Review by Allan McIntosh

Domestic history set in stone
Leslie Hills moved to a dilapidated ground-floor flat at 10 Scotland St in 1974. Years
later, after she’d paid off the mortgage, a solicitor passed her the deeds – documents she
used painstakingly to frame the history of a home.
Not just of her home, but that of successive families
and generations who have shared this building’s steps
and bedrooms, keys, locks, odd plumbing and doorknobs,
taps, creaks cobwebs and idiosyncratic hearths for nearly
200 years.
She weaves the story of the house – its foibles and those
of its inhabitants and neighbours – into a wider history of
the capital’s social, civic and architectural development.
Her book ranges from domestic intimacies to accounts of
national and international trade, politics and colonialism.
And, usefully, she evidences how the eastern New Town
has never been that smug unvariegated seat of cultural
and financial privilege much caricatured today.
Hills proceeds with thorough scholarship, scrupulous
acknowledgement of sources, and a generous list of
resources which other researchers will find useful in future.
She deploys self-deprecating humour and deadpan irony. Above all, she writes really
well: fluent, authoritative, persuasive prose, sometimes anecdotal, often slyly colliding
formality and contemporary colloquialism.
Edmund Burke described society as ‘A partnership between those who are living,
those who are dead, and those who are to be born.’ Hills’ book sits at the heart of just
such a 3-way conversation, arriving at an insightful study of past ‘people like us’ and,
in microcosm, of Edinburgh’s peculiar social experiment and work in progress: the
Second New Town. Recommended.—AM
Scotland Street Press, ISBN: 978-1-910895-733, £24.99 (hbk)