Qualla: Heriot Row

Heriot Row: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0. If Edinburgh ran a blue plaque scheme on Heriot Row, the architectural conservators say, the street would look like an attack of the measles. Almost every house deserves two or three. The decision instead was to install no plaques at all and let visitors imagine, looking up at those grave Georgian frontages, who has stood at those windows. James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who first wrote the equations of electromagnetism. Robert Louis Stevenson, the boy who turned a garden pond into Treasure Island. A spymaster, a chloroform pioneer, a publisher of Walter Scott. The Heriot Row residents are the people Edinburgh built itself for.

Read more: Heriot Row on Qualla

Image: Stephencdickson | CC BY-SA 4.0

Heriot Row: A Second New Town

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 3.0. Edinburgh's First New Town - the great Georgian grid of Princes Street, George Street and Queen Street, laid out from 1767 - had been such a triumph that by the turn of the nineteenth century the city wanted more. The slope falling away to the north of Queen Street was largely ow...

Read more: Heriot Row on Qualla

Image: Ad Meskens | CC BY-SA 3.0

Heriot Row: Quiet Modesty, Grand Effect

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0. The original scheme was unusually modest for its ambition: two storeys and a basement, except at the end pavilions and central pavilions, which had three. In 1864 David Bryce drew up plans to raise the entire western section to three storeys, but because each house was separately...

Read more: Heriot Row on Qualla

Image: Stephencdickson | CC BY-SA 4.0

Heriot Row: Stevenson's Island

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0. Robert Louis Stevenson grew up at 17 Heriot Row, the house his lighthouse-engineer father Thomas Stevenson occupied. From his bedroom window the young Robert looked out across the central section of Queen Street Gardens to a small pond with a single island in it - the kind of det...

Read more: Heriot Row on Qualla

Image: Stephencdickson | CC BY-SA 4.0

Heriot Row: The Roll Call

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 3.0. At number 31 lived James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist whose equations united electricity, magnetism and light. He was born in Edinburgh in 1831, lived briefly at 14 India Street, and would later move in scientific circles that changed the universe's self-understanding. At 6 lived...

Read more: Heriot Row on Qualla

Image: Ad Meskens | CC BY-SA 3.0

Heriot Row: Two Hundred Years Unchanged

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cast-iron balconies were not part of the original design - they were added piecemeal between 1830 and 1890, which is why each house wears a different one. Full-length first-floor windows began appearing around 1860, dropping the sills and turning four-pane sashes into five-pane. ...

Read more: Heriot Row on Qualla

Image: Stephencdickson | CC BY-SA 4.0