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History of Merchiston Area
The earliest known reference to Merchiston appears in the Exchequer
Rolls of Scotland for the year 1266 when it existed as one of a handful of
independently owned estates lying adjacent to the western and south sides
of the Burgh Muir, a rough tract of
forest and moorland to which the city of Edinburgh had held title since the
preceding century.
The Merchiston estate
was acquired in 1438 by Alexander Napier, a wealthy Edinburgh merchant and
one-time provost of the city. He or his
son, also Alexander, were responsible for the building of Merchiston Tower, a
fifteenth century towerhouse now incorporated into the Merchiston campus of Napier
University. The towerhouse was the
birthplace in 1550 of John Napier, the astronomer and mathematician who
invented logarithms, devised the notion of the decimal point and whose
proposals for novel armaments are now seen to anticipate tanks, armoured cars
and submarines. In his day the “simple
of Merchiston” credited Napier with having supernatural powers. He and his father before him both “had the
reputation of being a great wizard.” The
Scotsman newspaper's archives contain an article from 28 December 1910 entitled The Wizard Lairds of Merchiston (see http://archive.scotsman.com ). Surprisingly - for a wizard - Napier was
also a respected theologian and Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church
of Scotland... |
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| Further evidence of pre-nineteenth century development of the Merchiston
area is offered by a stone plaque at the corner of Bruntsfield Gardens and
Bruntsfield Place. This plaque is the
only present-day reminder of the site of a seventeenth century towerhouse,
described as a “gable ended and gabled manor house” built by the Livingstone
family of what was then the Greenhill estate. The mausoleum of John Livingstone, the estate's original owner, is
located towards the end of Chamberlain Road, just before the junction with
Greenhill Gardens. An apothecary, Livingstone died, of plague
in 1645, a generation after his neighbour, the “great wizard” of Merchiston had
passed away in 1617. |
| By the end of the nineteenth century the lay-out of the Merchiston area
had been established as we know it today, much of it built using the grey
sandstone quarried locally from the old Burgh Muir. The Greenhill estate towerhouse was
demolished in 1884 in order to make way over the following decade for the
tenement construction in Forbes Road and Bruntsfield Place, Avenue and
Gardens. Building on Merchiston Place
and Merchiston Avenue was already well underway during the late 1860s, by which
time many of the large villas in places such as Abbotsford Park and Greenhill
Gardens had been in existence for more than fifteen years. Earlier still, the house at 1 Church Hill was
constructed in 1842 by Dr Thomas Chalmers, the leader of the 1843 Disruption
when 474 ministers seceded from the Church of Scotland to form what became the
Free Church of Scotland. He died at
home in 1847 and mourners at his funeral were said to have numbered in the
thousands. |  |
Among the Merchiston area's other nineteenth century residents of note
was the architect and engineer James Gowans. His own home, its exterior a flamboyant mix of French, Gothic and
Chinese influences combined with very distinctive stonework, was built by him
in 1858 at 3 Napier Road. In 1966,
despite widespread objections, it was
demolished, leaving the house built opposite at 10 Napier Road and a set of
terraced houses on nearby Colinton Road as the only remaining examples of his
work in the Merchiston area south of the Union Canal. |  | 
| North of the canal, however, in the Shandon
area, are examples of his designs for model housing development. Gowans was a very active proponent of
improvement in housing for the working-class and his campaign for “light and
air”, i.e relief from the ill-effects of industrial pollution, was a
major factor in the post 1850 development of Shandon's colony-type artisan
dwellings. The Union Canal, completed by
1822, had stimulated the development of the industries with which the Shandon
and Fountainbridge areas are associated, then if not now: slaughterhouses and
meat markets, breweries, distilleries and railway works. |
| |  | The twentieth century saw some important additions to the Merchiston
area's townscape. New school buildings,
Boroughmuir High School on Viewforth and George Watson's College on Colinton
Road, were opened in 1913 and 1932 respectively. The completion of the Napier Technical
College complex, also on Colinton Road, followed in 1964 and in 1992, the same
year as the technical college officially became the main campus of several
making up the new Napier University, the Eric Liddell Centre at Holy Corner
opened as a community centre for residents of the Merchiston area. Named in honour of the Olympic gold medal
winner and medical missionary who had been a member of the church's
congregation at one time, the establishment of the ELC within the refurbished
former North Morningside Church served equally to protect the architectural
integrity of Holy Corner, “one of the most striking and well-known townscape
features in the city outside of [sic] the central area.” |
A complete restoration of the Union Canal
was also carried out in the 1990s with Millennium Link project funding. At the start of the twenty-first century the
canal is both a popular leisure resource as well as the core of the current
extensive commercial and housing redevelopment of Fountainbridge.
Similarly
successful upgrading of Polwarth's
Harrison Park has resulted in the recent award of a Green Flag, one of
only
three awarded in Scotland see green flag link. |  |
| Of
the twenty-first century residents of the Merchiston area, the best known are
probably a number of leading writers who have chosen to make their homes
here. Merchiston has been dubbed
Edinburgh's new “Literary Quarter” or, more irreverently, “Writers' Block”. |  | 
| To be seen shopping in the local Tesco Metro,
enjoying a coffee in Starbucks next door or just quietly walking the dog, the
creators of Rhona MacLeod, Inspector Rebus, Mma Ramotswe and Harry Potter are
household names worldwide. And Hogwarts
might be closer to Merchiston than you think. |
A much fuller account of the history of the Merchiston area is to be
found in Edinburgh City Council's Character Appraisals for the Merchiston and
Greenhill Conservation Area and for the Shandon Conservation Area (see http://www.edinburgh.gov.uk)
A useful and very readable resource is Charles J Smith's Historic
South Edinburgh, published in 2000 by Birlinn, Edinburgh.
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