a bathing blackbird or a droplet-flecked duck perched in summer under white blossoms by a waterfall below a small wooden bridge. Inverleith has more Chinese plant specimens than any site outside China. Today it boasts strong links with Yunnan Province and with botanists elsewhere in the People’s Republic, but its treasured Chinese connections have a longer history. Close to where the Scottish plant collector George Forrest once brought back specimens from China, Chiang Lee, known as the “silent traveller,” wrote several poems in the gardens one spring during World War II. Watching a shaft of sunlight striking rhododendrons and azaleas in bloom, he saw a thin layer of coloured mist above the blossoms—a beautiful phenomenon the Chinese call “Hwa-wu.” Chiang Lee thought of lines by Robert Burns: “Common friends to you and me, / Nature’s gifts to all are free.”
24. The Royal Botanic Garden at Inverleith, blending elements of Scotland and China, affords beautiful glimpses of the central Edinburgh skyline to the south. Including graceful Chinese gardens, it has more Chinese plant specimens than any other site outside China.
The gardens are rich in such moments of scot-free, priceless respite. Modern wanderers can enjoy not merely the alluring vistas over the Chinese Hillside, the Rock Garden, the Woodland Garden, or the recently installed Queen Mother’s Memorial Garden, but also (just in case it is raining) the John Hope Gateway, an indoors centre for botanical information. Opened in 2009 and designed by Edward Cullinan Architects, this fine postmodern pavilion with its light and airy first-floor restaurant includes a “Real Life Science studio,” where visitors can see and hear how experts from Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens are now working with people in more than forty countries, ranging from Afghanistan to New Caledonia and from China to Iraq. An exhibition on the importance of biodiversity looks out through a sixty-metre-long curved window over tiered ponds onto a specially planted garden.
If John Hope, Charles Darwin, or other botanists and naturalists from Edinburgh’s past returned in the twenty-first century, they would not be disappointed. They might share, though, the frustration of the twenty-first-century Regius Keeper, Professor Stephen Blackmore, who writes in the introduction to his popular book Gardening the Earth: Gateways to a Sustainable Future: “Everything in the world has its name and its place. Everything has its way of growing and living. Some people know the names and way of things, but most don’t. Strange—they remember the colours of every football team but can’t tell kingcups from buttercups.”
Over the centuries the Botanic Gardens at Inverleith have delighted many who can’t tell kingcups from buttercups, as well as all who can. One of the latter was certainly Robert Moyes Adam (1885–1967), appointed an assistant gardener in 1903. Adam had studied science at Heriot Watt College, as well as drawing at the Edinburgh College of Art and botany at Edinburgh University. His first job at the gardens was to assist in preparing drawings for lectures by the professor of botany, but he soon began to photograph plants. Much of his work was scientific and commercial. Yet by photographing locations ranging from Edinburgh to the remote Scottish island of Mingulay (which Adam visited in 1905, just before its evacuation), he established himself over several decades as one of his country’s most important photographers. From quiet snapshots of back gardens in pre–World War I Portobello to detailed images of plant specimens, birds’ nests, and scenes in the Botanic Gardens, Adam had a shrewd eye for the natural environment in Edinburgh as well as elsewhere. As an old man, chatting with Edinburgh friends such as John Anthony, author of the Flora of Sutherland, he enjoyed a quiet glass of sherry after Sunday morning kirk service, but he died decades before the best of his work came to be recognized in the twenty-first century for its keen sense of ecology. Today’s visitors to Inverleith may like to do what Adam occasionally did: wander out into the Botanic Gardens and point a camera lens up towards an interesting passing cloud.
Walkers with time and energy to spare may choose to meander all the way along the Water of Leith footpath, which runs through green, wooded parklands filled with birdsong from Inverleith to the city’s port. The word “Inverleith” means “basin of the [Water of] Leith” and refers to the river which runs close to the Botanic Gardens on its way to join the Firth of Forth. It flows into the Forth at the coastal settlement of Leith, now dominated by blocks of contemporary waterfront apartments, a massive Scottish Government civil-service building, and the dockside Ocean Terminal shopping mall. Yet the sight of a ship berthed at a quayside, or the anchor of a historic transatlantic ship set like a sculpture in a modern urban forecourt is enough to remind onlookers that this area (separately administered until 1920) was once a very different place. From at least the fourteenth century, Leith served as Edinburgh’s port, populated by mariners, brewers, traders, and merchants. Out of it flowed exports such as wool and hides; in came commodities ranging from roof tiles and the national supply of claret to books, fine clothes, and people. In the nineteenth century, when Leith was a very substantial port indeed, passersby could still see on its waterfront the palatial, crumbling house of one of its great patrons, Mary of Guise, the Catholic mother of Mary Queen of Scots. She ruled briefly from the port, which at one point threatened to rival Edinburgh, but her citadel was besieged by Protestant reformers in 1560, and Leith’s walls were demolished. Edinburgh regained, and has since kept, the upper hand.
Today most of Leith’s older waterfront structures have succumbed to developers. Gone are not just Mary of Guise’s grand house but also the vast, funnel-like towers of the Glassworks, an early twentieth-century landmark. Surviving properties such as the privately owned sixteenth-century Lamb’s House (where Mary Queen of Scots was welcomed when she sailed back from France to claim the throne of Scotland), and fragments, including a stone at Trinity House inscribed for the “MASTERIS AND MARENERS” in 1555, are reminders that Leith was sixteenth-century Scotland’s busiest port. It and its mariners were hymned by Renaissance Latin poet Arthur Johnston as proud and independent. Even in the mid-eighteenth century, large sections of the shoreline remained open grazing. A 1750 water-colour shows a windmill standing surrounded by coastal fields nearby, some of which formed the Leith Links golf course, while a few years later Robert Fergusson rejoiced in attending popular horse races on a sunny July day, watching “on Leith-Sands the racers rare.” We even know the names of some of the eighteenth-century horses: Best-at-the-Bottom, Land-ladie, Cavers.
In the early nineteenth century, there was a competition to lay out a further “New Town between Edinburgh and Leith”—the existing New Town was clearly not enough—with roads running around, then north of, Calton Hill. William Playfair won the competition, and the building of such streets as Leopold Place commenced. Where once trees and fields had bounded Leith Walk—still today the main thoroughfare to Leith—imposing, often neoclassical thoroughfares sprang up around it. By Robert Louis Stevenson’s time, you could look from the north of Calton Hill’s grassy slopes, “tessellated with sheets and blankets out to dry,” and see “suburbs run out to Leith . . . with her forest of masts.”
Despite those forests, or perhaps because of them, Leith was not always salubrious. Its twentieth-century tower blocks of social housing mark pockets of economic deprivation not far from sleek twenty-first-century apartments built by speculative property developers eager to regenerate the area and profit from its now substantially postindustrial docks. Not all of these speculations have succeeded. For centuries, Leith has enjoyed mixed fortunes. The future Lord Provost of Edinburgh William Chambers, a bankrupt’s son and the author of a volume of “autobiographic reminiscences,” wrote of how he had gone “trudging down” there looking for a job as a grocer’s delivery boy in 1813, the year before Scott published Waverley. Stopping for a moment opposite a public fountain, he sized up the shop from the outside.
The windows exhibited quantities of raw sugar in different varieties of brownness, hovering over which were swarms of flies, in a state of frantic enjoyment. Sticks of black liquorice leaned coaxingly on the second row of panes, flanked by tall glass jars of sweeties and peppermint drops; behind these outward attractions, there were observable yellow-painted barrels of whisky, rows of bottles of porter, piles of cheeses of varied complexions, firkins of salt butter, and boxes of soap. At the counter were a number of women and children buying articles, such as quarter-ounces of tea and ounces of sugar; and the floor was battered with dirt and debris.
Traditionally, Leith Walk was a haunt of prostitutes, and Leith was considerably more edgy than central Edinburgh. Of the carriages, or “chaises,” heading down Leith Walk to the eighteenth-century races, Fergusson commented, “Some chaises honest folk contain, / And some hae mony a Whore in.” Though the late nineteenth-century port had known great prosperity, it was subject to large-sale slum clearance; and almost two centuries after Chambers watched flies in a grocer’s window, its association with rot was strengthened when Irvine Welsh made Leith the setting for parts of his notorious 1993 novel of heroin junkies and urban violence, Trainspotting. That book’s bleakly ironic title refers to the then-derelict (now demolished) Leith Central Station, with its huge railway shed where trains no longer ran.
Living a little to the south, off Leith Walk, in a one-bedroom, ground-floor flat at 7 South Lorne Place, the unpublished single mother J. K. Rowling completed Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; her flat was broken into and stoned in a neighbourhood where violence, crime, and addiction were rife. Yet recently the port, its early nineteenth-century docks infilled but its Victoria and Albert Docks remaining, has become increasingly gentrified. In 1833, extensions to the port facilities at Leith temporarily bankrupted the City of Edinburgh; and the recession at the end of the twenty-first century’s first decade plunged waterfront developers into financial crisis. Yet there are still hopes that one day a new tram line, connecting Leith and Princes Street, will further enhance the old port’s prosperity.
Its dock area now boasts several waterfront attractions, the most celebrated of which is the British monarch’s former royal yacht, Britannia, berthed beside the Ocean Terminal mall as a paying visitor attraction. Built on Clydeside in 1953, the Britannia sailed more than a million miles before being decommissioned in 1997. In this floating palace Queen Elizabeth II, on her overseas state visits, was supported by a staff of three hundred people as she entertained guests ranging from Churchill and Gandhi to Nelson Mandela and Bill and Hilary Clinton. Still on board is Her Majesty’s Phantom V Rolls Royce, whose bumpers had to be removed each time it was hoisted on deck, so that it could be inserted neatly into the ship’s garage. To set the table for dinner in the State Dining Room took three hours, and that grand saloon’s pale interior contains everything from an Easter Island statuette to a narwhal’s tusk. “A Yacht is a necessity and not a luxury for the Head of our Great British Commonwealth,” Her Majesty once pronounced. Her subjects came to disagree, and Britannia has not been replaced. In contemporary Leith, this most singular and anachronistic phenomenon lures fascinated tourists. Preserved on board are attractions such as Princess Diana’s honeymoon suite, the Queen’s monogrammed frilly pillows, and the officers’ mess, where senior members of the crew used a soft toy to play energetic games of “wombat tennis.”
Back on terra firma, Leith’s more than twenty church buildings include those of the Scandinavian Lutheran Church (now the Leith School of Art), the Ukrainian Catholic Church of St. Andrew, and St. Thomas’s Church, which was converted in the late twentieth century into a Sikh temple. Leith, because of its port status, was a popular place for immigrant communities over the centuries. When surveys of “aliens” were conducted during the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Leith’s resident foreigners (as recorded in the surviving manuscript records of Edinburgh City Archives) came from Prussia, Berlin, Saxony, Switzerland, Lithuania, France, Italy, America, Finland, Denmark, Holland, and plain “Abroad,” but the largest number were Italians. Successive generations of immigrants made Leith relatively cosmopolitan, and an Italian presence remained notable. It was in the Catholic church of St. Mary Star of the Sea, in Constitution Street, on March 20, 1924, that twenty-two-year-old Carmela Maria (daughter of Pietro Rossi, a shopkeeper in Leith Walk) and twenty-three-year-old Alfonso Rudolfo Armando Antonio Paolozzi presented their only son, Eduardo Luigi, for baptism. The following year, Rudolfo, who loved machinery and built his own car from a kit, rented a confectionary shop at 10 Albert Street, just off Leith Walk. At home, the family spoke Italian dialect; around them the accents were those of working-class Scots.
25. An early nineteenth-century ferry arrives in Leith around the time that the young Charles Darwin visited the port and sailed on the Firth of Forth. William Daniell’s coloured engraving, published in 1829, shows fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen strolling and sitting on the waterfront not far from the docks where the Royal Yacht Britannia is berthed today.
Clean, neat, and beautifully arranged when photographed in the 1930s, the shop whose window bore the letters “A. PAOLOZZI” was absolutely the opposite of the dirty shopwindow eyed by the young William Chambers. The black-and-white photograph shows polished glass collaged with several rows of lettering advertising various brands of cigarettes; behind the lettered glass are serried rows of cakes, lines of bottles, and boxes ascending neatly from floor to ceiling. Standing proudly in its doorway, the confectioner, with his sleeves rolled up, looks proud of this sculpted order; his son, who would devote his career to collages, sculptures, and arrangements of objects, remembered how carefully the shopwindow had been “dressed” by a visiting confectionary representative.
Arrangement and order were part of life for the young Eduardo, who helped to run the shop. Before progressing to the “very grim” Holy Cross Academy in Leith, he was photographed at the age of eight with his forty-six classmates at Leith Walk Primary School. In that picture, the children have been arranged absolutely symmetrically in terms of gender: the front row is all boys; the second all girls; the third row has a boy at each end with girls in the middle; the fourth row has three boys at each end with girls in the middle; the back row, with Eduardo in it, is all boys. Muriel Spark, a middle-class Edinburgh girl born a few years earlier, hints at similar kinds of regimentation. The first paragraph of her classic novella of 1930s Edinburgh life, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, begins with the words “The boys,” and the second with “The girls.” In a society so enamoured of regimenting its young people, there was also, as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie shows with penetrating wit, a darker side. Spark’s closest schoolfriend, Frances Niven, recalled that their teacher, Miss Kay, had, like the fictional Miss Brodie, a strong admiration for Mussolini. In the back room of his Leith Walk shop, Rudolfo Paolozzi kept a picture of the Italian dictator, and the young Eduardo, photographed in Fascist youth-movement uniform beside his mother in 1934, was sent each summer to a Fascist summer camp on the Adriatic, where he did gymnastics, watched subtitled American films, admired the modernist design of the camp buildings, and took part in processions with “military priests” and Fascist insignia.
When Mussolini declared war on the Allies in June 1940, shortly after the British retreat from Dunkirk, children were already being evacuated from the Scottish capital for fear of ærial bombardment. Angry mobs roamed Edinburgh, Glasgow, and other cities. On June 11, 1940, the Scotsman carried an article titled “Rioting during Night of Big Round-Up.” There had been violence in the streets the previous evening:
While the Edinburgh police were busy rounding up Italians, anti-Italian feeling found vent in an orgy of window-breaking and looting in different parts of the city. . . . Crowds attacked ice-cream and fish and chip shops in Edinburgh, and large reinforcements of regular and special police were called out to deal with the demonstrators. . . . In Leith Street and Union Place, there were riotous scenes after ten o’clock. A crowd of over a thousand gathered, the great majority of them in the role of spectators. The trouble was due largely to irresponsible youths, who started stone-throwing. There are numerous shops in the vicinity occupied by Italians, and before the police were able to get control of the mischief-makers, many plate-glass windows were shattered. . . . The police made a number of baton charges.
Though he had tried to destroy or hide his fascist materials, Rudolfo Paolozzi found his shopfront reduced to splintered wood and broken glass. Not long afterwards, rather apologetic policemen took the confectioner away. Imprisoned briefly in Edinburgh’s Saughton Prison as a sixteen-year-old, Eduardo later recalled his cell’s beeswaxed floor, pottery chamber pot and pink china mug. Though he was soon released, and served in the British Pioneer Corps, he never saw his father again; along with many other Italian and German prisoners, the older man had been taken on board the SS Arandora Star to be interned in Canada. On July 4, 1940, the Scotsman reported that at six in the morning, while many on board were asleep, the vessel had been torpedoed by a U-boat. As the crowded ship’s lighting system failed, panic ensued and about eight hundred of those on board, including Italian traders from Leith, lost their lives. Among them were Paolozzi’s father and grandfather. Their bodies were never recovered.
The Paolozzi family’s ancestral home, an Italian village near Monte Cassino, was virtually destroyed in the carnage of World War II. All this provides the context for what is surely Edinburgh’s most moving modern public sculpture. In July 1991, just over half a century after the death of his father and grandfather, Paolozzi’s major bronze, Manuscript of Monte Cassino, cast in Germany and alluding to Italian history, was installed in Picardy Place outside St. Mary’s Metropolitan Cathedral, where the Paolozzi family had gone to Mass in the 1930s. The sculpture is in three huge pieces—severed body parts in the shape of an ankle, a foot, and a hand. The huge foot seems almost a small, fortified hill; the hand holds in its fingers a toy ball, and on its palm (where rainwater collects in wet weather) are two mating bronze grasshoppers. The sculptor who had carried pasta up Leith Walk to his grandfather as a child and who remembered his mother and grandmother cooking recipes brought from Italy, liked the idea that local children could play on his great bronzes, which recall “ancient memories and shared childhood experiences.” An excerpt from a medieval Latin poem is inscribed on the bronze, along with the date 1991 and Paolozzi’s own name. In his writings, he quotes the poem as translated by Helen Waddell:
MS. OF MONTE CASSINO
Written to Paul the Deacon at Monte Cassino
Across the hills and in the valley’s shade,
Alone the small script goes,
Seeking for Benedict’s beloved roof,
Where waits its sure repose.
They come and find, the tired travellers,
Green herbs and ample bread,
Quiet and brothers’ love and humbleness,
Christ’s peace on every head.