Qualla: Stockbridge, Edinburgh

Stockbridge, Edinburgh: Introduction

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown author, Public domain. On 27 March 1871, on the playing fields at Raeburn Place, twenty Scots played twenty Englishmen at a sport called rugby. Scotland won by a goal and a try to a try. It was the first international rugby match ever staged anywhere in the world. The field was at Edinburgh Academy's ground in Stockbridge, a New Town neighbourhood that the portrait painter Henry Raeburn had developed half a century earlier on two estates he happened to own. He named one street for his wife Ann. Stockbridge is that kind of place: residential, walkable, full of small specific stories that tend to outsize its compact footprint.

Read more: Stockbridge, Edinburgh on Qualla

Image: Unknown author | Public domain

Stockbridge, Edinburgh: Raeburn's Streets

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kim Traynor, CC BY-SA 3.0. Henry Raeburn was Scotland's leading portrait painter, the man who painted Sir Walter Scott and the Reverend Robert Walker skating on Duddingston Loch. He also bought land. The Deanhaugh and St Bernard's estates lay just north of Edinburgh's New Town, and Raeburn developed them w...

Read more: Stockbridge, Edinburgh on Qualla

Image: Kim Traynor | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stockbridge, Edinburgh: St Bernard's Well

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stanley Howe, CC BY-SA 2.0. On the south bank of the Water of Leith, just below a footpath through the valley, stands a small circular Greek temple supported by ten tall Doric columns. This is St Bernard's Well, modelled on the Sibyl's Temple at Tivoli. The mineral spring beneath had been considered medicin...

Read more: Stockbridge, Edinburgh on Qualla

Image: Stanley Howe | CC BY-SA 2.0

Stockbridge, Edinburgh: The Colonies

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AlasdairW, CC BY-SA 3.0. Between Glenogle Road and the Water of Leith run twelve parallel streets known as the Stockbridge Colonies. They were built between 1861 and 1911 by the Edinburgh Co-operative Building Company to provide low-cost housing for skilled workers locked out of New Town rents. The stree...

Read more: Stockbridge, Edinburgh on Qualla

Image: AlasdairW | CC BY-SA 3.0

Stockbridge, Edinburgh: St Stephen's Pendulum

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ralf Steinberger from Milan, Berlin + Munich, Italy + Germany, CC BY 2.0. The eastern entrance to Stockbridge is marked by William Playfair's St Stephen's Church, designed in 1827 and squeezed into ground at the south edge of Silvermills that fell away sharply. Playfair raised the main church up by a storey to handle the slope, with a tall flight of na...

Read more: Stockbridge, Edinburgh on Qualla

Image: Ralf Steinberger from Milan, Berlin + Munich, Italy + Germany | CC BY 2.0

Stockbridge, Edinburgh: Maxwell and Higgs

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Drnoble, CC BY-SA 4.0. James Clerk Maxwell was born at 14 India Street in Stockbridge on 13 June 1831. He went on to unify electricity, magnetism, and light into a single theory of electromagnetism, the foundation that Einstein later built on. Albert Einstein kept a portrait of Maxwell on his study wal...

Read more: Stockbridge, Edinburgh on Qualla

Image: Drnoble | CC BY-SA 4.0

Stockbridge, Edinburgh: Duck Wardens and Madame Doubtfire

Fri, 29 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit N Chadwick, CC BY-SA 2.0. Each year since 1988, the Stockbridge community festival has held a Duck Race. One thousand rubber ducks are released into the Water of Leith, numbered, and chased downstream. Duck Wardens follow on foot to keep the ducks out of the reeds and to stop children spectating from fall...

Read more: Stockbridge, Edinburgh on Qualla

Image: N Chadwick | CC BY-SA 2.0