On the Lawnmarket, at the top of the Royal Mile, Gladstone's Land is a rare tenement of Edinburgh's old town. A witness of the merchant prosperity of the late Renaissance, it reveals, behind its tall façade, the well-off domestic décor of the Jacobean city.
A tenement of the old town
The original building goes back to around 1550, but it is the great refitting of 1617-1620 — squarely within our window — that gave Gladstone's Land its present face, at the instigation of the prosperous merchant Thomas Gledstanes and his wife Bessie Cunningham. The building illustrates a reality proper to Edinburgh: enclosed within its walls, the old town lacked ground space, and so people built upward — six-storey buildings where, from cellar to attic, wealthy merchants and common folk lived side by side. Gladstone's Land is one of the few preserved examples of this kind of vertical urban dwelling.
The décor of Jacobean prosperity
The major interest of Gladstone's Land is its décor: its original painted ceilings, long covered then restored, illustrate the domestic taste of the merchant bourgeoisie of the Edinburgh of James VI and I. These ceilings adorned with floral and fruit motifs, the reconstructed shop and tavern on the ground floor, tell the wealth and refinement of a city in full commercial expansion. One can guess the trade networks of a Royal Mile tenement: an inventory of the time mentions raisins, figs, ginger, sugar and clay pipes — products come from afar, a sign of an already globalised trade. To see: the period painted ceilings, the six-storey building typical of the Old Town, the reconstructed ground-floor shop and tavern.
Did you know?
An inventory of 1632 drawn up for a neighbouring Royal Mile merchant lists raisins, figs, ginger, sugar and clay pipes — a concrete glimpse of the trade networks that ended up in an Edinburgh tenement in the early seventeenth century. These products come from the Mediterranean, the Indies and the colonies show that even Scotland's old town, far from the great ports, was already plugged into the world trade of the waning Renaissance.
Notes
Gladstone's Land lies at 477B Lawnmarket, Royal Mile, Edinburgh; a National Trust for Scotland property, open to the public. Hours to check.
Quiz
- Which refitting of Gladstone's Land falls within our period?
- That of 1617-1620 (Thomas Gledstanes)
- That of 1850
- That of Roman times
- Why were the Old Town buildings so tall?
- A lack of ground space in the walled city
- To defend against the English
- For love of height
- What do its painted ceilings reveal?
- The well-off domestic décor of Jacobean Edinburgh
- Battle scenes
- A map of the world