Bernard Street: Burns Among the Merchants
Why is it significant?
Notice how the street suddenly swells into something close to a square, lined with stately stone fronts built for money: banks, exchanges, merchants' offices. On his tall plinth, Robert Burns gazes out over the traffic, looking as if he were composing something rude about it.
Key Facts
| Place | Bernard Street: Burns Among the Merchants |
|---|---|
| Address | Bernard Street, Leith, Edinburgh EH6, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.97550, -3.16680 |
| Part of Walk | Leith Uncovered: The Shore, the Docks and the Birthplace of Golf's Rules in Edinburgh |
| Generated | Generated |
Notice how the street suddenly swells into something close to a square, lined with stately stone fronts built for money: banks, exchanges, merchants' offices. On his tall plinth, Robert Burns gazes out over the traffic, looking as if he were composing something rude about it.
Why Burns, in a harbour town he barely knew? The Leith Burns Club put him up in 1898, and there is a joke hidden in the choice. Scotland's national poet spent his last years working as an excise officer, a taxman paid to catch smugglers. And here he stands, in a port where, in his day, brandy, gin and tea slipped ashore by night without paying a penny, keeping a stony eye on the quays.
The street's name hides a courtier. According to Leith tradition, it remembers Bernard Lindsay, a groom of the chamber to King James VI, who was granted the old royal storehouse on the Shore and turned it into a tavern, with a tennis court for the gentry. The king's man became a publican... which, in Leith, may well have been the better job.
A few steps round the corner on Constitution Street stands the old Corn Exchange of the 1860s, where grain dealers haggled beneath a carved frieze of cherubs ploughing, sowing and harvesting. All this confident architecture belonged to a town that ran its own affairs for less than a century. Leith became an independent burgh in 1833. In 1920 it was merged into Edinburgh, after a local vote in which Leithers rejected the merger by a huge margin. The city absorbed it anyway.
In some families that vote still stings a hundred years on, and you will see the word Leith worn proudly on football shirts, shop signs and murals. Now walk west along Bernard Street towards the river, then slip into the lanes just south of it, Burgess Street and Water's Close, to find a tall old house with steep, stepped gables.