A “row of thatched cottages, a line of trees and a blacksmith’s forge” is a much quoted description of Old Morningside (though the original attribution is unknown to me).

Morningside was a little rural village on the road south from Edinburgh and at the limits of the burgh’s lands. Around it, before 1800, were farms, and a couple of castles or grand seats, and beyond it to the south lay (and still lie, beyond the suburbs) wilder rural lands and hills that attract snow, shopping warehouses and outdoorsy activities. In the nineteenth century came two waves of transformation. First came the large villas, estates and institutions, parcelling up the land. Then down the roads and later into the fields came the smaller houses, terraces, and tenements, new roads and trams, with Edinburgh’s peripheral South Circular Railway appearing in 1884. By 1900, the area’s mixter-maxter of housing styles and road patterns were in place.