Engraving of Luckenbooths at St. Giles's Church, 1819

Engraving of Luckenbooths at St. Giles's Church, 1819

Jewellery and Silverware

This view of St Giles’ Cathedral by London engravers James Sargant Storer (1771-1853) and Henry Sargant Storer (1796-1837) was published in Views in Edinburgh and its Vicinity, (Volume 2) shortly after the parade of small shops in the foreground were demolished to widen the streets of Edinburgh’s Old Town. The shops known as Luckenbooths, or ‘locked booths’ were associated with various small-scale trades, particularly the cheaper end of Edinburgh’s jewellery trade. The booths were a fixture in and around Edinburgh’s Parliament Square from at least the seventeenth century.

An aerial plan of the cathedral, found in the sketchbook of nineteenth-century antiquarian Daniel Wilson, depicts St Giles’ Close in the years 1806-18, it includes reference to ‘Luckenbooth Street’ to the north and small shops belonging to ‘Green the Watchmaker’ and ‘Gordon McKenzie Jeweller’ situated on the south side of the church from which direction this engraving is taken. Luckenbooth Street was demolished in 1802 but the Parliament Square booths remained until 1817. Excavations on the walls of St Giles in preparation for the building of Lorimer’s Thistle Chapel in 1909, revealed the remains of fireplaces and containers for smelting glass in the old Luckenbooth cellars, suggesting that some may have contained small workshops.

Despite their simplicity, Edinburgh’s nineteenth-century Luckenbooths embodied something of the lively buying and selling street culture in the Old Town at a time when luxury trades were migrating to the bridges that joined old Edinburgh with the new retailing centre of Princes Street in James Craig’s New Town. The booths were immortalised in painted depictions and writings, notably in Walter Scott’s, The Heart of Midlothian, in which Scott describes: ‘a huge pile of buildings called Luckenbooths, which for some inconceivable reason, our ancestors jammed into the midst of the principal street of the town (…) the hosiers, the glovers, the hatters, the mercers, the milliners, and all who dealt in the miscellaneous wares now termed haberdasher’s goods were to be found in the narrow alley’ (Chapter 5).

In jewellery too, small goods made to appeal to a passing trade are thought to have been the stock-in trade of Luckenbooth sellers. Scottish love tokens, known from the end of the nineteenth century as ‘Luckenbooth brooches’, are particularly associated with the booths’ small-scale style of retailing. Typically heart-shaped and featuring the symbolic motif of a crown or two entwined hearts, the brooches were made in silver and gold, with more expensive versions incorporating jewels and precious stones. Like the booths themselves they found resonance with a particular strand of nineteenth-century romanticism, legend associates their simple heart-shaped forms with love gifts exchanged between Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley.

Father and son team, James and Henry Storer, were talented engravers and publishers of specialised works on topography and architecture producing many similar works to this one. James’s other works include, Views in North Britain Illustrative of the Works of Burns (1805) and The Cathedrals of Great Britain (1814–19). The latter was produced in collaboration with his son, and was credited by the architect Augustus Pugin as including the most accurate existing views of the buildings .

RCAHMS

Historic Environment Scotland