General Register House & the Wellington Statue
Why is it significant?
In front of the long, domed building at the east end of Princes Street, a bronze Duke of Wellington sits on a horse that rears up on its hind legs, frozen in mid-air. Balancing tons of metal on two slim legs was a real engineering feat in the 1850s, and the sculptor spent years solving it.
Key Facts
| Place | General Register House & the Wellington Statue |
|---|---|
| Address | 2 Princes Street, Edinburgh EH1 3YY, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95370, -3.18940 |
| Part of Walk | Calton Hill, Edinburgh: Monuments, Martyrs and the Athens of the North |
| Generated | Generated |
In front of the long, domed building at the east end of Princes Street, a bronze Duke of Wellington sits on a horse that rears up on its hind legs, frozen in mid-air. Balancing tons of metal on two slim legs was a real engineering feat in the 1850s, and the sculptor spent years solving it.
Edinburgh's favourite joke about it is a pun: the statue shows the Iron Duke, in bronze, by Steell. The sculptor was indeed John Steell, and the statue was unveiled in 1852, on the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. The Duke himself was still alive that summer... he died a few months later, in September.
Behind him stands General Register House, designed by Robert Adam, with its foundation stone laid in 1774. For centuries Scotland's legal and state records had been kept in cramped, damp rooms in the Old Town, and over the centuries many had been lost to fire, war and neglect. Part of the money for this new building came, rather pointedly, from the estates confiscated from Jacobite families after the rising of 1745. The rebels' land paid for the archive of the state that had defeated them.
Inside, Adam built a great domed rotunda lined with galleries of shelves, and the building is still doing the job it was designed for. It is one of the oldest purpose-built record offices in the world still in use, part of the National Records of Scotland, which keep among their treasures the Declaration of Arbroath of 1320, the famous letter in which Scotland's barons asserted the kingdom's independence.
Look at the clock tower of the grand hotel opposite: for generations it has been set a few minutes fast, so that travellers do not miss their trains. Now walk east along Waterloo Place, the broad street beside Register House, and keep going until you see a gateway and a tall obelisk on your right.