Thistle Street: The Lane Behind the Grand Façades
Why is it significant?
Thistle Street is the New Town with its collar loosened. After the wide, ceremonial streets you have just walked, this one is narrow and low, with smaller buildings, smaller doors and a much more human scale. That was the whole idea.
Key Facts
| Place | Thistle Street: The Lane Behind the Grand Façades |
|---|---|
| Address | Thistle Street, Edinburgh EH2 1DF, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95460, -3.19650 |
| Part of Walk | Edinburgh's New Town: Georgian Squares, Crescents and the Plan That Built a City |
| Generated | Generated |
Thistle Street is the New Town with its collar loosened. After the wide, ceremonial streets you have just walked, this one is narrow and low, with smaller buildings, smaller doors and a much more human scale.
That was the whole idea. In James Craig's plan, the grand streets, Princes, George and Queen, were for the gentry. Between them ran two modest lanes, Thistle Street here and Rose Street on the other side of George Street, for the people who kept the New Town working: shopkeepers, craftsmen, coachmen, stable hands. The mews and coach houses sat behind the big houses, and the lanes stitched the service world together.
And look at those names again. Rose for England, Thistle for Scotland, and the two squares named after the patron saints of the two nations. When the plan was drawn, the Union of 1707 was only sixty years old and the last Jacobite rising barely twenty years past. Edinburgh was making a very public point: we are loyal, we are British, please send the investment north... It was politics in street signs, and it worked rather well.
There is a sadder side to the story. As the professional classes moved north into these straight streets, the Old Town they left behind was abandoned to the poor. The tall tenements of the Royal Mile, where judges and porters had once shared a staircase, became some of the most overcrowded slums in Europe by the middle of the nineteenth century. The New Town's beauty and the Old Town's misery were two halves of the same move.
Thistle Street has always been a little rougher, a little livelier, a place for workshops, taverns and small trade rather than for promenading. In a city that loves its façades, it is good to walk for a moment down the back of the stage. Return east to Hanover Street, then follow the grid back toward St Andrew Square and the stately house standing behind its forecourt on the east side.