HOUSES AND SHOPS IN LEITH STREET: FOOTNOTES
1. AJ Youngson, The Making
of Classical Edinburgh,1750-1840, (Edinburgh University Press,
1966 and 1988), p.66, referring to an Act of the Town Council, 13th
September 1769.
2. AJ Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh,1750-1840, (Edinburgh University Press, 1966 and 1988), p.66.
3. HM Paton, "The General Register House," The Book of the Old Edinburgh Club, Vol.17 (1930), pp.170-171 states that the Trustees had purchased the ground from the heirs of Robert Mowbray before the construction of Leith Street, which he dates to 1775 rather than 1774.
4. Although in 1772 Robert and James Adam had jointly been appointed as architects for the scheme, it had always been Robert who was the moving force in the partnership, and during the 1780s it seems that James gradually removed himself from creative involvement with the firm, spending more and more time at a country residence in Hertfordshire.
5. When Robert and James Adam had been appointed by the Trustees, they had agreed to act as supervising architects for the project, providing all necessary working drawings, and without charging the Trustees for the plan already drawn, in return for which their fees would be 2.5% on the money expended on the building, and 50 guineas as the expense of each journey to Edinburgh to supervise the work. However, designs commissioned outwith the original scope of the project - including all three of the unexecuted associated buildings - were charged for separately. AT Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Vol. 2 (Country Life, 1922), pp.231, 232 and 234, quoting the Trustees Minute Book, refers to the note of the meeting on 21st August 1787, and an account presented to the Trustees in 1792, listing extra designs commissioned from Robert Adam and the charges to be paid.
6. AT Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Vol. 2, (Country Life, 1922), p.231.
7. For Adam’s Italian tour, see J Fleming, Robert Adam and his Circle in Edinburgh and Rome, (London, 1962).
8. Adam uses the same motif of a double-level loggia in the buildings surrounding the square at the north end of his South Bridge scheme, the designs for which he was working on at the same time as those for the Leith Street terrace, early summer 1785 (the Leith Street designs were finished on 12th July and those for South Bridge on 14th July). Neither scheme was realised, and the motif re-appears - in the form of the quadrant colonnades in each corner of the courtyard - in the partially-realised designs for Edinburgh University, dating from 1789. It can be suggested that setting the windows back behind such loggias would have cut down the amount of light reaching the rooms at the front of the houses, but it is not uncommon for town-houses of this period to possess projecting first-floor balconies, which have similar effects on the ground-floor rooms in those cases.
9. See Walter Ison, The Georgian Buildings of Bath, (Faber and Faber, 1948) pp.200-201.
10. See Walter Ison, The Georgian Buildings of Bristol, (Faber and Faber, 1952), pp.228-31. For Edgar Buildings, see the same author’s The Georgian Buildings of Bath, (Faber and Faber, 1948). Edgar Buildings is not discussed in the text, but is identified and clearly dated on the plan opposite page 212.
11. The drawings for the Leith Street terrace (Soane Museum, Volume 38, Drawings 45-49) are all endorsed "A fair copy of this sent to Edinburgh 12th July, 1785." Adam's designs for South Bridge were sent to the South Bridge Trustees on 14th July, 1785 (See AG Fraser The Building of Old College (Edinburgh University Press, 1989), p.67. This is only two days later, and shows that Adam's office must have been working on the two schemes at the same time. In addition, one of Adam's draughtsmen was ill at the time, and he was having difficulty in finding a replacement (Ibid., p.67). These facts may explain some of the anomalies in the Leith Street drawings, because of the pressures on Adam's office at the time.
12. The iron railings, interspersed with lamps, are shown on the elevation of the plainer version of the design, which Adam provided to the Trustees and which is preserved in the Scottish Record Office (SRO, Register House Plans, 6080), but are not shown on Adam’s office-copy of the drawing, in the Sir John Soane Museum. There are other differences between the two drawings, including the fact that in the SRO copy, some of the tympana, (the semi-circular panels above the doorways) are shown with fanlights, omitted from the Soane Museum copy.
13. Minute Book of the Register House Trustees, quoted AT Bolton in The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, Vol. 2 (Country Life, 1922), p.231. The accounts of the further meetings of the Trustees on 11th February 1786, 21st August 1787 and 7th February 1788 are given in Ibid., pp.231-2.
14. The copies of the drawings preserved in the Soane Museum are all endorsed "A fair copy of this sent to Edinburgh 12th July, 1785" (see note 11 above). The drawings, once they reached Edinburgh, would have been copied by hand by the staff of Adam’s office there, before any soundings of public opinion could have been taken. Any consultation exercise would probably have been very limited in scope.
15. Baxter is suggested by Alan Tait in his article on the construction of Register House. See AA Tait, "The Register House: the Adam Building", Scottish Historical Review, Vol.53 (1974), note 7 on pp.120-1.
16. Salisbury’s name is suggested in J Gifford, C McWilliam and D Walker, The Buildings of Scotland: Edinburgh, (Penguin, 1984), p.328.
17. AT Bolton, The Architecture of Robert and James Adam, (Country Life, 1922), Vol.2, p.232.
18. Although they were not built, Adam’s Leith Street designs seem to have been influential amongst Edinburgh architects. The centrepiece of Adam’s design, with its two end bays projecting and rising above the parapet running between them, was reproduced by James Begg in his large and magnificent tenement building at Gayfield Place near the head of Leith Walk. (J Gifford, C McWilliam and D Walker, The Buildings of Scotland: Edinburgh, (Penguin, 1984), p.427). The idea of the two-level walkway was also used in later developments.