Scottish Poetry Library: A House Built for Poems
Why is it significant?
Walk down Crichton's Close and you come to a small, light-filled building of timber, glass and stone, tucked in among old walls. It looks almost shy.
Key Facts
| Place | Scottish Poetry Library: A House Built for Poems |
|---|---|
| Address | Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton's Close, Edinburgh EH8 8DT, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95150, -3.17810 |
| Part of Walk | Ink, Ballads and Double Lives: Edinburgh's Literary Old Town |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk down Crichton's Close and you come to a small, light-filled building of timber, glass and stone, tucked in among old walls. It looks almost shy. Yet this is the Scottish Poetry Library, one of very few buildings anywhere built purely for poetry, and the right place to end a walk through the first City of Literature.
It began in 1984 as the idea of the poet Tessa Ransford, who believed poetry should be as easy to borrow as a novel. For years it lived in borrowed rooms. This building, designed by the architect Malcolm Fraser, opened in 1999, the same year Scotland's new parliament first sat. Anyone can walk in, pull a book off the shelves and read, and the collection runs from medieval verse to poems written last year.
Think back over the voices you have met today. Allan Ramsay lending out books by St Giles'. Burns reading proofs in Anchor Close. Scott listening to Border ballads, Hume among his books, Stevenson dreaming up his double man, Rebus climbing the steps of Fleshmarket Close. In 2004 UNESCO made Edinburgh its first City of Literature, and in the same year Edwin Morgan became the first Scots Makar, the national poet of modern Scotland.
Just across the Canongate stands Panmure House, where Adam Smith spent the last twelve years of his life. Before economics made him famous, Smith had given public lectures in Edinburgh on rhetoric and literature. And a few days before he died in 1790, he asked two friends, the chemist Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton, to burn almost all of his unpublished papers. They did. Nobody knows what went into the fire.
A little further down the hill, the long wall of the Scottish Parliament carries quotations from Scottish writers carved into its stone, so even the politicians walk past literature every day. This is where the walk ends. Find a chair, take down a book of poems and rest a while... and if your legs still have something left, Arthur's Seat is rising just beyond the rooftops, with stories of its own.