Publication Account
Date 1951
Event ID 1097628
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/1097628
18. 312-328 Lawnmarket.
[see also NT27SE 270]
The two neighbouring lands, each of five storeys and an attic, which stand on the S. side of the Lawnmarket in front of Riddle's Court are unusually good specimens of early Georgian housing of the better class, fashioned out of two earlier buildings. Each distinguished by three gablets with curvilinear pediments towards the street, they are more or less T-shaped on plan and generally similar, but the W. one, which was built by Captain George Riddell, wright, in 1726,* has a rubble front relieved by a single string-course and back-set dressings of freestone, while the front of its neighbour, rebuilt in 1752 by Thomas Fisher, merchant, is of ashlar without string-courses. The ground floor in both cases has been remodelled as shops, but it still includes two original passages leading S., one admitting to Fisher's Close and the other to Riddle's Court. The newel stairs that give access to the flats in the upper storeys project into the Close and the Court respectively. Both the stair-entrances have moulded doorways, the W. one bearing the date 1726. The fronts have eight large windows on each of the principal floors, but each storey of the W. building has, in addition, a small window lighting a closet within the W. gable. The attic floors are lit from a pair of windows in each of the gab lets, circular ventilators surmounting the W. lights. In both tenements there has been some internal rearrangement. In the W. tenement only a few of the rooms are panelled and retain the original marble mantelpieces, but every flat in the E. tenement shows traces of panelling while several of the original moulded stone fireplaces remain in use. This latter tenement generally has finishings of a rather earlier type than the other.
RCAHMS 1951
*Exercising its rights under an Act of 1663, which empowered burghs to seize, after due warning, houses fronting on their High Streets which had lain ruinous for three years, and to sell them at a price fixed by valuation the Town sold this property to Riddell for 10,000 perks in June 1726. In 1733 the place was described as 'Riddell's Land lately built by George Riddell, bound on the east by Fisher's Land and its close.
