Atmospherically misleading: the thread about Louis H. Grimshaw’s paintings of Edinburgh

This thread was originally written and published in July 2023.

Today’s (July 9th 2023) Auction House Artefact was this evocative and eerie late-evening painting of the High Street in Edinburgh, looking towards St. Giles after the rain. Painted by Louis H. Grimshaw in 1895, in the “moonlit cityscape” style he inherited from his father, John Atkinson Grimshaw.

The young Louis Grimshaw started working as an artist as an assistant to his father, helping with the details such as the people on moody and atmospheric late night scenes such as this one, “Glasgow, Saturday Night“, showing the hustle and bustle of the Broomielaw on the Clyde. The Grimshaws talent was one of capturing the ethereal glow of a sunset or moonlight as it reflected through clouds upon a wet cityscape and contrasting that with the bright, artificial lights of modernity. They also chose to deliberately avoid the dirt, grime and squalor of Victorian town life in their paintings, creating evocative but fundamentally sanitised scenes.

Father and son worked together until the former’s death in 1893. At this juncture, Louis continued the style and subject matter himself. In his painting of St. Giles, we see the historic and frequently decrepit Old Town portrayed as a modern and prosperous city, with glowing shop lights, busy shoppers, clean streets, neat rows of gas lamps a horse tram picking up passengers. (This was the brief 12 year period when the Old Town had a tram route up the High Street, which was lost the year after this scene was painted when the horse trams moved over to cable traction and the route was shifted down the Mound instead)

Despite his talents, Louis Grimshaw packed in the unpredictable and insecure life as painter in 1905, swapping it for the steady pay and regular work of a cartographer, for The Guardian, in 1905. As such he left a limited body of work and it commands high prices – £70-100k for the St. Giles painting when it last sold in 2008. He mainly depicted London but seems to have painted 3 Edinburgh scenes in 1895. Below we have the classic view up the High Street from “John Knox’s” House looking towards the Tron Kirk and St. Giles, the moon glowing somewhere above Auld Reekie’s smoggy cloak.

A small troop of Highlanders are marching downhill from the Castle to Holyrood. The gaslamps are lit, the shop windows are bright and on the right is the welcoming lamp and incongruous (for the Old Town) classical columns of Carrubers Close Mission.

Grimshaw’s scene matches *very* closely a photograph from the 1890s by John Patrick one can’t but wonder if it was the inspiration. The photo also shows the reality of the High Street compared to Grimshaw’s stylised, gentrified painting. Mixed in with the bustle and prosperity are the shoeless, malnourished children and obvious signs of the decaying, overcrowded accommodation of the Old Town that made life here so tenuous for so many children

In fact, it’s such a close match, I think that Grimshaw’s scene can only have been a tracing of Patrick’s photograph. See for yourself below:

Grimshaw’s last Edinburgh scene (that I can find) shows Holyroodhouse from the foot of the Canongate. Again the moon behind the cloud and smog casts an eerie glow over the damp road. Again the lights are bright and streets are clean. Again this is very sanitised scene compared to the reality of life in the Canongate at that time.

The reality was that in the 1890s, the Canongate – at one time long ago the suburban retreat of the City’s wealthy classes – was a crumbling, overcrowded and insanitary neighbourhood, where disease, malnourishment and poverty were endemic and child mortality was high.

Don’t get me wrong, I love these paintings and the artist’s skill in conjouring up the atmosphere. But they are a set-dressed fantasy, this thread on the diet of the working class of the Canongate in 1901 gives a window on what life was really like here for many. My Mum’s family lived this reality, at this time- flitting between the slums of the Canongate, High Street, St. Leonards and Stockbridge, constantly on the move; looking for something better or leaving behind something worse. They were Irish immigrant labourers, at the very bottom of the pile, and that reality was of their eleven children, eight predeceased their mother and four never made their 1st birthday. Of the children that survived to adulthood, five died as young adults from TB: even in the better times of the 1930s and 40s, the legacy of a childhood in the slums caught up with them.

Sorry. Ranty reality check over – please don’t get me wrong, these are very nice and evocative paintings. Stick a couple of dancers and a butler in them and they’d be quite like a Jack Vettriano scene. Do enjoy them; but they absolutely need a word of caution about how artificial the world is that they present us with.

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The “most fortunate of the city politicians”: the thread about the life and times of Orlando Hart

This thread was originally written and published in October 2023.

Last week’s thread about the bankers Sir James Hunter Blair and Sir William Forbes contained a caricature by the prolific John Kay that satirised the local political scandal of “The Levelling of the High Street” as part of the construction of the South Bridge. On the left is a local politician by the name of Orlando Hart.

Orlando? I didn’t at first believe there was a man in 18th century Edinburgh called Orlando! Lowland Scotland in the 18th and 19th century had a habit of naming their sons from a rather small pool of names – work by Richard Rodger on the 1861 Census has shown that a full 50% of boys in Edinburgh were named either John, James, William or Robert and the top 10 most popular names accounted for 79% of all boys. But it turns out I was totally wrong, and Orlando Hart was one of a population of (probably) just two Orlandos in the whole country at this time. I am informed (thank you Corpyburd on Twitter) that this seed of doubt, on my part, has a name – The Tiffany Problem. This is when people do not believe something historical is true, because it sounds modern, and takes its name from people associating the name Tiffany so strongly with the 1980s and a certain pop star that they cannot believe it was a relatively common medieval name. So I just had to try and find out a bit more about this exotically-named man.

So who was Orlando Hart? When and where he was born, I do not know, I cannot find any birth registration for him, but based on the known facts of his life he was probably born between 1720-30. Hart wasn’t a particularly common surname in Edinburgh at the time, only 12 boys and 8 girls named Hart were registered born in Edinburgh in the 20 years 1715-1735. So unless he was born under a different name as one of those 12, I assume he may not have been born in Edinburgh. In 1751 we get our first solid record of him, when a journeyman1 shoemaker of his name married Elisabeth Henderson of the Water of Leith Village at the West Kirk of St. Cuthberts.

Children followed; (Mac)Duff in 1755 (named after a friend), Archibald in 1760 and Katharine in 1766. A son also named Orlando Hart, was buried in 1772. Like many aspiring and connected men of the time, Orlando was a Freemason; in 1755-57 and again in 1761-62 he was a Grand Steward in the Grand Lodge of Scotland – a man clearly getting somewhere in life. It is evident he was popular amongst his contemporaries, in 1757 he was elected to the Monarchy of the Jolly Sons of St. Crispin – a fraternal organisation for shoemakers and by 1760 he was noted as a “Shoemaker in Lady Yester’s Parish“. Lady Yester’s – or the South East Parish of Edinburgh – served the portion of the city south of the Cowgate and east of College Wynd. The church moved from a 17th century building in the High School Yards to a new one on Infirmary Street in 1805.

But Orlando Hart was moving upwards in life and didn’t stay still long, 3 years later he was a “Shoemaker In the Mint” – the old Royal Mint of Scotland, north of the Cowgate where Coinyie-House Close now stands. He is recorded as being shoemaker to James Boswell in the latter’s correspondence.

Successful and popular as a shoemaker and a freemason, it was natural that local politics should follow and in 1766 he was elected Deacon of his Trade Incorporation, the Cordiners. (Cordwainer was the ancient word for a shoemaker, who made shoes from new leather – Cordoba, from the Spanish city of Córdoba where the best shoe leather traditionally came from. A “cobbler” in contrast was someone who repaired, or re-made, shoes.) The Deacon was the most senior office holder of his Trade, elected by and from amongst his peers. It also conferred him a seat on the town council as a representative of his Trade. Further success followed, in 1771 he was elected Convenor of the Trades, the most senior officer of all the city’s Trade Incorporations.

His rise did not stop there. By 1773 he was a Magistrate – a legal officer of the Town Council in the lowest level of courts – again the Trades had a right to put forward a candidate for one of these positions. The Town Council and its officers at this time was a mixture of elected councillors and also a balance of seats held by the representatives of the Trades and the Merchants. By now, Orlando Hart’s business has moved to the centre of the Old Town, “Opposite the Guard“, meaning the old guard house lodge in the centre of the High Street, between the Tron Kirk and St. Giles. A prestigious address, in a time before the Old Town was yet to be supplanted by the New Town as the place to do business.

Not content to be just a successful Shoemaker, freemason, man of his Trade and local politician, he was also quite a dab hand with his golf clubs. Golf was a pastime that occupied the important men of the city and was as much a place to fraternise and do business as to improve your handicap. When the Royal Burgess Golfing Society reformed in 1773, who should be elected club captain but Orlando Hart?

He represented the City as a Commissioner of the Convention of Royal Burghs, where the representatives of the various Burghs would gather once or twice a year to thrash out the issues of the day, and also at the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland alongside the Lord Provost of Edinburgh (the most powerful local politician in all of Scotland). In 1775 he was once again elected Deacon Convenor of the Trades – for a good 25 years of his life he was constantly in one office of local government or another. These were positions elected from and amongst his peers, a mark of his popularity amongst them. John Kay’s brief biography says he was “Considered one of the most fortunate of the city politicians… He possessed a happy knack of suiting himself to circumstances, and was peculiarly sagacious in keeping steady by the leading men in the magistracy”. What this means was that Hart was always careful to align himself to the most senior men in the council, whomever they may be, without treading on the toes of others. He was awarded the honorific (and profitable) office of Keeper of the Town Water Works.

In 1787, Orlando Hart’s name appears at the back of an important book as subscriber to “Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect” – the Edinburgh reprint of Robert Burns’ sensational début publication, which saw the good and the great of the city clamouring for the author’s favour. A year later, his name pops up in another interesting place; as being called to assize as a Juror in the case of one William Brodie – Deacon Brodie to you and I. Brodie was a man who had once held an equivalent office of local government, Deacon, as Orlando, but the latter was not selected to sit on the jury.

Hart must have been well into his sixties by 1791 when he was once again elected as one of the two Town Councillors representing the Trades. By this time he must also have been exceptionally wealthy, as he bought a feu on Charlotte Square – the newest and most prestigious development in town – to build himself a house. That feu was for number 6, which he bought for £290. He spent probably spent ten times that on completing the house to Robert Adam’s plans (a total c. £490k in 2023). Number 6 Charlotte Square is of course Bute House, residence of the First Minister of Scotland.

It is not clear if Orlando Hart ever lived in the house himself, he died on September 9th 1793, no more than a year after its completion and just months after being elected as one of the managers of the Public Dispensary of Edinburgh . His wife, Elisabeth Henderson, died exactly a week later. Macduff Hart, who was his sole surviving son by this time, inherited Orlando Hart & Sons shoemakers. It was from the estate of Orlando Hart that No. 6 was sold to the Craufurd family in 1796, Mrs Isabella Craufurd being the widow of a banker and owner of a plantation and 600 slaves in Jamaica. She took up residence there with her son.

That was the life and times of Orlando Hart; I have yet to find his registry of death so cannot identify where Hart’s Ground, the family burial plot was. I also suspect he may have been godfather to a number of children as I can find boys born in Edinburgh during his lifetime of his name – Orlando Hart Baillie (son of a Shoemaker) and an Orlando Hart Wilson, who would go on to enjoy a relatively successful naval career.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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The Royal Mile: the thread about a street with no addresses

This thread was originally written and published in September 2022.

Apropos current events (at the time of writing), I thought it might be interesting, relevant or a bit of both to delve a little into the name of a certain street and dispel a few myths or misapprehensions about it.

The Royal Mile of course is well known as that ancient main street of Edinburgh’s Old Town, named for the mile long route between Edinburgh Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse. This is a route steeped in history and long trodden by monarchs of Scotland, yes? The history books (or some of them) actually will tell you this, so it must be true, yes? Well, not really, no.

OK, the bit about it being a mile long between the castle and the palace is correct, it almost exactly is – give or take a foot, yard or metre. But that’s a statute mile not the Scots mile which some sources claim (which is ~200m longer) so that should raise a slight suspicion as to how ancient a term it really is. Feel free to measure it if you don’t believe me! You also won’t find any property with a street address of Royal Mile and you won’t find it in any old Post Office directory listing.

No. The Royal Mile is a collective term for four distinct streets, which in days of yore were in two completely separate burghs. From the top of the hill at the castle to the bottom, which is from west to east, we have the Castle Hill, Lawnmarket and High Street of Edinburgh and the Canongate which was in the Burgh of Canongate. These are shown below with their separate names on Kincaid’s street map of 1784.

Stuart Harris, who wrote the book on Edinburgh street names, takes particular exception to the Royal Mile name: “to use this label for the combined length of the separate historic market streets [Edinburgh and the Canongate] it is at cost of blurring the distinction between the two“. He continues “it is not only meaningless historically, but unhappily gives an impression that this was a route created to link castle and palace, whereas the truth is that it came into being hundreds of years before the kings of Scots had anything to go with the fortress or the palace“. Harris notes that in medieval references it is given as “via Regia“, the King’s Way, but then that was given to any public highway, with the adjoining streets and closes all being in private ownership in their respective burghs. Using the “nickname” of Royal Mile, he bemoaned, was causing the erosion of the historic and distinct individual street names, “with a regrettable loss of civic dignity“.

The route is undoubtedly ancient, a track will have existed along the spine of the Castle Rock since as long as people scratched out a living on its summit as a defensible place to survive. But how old are the street names and how old is the objectionable term Royal Mile? The earliest medieval references to the High Street describe a vicus foralis or market street, because that’s what it was and why it was much wider than it is now. By the 16th century it’s the magnus vicus or great street and by the start of the 17th it’s the High Street (or Hie Gate in Scots). The below sketch reconstructs the 15th century birds’ eye view of the city on its ridge below the castle, with the prominent one-mile route from castle to Holyrood.

The name Castle Hill, now partly buried beneath the 18th and 19th c. Esplanade, dates to at least 1484. It refers to the hill you climb to reach the castle, the castle itself sits on the Castle Rock. There’s evidence to suggest that the Castle Hill predates the High Street as the main centre of populace of Edinburgh.

The Lawnmarket is nothing to do with lawns or selling fodder. Lawn is a corruption of the Scots Laund or Laun; in English – Land; it was the Landmercatt, where people from the lands outwith the burgh could trade. The main city markets were restricted to only being for the traders of the burgh. In the 1765 town plan by Edgar (below) it’s even spelled as Land Market.

And the Canongate, the principle thoroughfare of the burgh of that name dates to not long after the foundation of the Holyrood Abbey in 1128, first being recorded in 1363 as the vicus canonicorum or “Canoungait“, the way of the Canons (of the Abbey). The Burgh of Canongate, whose superiority was held by the Abbey until the Scottish Reformation, post-dated the street name and was established at some time in the 15th century.

And so what of The Royal Mile? Well, it’s a term that first appears in newspapers in the late 19th century. There are a couple of references to it in articles in The Scotsman in the 1880 and 1890s, written in a manner that implies it was clearly a term already understood locally. But crucially, it’s not given as a proper noun, it’s in quotation marks as the “royal mile“, it’s being used as a descriptive nickname. It first appears in book print that I can find in 1901, in “Edinburgh in the Nineteenth Century” by W. M. Gilbert. Again, with the quote marks and no capital on mile, again it’s clearly a nickname.

From here on, use of the term grows. A burgh councillor, C. J. Mcarthy, gave a talk illustrated by magic lantern slides of the title to the Edinburgh Architectural Association in 1905. By 1920, it’s the title of a historical guidebook published locally, by Robert T. Skinner

And by the 1930s, the name and its mythical genesis is firmly embedded in the popular history books.

So there you have it. Yes, the Royal Mile or royal mile is a well accepted and established local name for the area between the Castle and the Palace, but as is sometimes the case the accepted history is a relatively modern invention to fit the facts and is divorced from the historical reality.

If you have found this useful, informative or amusing, perhaps you would like to help contribute towards the running costs of this site – including keeping it ad-free and my book-buying budget to find further stories to bring you – by supporting me on ko-fi. Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends.

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#JuniperRidge Landfill can expand, state says again after judge orders reconsideration

by Marie Weidmayer, March 23, 2026

Excerpt: "The Juniper Ridge Landfill can expand, the Maine Department of Environmental Protection decided for a second time — but a judge must sign off first.

"A new public benefit determination allows the #OldTown landfill to expand, the #ConservationLawFoundation said Monday. The foundation and #PenobscotNation sued the #MaineDEP in November 2024 over the proposed expansion.

"The department had to reconsider allowing the expansion after a judge ruled in January that the Maine DEP did not complete 'critical' fact finding during the public benefit determination. The Maine DEP decided Oct. 2, 2024, there is a public benefit to the expansion and expanding the landfill is not inconsistent with #EnvironmentalJustice.

"Penobscot County Superior Court Judge Bruce Mallonee will reconsider the application because the case is still pending, Maine DEP spokesperson David Madore said. The department can resume processing the expansion application and will have a public hearing, he said.

" 'This decision does not reflect the lived reality of our people,' Penobscot Nation Chief #KirkFrancis said. “Our voices and our knowledge of this place must be meaningfully considered when those in power make decisions that will impact our land and community.'

"The lawsuit is still pending in Penobscot County Superior Court. The foundation and Penobscot Nation are determining next steps."

Read more:
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2026/03/23/penobscot/penobscot-police-courts/landfill-expansion-juniper-ridge/

Archived version:
https://archive.ph/8dI8S

#MainePol #CasellaWasteSystems #WaterIsLife #SoilIsLife #PFAS #MaineFirstNations #Pollution #ForeverChemicals

Explore Lyon's historic Old Town 🏙️, savor traditional bouchon cuisine 🍴, and discover the stunning Fourvière Basilica ⛪️. Get ready for a weekend adventure!

#Europe #Travel #Lyon #France #WeekendGetaway #OldTown #BouchonCuisine #FourvièreBasilica

https://europa.tips/en/weekend-in-lyon-guide

Untitled (2015)
Photo ©️ Dietmar Bachmann
📍Amiens, France

#Fensterfreitag #WindowFriday #photography #photo #windows #canal #facade #reflection #mirroring #water #oldtown #Amiens #France #Nikon #NikonD810 #Fotografie #Foto #Fenster #Kanal #Fassade #Reflexion #Spiegelung #Wasser #Altstadt