This thread was originally written and published in two parts, in February 2018 and November 2019. It has been joined into one, edited and corrected as applicable for this post.

There’s a thread I was been meaning to do about the quirks and peculiarities of an old way to name streets in Edinburgh; where the road gets one name but the buildings get a different street address name.

London Road is a case in point, hardly any buildings have an address “London Road“. Starting at the western end and heading out of town the buildings street addresses go Blenheim Place & Leopold Place (on opposite sides) > Brunton Place > Maryfield / East Norton Place (on opposite sides) > Cadzow Place / Earlston Place (on opposite sides) > Dalziel Place > Meadowbank Place > Parson’s Green Terrace > Hillend Place / Jock’s Lodge (on opposite sides) > Wolesely Place > Wolsely Terrace.

That’s an awful lot of different streets in one! In these cases, the “Place” (occasionally, “Terrace”) refers to a tenement development, these can be anything from single buildings to a row of 10 or 20 “buildings”stairs”. Back in the day they were named by either the party that fued the land (split it off an original parcel for development) or at the discretion of the builder. The principle roads were generally named where they were going from/to. The London Road was Robert Stevenson’s early 19th century grand entrance to the city for the London stagecoaches, hence its name.

Just to confuse matters, the “places” are frequently named differently on different sides of the road – London Road through Abbeyhill is East Norton Place and Cadzow Place on one side and Earlston Place and Maryhill on the other.

The Edinburgh Co-operative Building Company, who built Edinburgh’s “colony” housing, kept up this trend. They named the rows of houses rather than the actual streets. See here at Abbeyhill how the names are marked on the map inside the buildings and not on the road.

This makes sense to the builders as each terrace has two storeys of main door flats; ground floor flats accessed off of one street, the first floor flats have their own doors and staircases and are accesses from the street on the other side. But this gives the highly confusing scenario where if you want the even numbers of say Alva Place you go to one street and if you want the odds you go to the next street. I’ve been totally caught out by this a number of times when going to view flats or visit someone.

The east end of the Abbeyhill Colonies takes this to extremes, with a short street having different names not just on both sides but also at different ends of the same sides! And that’s before you take into account the corner buildings on London Road being “Earlston Place” addresses

So that’s one little 125m-long residential street having 4 different street addresses and requiring 9 different street signs!

Needless to say, this sort of detail is entirely beyond Google’s ken, who have named the streets in a conventional manner and therefore gotten it totally wrong.

Open Street Map gets it right (almost), naming the individual rows of buildings but also can’t quite resist naming the end street too.

Come a mass public postal system things began to get out of hand as there were a number of different ways that you could style an address. This called for some rationalisation. Perhaps the most wholesale example was Leith Walk, which was built as a string of individual “places”.

From the very top of the Walk, the Edinburgh end at current day Picardy Place, the facing “pairs” of places on opposite sides of the road went Union Place / Greenside Place> Antigua Street / Baxters Place> Gayfield Place & Haddington Place / Elm Row> Croall Place / Brunswick Place> Albert Place / Shrub Place> George Place / Crichton Place.

We are now at the Leith and Edinburgh boundary at Pilrig Street. Continuing down into Leith, the development of the tenements we see today was later than in Edinburgh and they generally took Leith Walk addresses, although many older tenements and individual houses persisted in the mix for longer (and a few still survive).

The older “place” names went Fyfe Place > Kings Place > Orchardfield / Heriot Buildings > Springfield > Ronaldson’s Buildings > Stead’s Place / Anderson Place > Allison’s Place > Whitfield’s Place / Macneill’s Place > Cassell’s Place / Queen’s Place.

We are now at the foot of the Walk. Confused? I am!

Here’s an interesting thing. The names of most of the streets of “Marchmont” as we know it today are mainly called after the country estates in the Scottish Borders once owned by the Warrender family. The Warrenders or Bruntsfield House owned the lands of what is now Marchmont and fued the Bruntsfield or Warrender Park lands development. This resulted in the tenemented streets with romantic Borders names such as Marchmont, Thirlestane, Spottiswoode, Lauderdale and Arden.

It was apparently the intention that this new suburb would be called “Warrender Park”, with Marchmont only applying to a few of the roads. So how did Marchmont come to be the prevailing name for the district? Well the story goes that it comes from the early days of trams reaching the suburb. The original destination was Marchmont Road, and over time it was simpler and easier for the signwriters to just paint “Marchmont” on the destination boards for the destination rather than “Warrender Park”.

Anyway, there are lots more examples of this – on late Georgian buildings you can often see an elegantly carved building name next to the modern street sign and sometimes the 2 don’t match, in that difference there’s a wee story.

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Part 2 of this story was prompted when I was browsing through an old copy of the Book of the Old Edinburgh Club (volume 27, 1949 to be precise) that has an interesting article on the history of street numbering in Edinburgh. Up until the late 18th century, there weren’t any street numbers in Edinburgh at all. People found their way around by reference to landmarks and other streets, e.g. “opposite the back stairs, Cowgate” or “head of Riddle’s Close, Lawnmarket”. If you got lost, you’d just ask This meant that the early Post Office directories, e.g. by Williamson, didn’t contain numbers, just general street or neighbourhood names and sometimes a location description.

These early publications only listed important people with professions or trades anyway, so it wasn’t necessarily too much of a problem. Nobody got lost.

Williamson, who published the directory, was “Indian Peter” Williamson and he was a very extremely interesting fellow. He originated the “penny post” system for Edinburgh, so it stands to reason that he also organised the directory listings too to drum up business. Peter was native to Aberdeenshire but had been forcibly taken (kidnapped, by his own account) to north America against his will as a boy. He was sold into service there, but was treated kindly by his master and got the rudiments of an education, earning his freedom and an inheritance when the former died.

Anyway long story short, by Williamson’s account he bought a farm with his inheretance and married. But the “French and Indian War” intervened and he was being captured and imprisoned during a native attack. Spending time with them, he learned something of their ways, before escaping. He joined the British Army to fight the French and their native allies, but again was caught and imprisoned, taken this time to Canada as a Prisoner of War. On release, he worked his way back to Scotland and was able to bring his original captors and traffickers to justice.

Along with the £100 compensation from his court victory, he wrote an account of his adventures, the proceeds of which made him financially independent. Using his finances he set up a coffee house and printing shop, printing a newspaper “The Scots Spy” and popular books such as Scottish editions of the Psalms. He often took on the guise of “Indian Peter”, dressing up in the Delaware costume and regaling audiences with his stories to ingratiate himself in polite Edinburgh society, in which he was something of a local celebrity.

He then used his press to print his directory of Edinburgh, listing all the worthies by rank, profession or trade, and organising them and their addresses systematically. But even his own address was given rather vaguely.

With his directory he had given Edinburgh its first comprehensive list of anyone who was anyone and where they lived. So it stood to reason that he should take up the rights (and profits) for the Penny Post so that people could make use of the information he provided to send each other letters.

Williamson set up a network of 17 shops that would accept mail and employed 4 postal carriers to move it between them and then deliver it onwards. He placed notices in his directory advertising this all. To make his business seem grander, he numbered the service caps of his employees 1, 4, 8 and 16 to suggest he had 4 times as many workers as he did.

Williamson thereby established the first regular local public postal service in Scotland, and he ran it as a local monopoly for 30 years until it was bought out for £25 by the GPO in 1793. That’s 18th century nationalisation in action! Williamson published his last PO directory in 1790, to run until 1792, you can see it here. It was printed by a subcontractor, but sold at Williamson’s “General Penny Post Office” at the Luckenbooths

By this time, we see street numbers beginning to appear for the New Town, but as volumes of mail and those wishing to send and receive it increased exponentially, finding the correct address became an ever increasing problem. This was particularly so when so many people shared relatively few surnames, and Presbyterian Scots had a habit of using a very limited selection of Christian names. Williamson had to insert a begging note in his directories asking people to be specific with how they addressed their post.

So street numbering was the way forward and the system began to be applied throughout the town. Here we see some 1790s street numbering for the New Town Morrisons.

Only, there was one slight problem. Nobody mandated how it should be carried out. So on Nicholson Street for instance, they started at No. 1 on the northeast most property and numbered consecutively all the way to where it became Clerk Street, then crossed the road and went back the way on the west side .

George Street was numbered consecutively on each side, both sides starting at 1, so you had to specify the north or south side of the street in addresses.

Streets with only one side (e.g. Princes Street) were easier to do, you just started at one end and worked along. But of course at this time, Princes Street had a block of business and housing on its south side where the North British / Balmoral Hotel was later built.

So for a while Princes Street had 1-5 (south side) as well as 1-5 (north side). After this, it was renumbered with 1-9 on the south side and 10 and up along the north side.

There are fundamental problems with these systems. Firstly, how do you account for streets that are growing longer? Then of course there’s the problem of finding an unknown address when the numbers on each side of the street have little relation to eachother. And of course, the north/south system with duplicated numbers was just a bit silly, wasn’t it?

There was the additional problem, particularly with Princes Street, where the original townhouses had been subdivided into multiple premises, all still with same number. So a new, “universal” system had to be developed. And in 1811 the Corporation took it upon itself to set it up.

The new system divided the city roughly into quadrants based on the intersection of the High Street and the Bridges. In each quadrant, the numbers would ascend in a manner moving away from the centre. So in the northwest quadrant for instance, street numbers started at the eastern or southern end of the street and increased as they headed west or north (blue arrows). they got higher moving west and moving north. Each street would have odd numbered doors on one side and even numbers on the other, in the manner with which we are familiar today

Many buildings were renumbered as a result, and some (e.g. Abercromby Place) had the ordering of the existing numbers switched to match the new rules. Exceptions were made for the Lawnmarket / High Street / Canongate, which, being the central axis, didn’t quite fit the system.

Another interesting feature of the system is that – generally – if you walk “up” a street in the direction of the blue arrows on the map above, the odd numbers should be on your right and evens should be on your left. There are exceptions however, e.g. Great King Street where the evens will be on your right.

There are other quirks too. Princes Street these days jumps from 1 – 10. That’s because 1 – 9 were the premises cleared away to build the North British Hotel in the 1890s, which was given number 1 Princes Street, but the whole street had been numbered in 1811 as if it had only 1 side.

This also dispels the conspiracy theory that Thistle Street is the inferior of Rose Street, being only half as long, as the result of a sinister unionist plot. Until re-numbering, Rose St. was 3 separate streets, East, Mid and West, each with its own numbering system. Young, Hill and Thistle are their northern equivalents.

It’s at this time that Charlotte, St. David and St. Andrew Street were split into north and south sections, which made the numbering relative to the squares they run off of more rational

The new system did create problems of its own, like on Great Stuart Street, where Ainslie Place gets in the way of the numbering system so walking along the street, we have to pass 1-15 Ainslie Place to get from 5 to 7 Great Stuart Street.

These changes are an important consideration if you’re looking at a New Town address from a document that is printed prior to 1811, as there’s the very strong probability that it points to a different building these days.

Asides from the unusual system of separate road and “place” names for the street address described in part 1 of this post, Edinburgh has (had) another street numbering quirk; “double decker” streets, e.g. Victoria Street, and previously much more extensively on Leith Street. Thus the southwest side was numbered as “Leith Street Terrace” at the upper level in a consecutive series.

But for some reason, perhaps again because it was one axis of the quadrants, South Bridge was never renumbered and uniquely retains its unusual pre-1811 numbering scheme working down one side and back up the other.

So there you have it. An explanation of why some Edinburgh streets have a very confusing naming convention with multiple names for different parts of the same street, why some street numbers make more sense than others and the curious tale of how a kidnapped boy from Aberdeenshire came to set up Edinburgh’s first street directory and postal service and brought about the introduction of a rational street numbering system for the whole city.

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