Heriot Row & Queen Street Gardens: Robert Louis Stevenson's Window
Why is it significant?
Walk along Heriot Row until you reach number 17, and look up at the windows of the upper floors. Behind one of them, in the 1850s and 60s, a thin, feverish little boy lay awake through the long winter nights, coughing, with his face to the glass.
Key Facts
| Place | Heriot Row & Queen Street Gardens: Robert Louis Stevenson's Window |
|---|---|
| Address | 17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh EH3 6HP, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95570, -3.20150 |
| Part of Walk | Edinburgh's New Town: Georgian Squares, Crescents and the Plan That Built a City |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along Heriot Row until you reach number 17, and look up at the windows of the upper floors. Behind one of them, in the 1850s and 60s, a thin, feverish little boy lay awake through the long winter nights, coughing, with his face to the glass.
Heriot Row was built between 1802 and 1808, with houses on one side only, facing the long private gardens of Queen Street across the road. It takes its name from George Heriot, goldsmith to King James the Sixth, whose charitable hospital owned this land. In 1857 the Stevenson family moved into number 17, and their only son, Robert Louis, born in 1850, grew up here.
He was so often ill that his world was this room, his nurse Alison Cunningham, known as Cummy, and the street outside. Cummy filled his head with stories of Covenanters, martyrs and the devil. And every evening he watched for the lamplighter coming along with his ladder to light the gas lamps. Years later, in A Child's Garden of Verses, published in 1885, that man became Leerie, and the poem still makes Edinburgh readers misty-eyed.
Now look across at Queen Street Gardens. Inside the railings there is a pond with a little island, and the local legend says that the boy at the window looked at that island long enough to dream up Treasure Island. Nobody can prove it, but nobody here wants to disprove it either. His father Thomas was a lighthouse engineer from the great Stevenson dynasty that lit Scotland's coasts, and the son was meant to follow him. He tried engineering, then law, and then he ran away into writing.
Think of Jekyll and Hyde when you look at this row: respectable façade at the front, and a hidden life behind it. Stevenson knew both Edinburghs, the polished New Town and the dark closes of the Old. Continue east along Heriot Row to Dundas Street, then turn right, uphill across Queen Street into Hanover Street, and take the narrow lane of Thistle Street on your right.