The Real Mary King's Close: what is down there, and what is only a story

Edinburgh’s Old Town runs down a ridge from the castle, and the ground drops away so sharply on either side that the lanes leading off the Royal Mile are less streets than staircases. They are called closes, they are numbered in the dozens, and Mary King’s Close was an ordinary one: houses several storeys high on both sides, open sky above, a steep descent towards the Nor Loch.

It takes its name from Mary King, the daughter of an Edinburgh advocate, who traded in fabric and was living on the close in the 1630s. She died in 1644. The plague reached the city the following year — which is the coincidence that a lot of the folklore is built on, and it is worth noticing that the order is the wrong way round.

What changed the close was not disease but civic ambition. In 1753 the town began building the Royal Exchange — the building that is now the City Chambers — and the site it chose was the top of Mary King’s Close. The upper storeys of the houses were demolished. The lower storeys were kept, because they were sound and because they made a convenient foundation. The new building went up on top, and the street simply became an interior.

This is the fact that ought to be the headline and almost never is. The close was not abandoned when the Royal Exchange went up. Parts of it stayed in use, and parts of it stayed inhabited, for another century and a half.

The last resident was Andrew Chesney, a saw maker, who was still living there in 1897 and left in 1902 when the corporation took the property under a compulsory purchase. He was awarded four hundred pounds.

Sit with that for a moment. There was a man making saws in a house on a street with a municipal building on top of it, in living memory of people whose grandchildren are alive now. No ghost story on any tour in this city is stranger than that, and it is entirely documented.

It is the most conventional underground hour in Edinburgh, and that is a compliment. You go in through a door on the Royal Mile beside the City Chambers, down a stair, and out onto what is unmistakably a street — sloping, cobbled, with doorways and window openings in the walls on either side and a ceiling where the sky used to be.

The guide is in period costume and works a character, which sounds worse than it is; the good ones use it to hold together an hour of genuine social history about how a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Edinburgh household actually functioned. There are reconstructed rooms. There is a section on the plague that is careful about what is known.

It is not frightening. Groups are managed, the lighting is designed, and nobody jumps out at you. If you came to Edinburgh to be scared, book a vault tour instead. If you came to understand the city, this is the best hour on this site and it is worth the eleven-dollar premium.

The building on top of Mary King’s Close is not a quirk of later development. It was a deliberate civic project, and it failed at the thing it was built for.

Work on the Royal Exchange began in 1753 and finished in 1761. The intention was to give Edinburgh’s merchants a covered place to do business, off the street. The merchants declined to use it. They had conducted their trade for generations standing outside on the Royal Mile, at the Mercat Cross, and they carried on doing exactly that.

So the building sat largely unused for its stated purpose and drifted into municipal hands. It is the City Chambers today, and it has been the seat of Edinburgh’s local government for most of two centuries.

The irony is worth holding on to. A street full of houses was demolished down to its lower storeys to make room for a merchants’ exchange that the merchants refused to enter — and the part that survives, and that people now pay to see, is the part that was supposed to be thrown away.