The fire began on the evening of 15 November 1824 in a building on the High Street near Old Assembly Close. Within hours it had spread to the buildings around Parliament Square and the Old Town tenements that surrounded it. The fire burned for four days. By the time it was extinguished, a significant portion of the medieval Old Town had been destroyed.
Edinburgh’s Old Town in 1824 was extraordinarily combustible. The tenements – some of them twelve or fourteen storeys tall, built of timber-framed construction behind stone facades, crammed with residents and the accumulated possessions of generations – were among the densest urban housing in Europe. The closes running off the High Street were so narrow that buildings on either side could almost be touched from the middle. Fire in one building transferred to the next with a speed that the city had no means to address.
What Burned
The buildings destroyed included the Tron Kirk steeple – the Tron Kirk itself survived – and the tenements around Parliament Square, including the building known as the Old Post Office and several significant medieval structures. The Assembly Hall used by the Church of Scotland was damaged. The destruction removed a large section of the architectural fabric of medieval Edinburgh that had survived intact since the sixteenth century.
The human cost was significant: thousands of people were made homeless, concentrated in an area where housing was already desperately overcrowded. The fire created a temporary displacement crisis in the Old Town that charitable organisations attempted to address in the weeks following.
The Response
What became clear during the four days the fire burned was that Edinburgh had no organised fire-fighting capability. The city had fire engines – hand-pumped devices that required a water supply – but no organised corps of trained firefighters to operate them. The military assisted. Private individuals formed chains to pass water. Insurance company fire brigades – which existed to protect insured properties and had no obligation to attend other buildings – came and went according to their contractual interests.
James Braidwood was appointed Edinburgh’s Master of Fire Engines in January 1824, seven months before the great fire. He was 23. Following the fire, he developed and implemented what became the model for municipal fire fighting in Britain: a corps of trained full-time firefighters, standardised equipment, regular practice, and a system of city-wide deployment rather than station-by-station response. His manual on fire fighting, published in 1830, was the first systematic treatment of the subject.
Scotland’s First Fire Service
Edinburgh’s fire service under Braidwood was the first professionally organised municipal fire brigade in Scotland and among the first in the world. Braidwood left Edinburgh in 1833 to establish the London Fire Engine Establishment, the forerunner of the London Fire Brigade. He died at the Tooley Street fire in London in 1861, killed when a warehouse wall collapsed.
The area destroyed by the 1824 fire was rebuilt over the following decades in the more regularised style of nineteenth-century Edinburgh, replacing medieval timber-framed construction with stone tenements to a more standardised footprint. Parliament Square was cleared and rebuilt. The layout that visitors see today in that area of the Old Town is largely the post-fire reconstruction, not the medieval fabric it replaced.
Braidwood is commemorated by a plaque on the Royal Mile. The fire that made his career necessary is less well remembered, which is the fate of most urban disasters once the reconstruction is complete.
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