I have seen a ghost.

Well, not literally – but I’ve come pretty close!

Recently I’ve been teaching a creative writing course I designed at the University of Glasgow which is all about ‘time travel’. We looked at a few straightforwardly sci-fi books about characters actually traveling backwards and forwards in time, as well as poetry, memoir, and historical fiction books that invited us to think about memory and imagination as forms of time travel too.

Teaching this class made me think of a walk I took a few months ago with a dear friend of mine, Alan, who I met while volunteering at The Georgian House. We walked around the Canongate area of Edinburgh (near Holyrood Palace) and he showed me some photographs of how the streets looked in times past. It was almost spooky to see the black and white images of the chaotic shop fronts, the women in their wide-brimmed hats full of flowers, and then look up at the very same street today.

Here’s one photo of Edinburgh taken in the 1890’s (or thereabouts, it’s hard to date old photographs sometimes!) alongside a photo I took of Edinburgh now:

Do you see the same tower? The same clock? You’ll notice that in the past there was a busy shop front right there. It’s still a shop (looks like one dedicated to Diana, Princess of Wales), but nowadays shops don’t keep all their wares on the street for you to see (as was the custom when this photo was taken). Shop owners in Edinburgh apparently used to display all of their items outside on the street – so you could see what they had! They would bring it all in again at night. (Seems like theft would be an issue!)

Or how about this street scene from the early 1900s versus the same street now?

See the same archway in both shots? The man with the blue shirt and backpack is walking roughly where the well-dressed woman with the black skirt once walked. Notice the people standing to her right in the black and white image? The little boy doesn’t have any shoes. This was a poor area of the city for a long time and this sight of a shoeless child wouldn’t have been uncommon at all. It’s hard to imagine now since this is the heart of expensive, tourist Edinburgh (you can see the Museum of Edinburgh in the modern photo – where you can actually learn a lot more about the city’s history).

See all the women with their babies too? That made me think of the crammed living conditions in the Old Town and the no-doubt difficult lives for families living in closes (alleyways) like this one: Bakehouse Close.

Maybe ‘you had to be there’, but for me there is something really special and really surreal in looking at the same street across this immense gap of time. People walked right here. People lived right here. And that’s the case for every city, not just Edinburgh. People walked the same streets, lived their lives inside the same walls. I’m not saying that I actually believe in ghosts but it’s hard not to imagine that something of these people lingers – if only in our photographs.

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Huge thanks to Alan for sourcing these images and sharing them with me. He was a tour guide for many years and is now a playwright and tremendously knowledgeable about Edinburgh’s history. You can catch him as a volunteer tour guide at The Georgian House (where I used to volunteer before I started my current lecturer job).

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Let me know what you’ve been up to recently and my apologies for the radio silence. Teaching and writing occupy much of my time, but I love sharing these blogs with you and I have more Madeira Mondays planned. Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your day.

Madeira Mondays are a series of blog posts about 18th century history and historical fiction. Thanks for reading!