The lost Scottish Parliament - a missing link unearthed...
- Robert Sproul-Cran
- May 8
- 5 min read
There are precious few images surviving of the old Scottish Parliament. But now a vital clue allows Parliament Square to be completed.
Bit by bit we have been able to recreate the appearance of Edinburgh's old Parliament Hall, from surviving portions of the building still standing, to salvaged masonry scattered from Edinburgh to Peebles and the Scottish Borders. There are only two or three images of the building itself, and the same number of prints and a painting showing St Giles and the shops and Luckenbooths which crowded round its walls. But what of the rest of the square- or Parliament Close as it was then known?
It seemed that the only views of those less celebrated buildings worth recording were when buildings collapsed or went up in flames.
There are some details which can be gleaned from these, although they don't entirely agree with each other The tenement to the right of the images is clearly one storey higher than that on the left, but Hill and Lizars disagree over whether there should be four or five rows of windows above the ground floor shops. The one thing that is correctly noted is that there is no equestrian statue of Charles II - the plinth is empty. Just as well - it would probably have melted. In fact it had been taken away for repairs earlier in 1824, and spent the next eleven years in the Calton Jail!
So if we could go back in time to find a more accurate view of the east and south sides of Parliament Square, we'd want to find a picture from before the Great Fire. We'd send our artist up the top of the tower of St Giles to get an unobstructed view all around. If we could pick our ideal year we might ask for around 1830, when the new Reid facade was being built over the old Parliament Hall.
Well, astonishingly, such an image exists!
It's not on public display, but it's looked after by the City Arts Centre, which is part of The City of Edinburgh Council, Museums & Galleries. The image at the top of this post is the part that includes Parliament Square. At centre right we can see the roof of Parliament Hall, with the access tower sitting in the corner of the 'L' shape. In front of it are two newly erected pillars - part of the new facade. To the left of these is a completed section of the new Reid facade, complete with sphinxes on the roof. It now covers up the 'Jamb' and the Exchequer building. And to the left of that is the only picture I've yet found of the massively tall tenements on the southeast side of Parliament Square. There's another painting which continues the scene to the left, including the east side of the square. Let's look at the two of them together...
The images don't quite line up. So why is this? And what is their purpose?
The answer is more Hollywood than Holyrood.
These aquatints or lithographs seem to be by W. Wells. They are a copy of massive artworks constructed by Robert Barker. The originals would have lined the walls of a large circular room. He didn't actually paint the views himself. They were painted on canvas by his twelve year old son, Henry Aston! Barker first tried out his contrivance in 1788, and exhibited it in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Entrance would have been up a flight of stairs taking you into the middle of the room. You would then have been surrounded by a 360 degree panorama of the chosen view.
Barker turned his thoughts to London, where he reckoned there was the prospect of a long term business. He sent Henry to draw the view of the city from a roof on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge. This time the construction was to be bigger and better than the Scottish trials.
In 1792, Barker built a rotunda according to his patent design. His friends invented a new word to describe it - a 'Panorama'. It was able to exhibit two panorama paintings, one 90 feet in diameter on the ground floor and another 50 feet in diameter on the upper level. Spectators were charged one shilling per panorama. That's just under £10 in today's money.
The London showings were highly successful, and his thoughts moved on to other locations - and back to Scotland. Here he created a 360 degree view of Edinburgh from the Calton Hill, and the one we're looking at today, from the spire of St Giles. What showmanship! Of course the originals no longer exist, but what we do have is artists' copies of the views. Here are the four images, to give the complete picture.
The images don't line up exactly. You can see in the centre there's a repeated part. It looks as if at some point in the past the pictures may have been glued together into one strip, then separated again, so some small vertical strips may have been lost. But they do provide some unique details. We can process the images to clarify some of the edges.
What is clear is that there were shops lining the whole of the east and south sides of the square, from John's Coffee Shop hidden below St Giles on the left of these pics (which has just re-opened!) round to a close immediately beside the left hand sphinx of the new Reid facade. This led down a flight of steps to the Meal Market and the Cowgate beyond. We can see that the south tenements had a ground floor shop level, then six floors above this. But we must remember that the back of these buildings were on a steep slope dropping down to the Cowgate, and there may have been another four storeys which we can't see from this side - eleven in total.
1700s Edinburgh - the birthplace of the skyscraper!
William Edgar's map of 1742 gives an excellent overview of the layout.
So we now have enough information to start to model the view of Parliament Square as seen looking out eastwards from the Parliament building. Here's a first impression. It's still rough around the edges, but it does represent Edinburgh at dusk, in the pouring rain, with wet pavements, under leaden skies. I did say I was going for reality...
In the next blog I'll re-create more views of the east side of Parliament Square. Remember to add your email and click on the subscribe button at the foot of the page if you want to be told when the next post appears. And probably clicking 'like' does no harm if we want more people to find these posts. There will be no spam, and nothing will be shared. I'm not flogging anything! I'm just doing this because I really enjoy bringing this rich part of Edinburgh's history to life.