City centre shopping can be a headache at the best of times, and trying to balance crowds, social distancing and masks hasn’t made retail therapy the most enjoyable of tasks this year. But it could be worse - a lot worse.
In the 15th century, Edinburgh had its first permanent shops installed - but these were a far cry from the St James Centre or Princes Street.
Luckenbooths or ‘locked booths’ were exactly that - fixed market stalls as opposed to the itinerant ones that still proliferate today thanks to the farmers’ market craze.
They were originally built so that artisans - particularly metal smiths selling gold and silver trinkets - could display their wares to passing customers, but eventually the range of businesses would expand to rival the kind of shops we see around Edinburgh today.
Toymakers, publishers and Edinburgh’s first circulating library operated out of the luckenbooths, although they weren’t in the most salubrious end of town. The Old Tolbooth Gaol held some of Edinburgh’s worst criminals until 1817 when it was replaced with Calton Prison, and one of the shops - known as Gilmour’s, although it’s unclear what they sold - had a flat roof that would be used for public hangings. Charming.
When Allan Ramsay established his library in 1752, the area became a meeting place for writers and intellectuals, despite the surroundings, and when the space was passed on to William Creech later in the century it became the home of his publishing company.
Henry Cockburn, after whom the nearby street is named, described it as “the natural resort of lawyers, authors, and all sorts of literary idlers... All who wished to see a poet or a stranger, or to hear the public news ... or yesterday's occurrences in the Parliament House, or to get the publications of the day, or newspapers - all congregated there, lawyers, doctors, clergymen and authors."
It’s probably safe to say that he wouldn’t have approved of the buskers, fire-eaters or Fringe performers who occupy that area now either.
Scottish poet Tobias Smollett was also a regular, although he didn’t think much of his surroundings, claiming that the Royal Mile “would undoubtedly be one of the noblest streets in Europe, if an ugly mass of mean buildings, called the Lucken-Booths, had not thrust itself, by what accident I know not, into the middle of the way”.
Part of the problem was how crowded it made the already narrow streets. Another problem was the smell. One passage between the booths and St Giles Cathedral was known as the ‘stinking style’.
Although unpopular with some and ever more impractical as the amount of foot traffic and carriages on the High Street began to increase, they were nevertheless an Edinburgh institution from the 15th century until the early days of the 19th.
These days all that remains is the brass markers on the cobblestones that indicate the booths used to be there. The tenements they were part of largely remain, and the street still has thriving shops, particularly beloved of tourists. But it’s impossible to walk down the Royal Mile without remembering a time when shopping would have been a very different experience altogether.
