What the City Buried

Mary King’s Close and how Edinburgh built over ordinary lives in the pursuit of progress

I noticed the air first. Not cold exactly, but held. Still. As though it had been waiting.

The tour guide’s voice travelled ahead of us through the narrow stone rooms, steady and practised, describing numbers, dates, conditions. Overcrowding. Disease. Sanitation. We were standing beneath the Royal Mile, below the weight of Edinburgh’s daily movement, in a place that once opened directly onto the sky. I remember closing my eyes, briefly, not to heighten the drama but to remove the present. The lighting, the handrails, the quiet choreography of modern visitors. I wanted to understand what this space had been when it was not curated, when it was not explained.

I imagined the absence of silence. Footsteps on shared stairs. Voices from above and below. The sound of water carried by hand, of waste emptied where it should not have been. I imagined the smell, which history rarely records properly. Human presence without relief. Damp stone. Smoke. Food. Refuse. Life pressed into too little space.

This was Mary King’s Close, and despite everything said about it, what struck me most was not its darkness, but its ordinariness.

To understand Mary King’s Close properly, it is essential to understand what a close actually was, because modern language has shrunk it into something smaller and stranger than it ever was. A close was not an alley. It was a street, narrow and steep, running downhill from the Royal Mile. Edinburgh’s Old Town grew upwards because it could not grow outwards. Defensive walls constrained expansion, while population increased steadily through trade, migration, and political importance.

The response was height.

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Edinburgh had some of the tallest residential buildings in Europe. Ten, sometimes twelve storeys high. These were not anomalies. They were normal. Families lived stacked above one another, arranged by both wealth and necessity. The wealthier tended to live on the lower floors, closer to the street, where access was easier and water less of a burden. The poorer were pushed upwards, where stairs were longer, ceilings lower, and conditions harsher.

A single close might contain homes, workshops, storage rooms, taverns, and small businesses. Life was not zoned. It was layered. Mary King’s Close functioned within this system. It ran from the Royal Mile down towards the Cowgate, open to daylight and weather, busy with movement and commerce. Mary King herself was a real person, a merchant and property owner active in the early seventeenth century. The Close bore her name because naming streets after residents or owners was standard practice. It was a practical convention, not a legend in waiting.

What matters here is this: Mary King’s Close was never intended to be underground.

The popular story often implies sudden catastrophe. Plague. Quarantine. Sealing. Abandonment. The reality is slower, less dramatic, and more revealing.

The plague did reach Edinburgh in 1645, and it was devastating. Contemporary civic records suggest that up to half the city’s population may have died. Mary King’s Close was affected, as much of the Old Town was. But it was not sealed and abandoned overnight. Property records and rental documents show continued occupation in the decades that followed. People stayed because they had little choice. Life, reduced and harsher, continued.

This distinction matters because it reframes the meaning of what came next.

By the early eighteenth century, Mary King’s Close was no longer central to Edinburgh’s economic life. Wealthier residents had moved towards emerging districts. The Close declined gradually, not through collapse but through attrition. Lower rents, overcrowding, worsening sanitation. The space did not fail suddenly. It was allowed to deteriorate.

The transformation of the Close into an underground space occurred later still, during a period when Edinburgh was deliberately reinventing itself.

In the mid-eighteenth century, Edinburgh’s leaders were determined to project a new civic identity. The city had become a centre of Enlightenment thought, and with that came pressure to look like one. Order, rationality, cleanliness, and visibility mattered. The Old Town, with its vertical congestion and visible poverty, conflicted with this ambition.

Reform, however, was expensive. Widening streets, retrofitting sanitation, and rehousing entire populations required political will and sustained investment. Concealment was cheaper.

When the Royal Exchange was constructed in the 1750s, buildings along Mary King’s Close were partially demolished. Crucially, they were not cleared away entirely. Upper storeys were removed. Lower floors and foundations were retained. New civic structures were erected directly on top of the existing stonework. The ground level of the city was raised.

This is how Mary King’s Close became underground.

Rooms that had once formed the lower floors of homes and businesses became sealed spaces beneath the new Edinburgh. The Close did not collapse. It did not disappear through neglect alone. It was structurally absorbed and rendered invisible.

The city did not erase these lives. It built over them.

Walking through the preserved rooms today, visitors are often told about disease, filth, and death. These things were real, but they were not unique to this Close. Conditions here were harsh because conditions across the Old Town were harsh. There was no modern sanitation system. Waste disposal relied on shared privies and informal practices regulated only intermittently by city ordinances. Water was carried by hand from communal sources. Ventilation was limited by design. Privacy was minimal.

Yet people worked here. Children were raised here. Goods were traded. Debts were recorded in burgh court registers. Disputes were settled. Ordinary life unfolded under strain.

Mary King’s Close was not a slum set apart from the city. It was the city, functioning under pressure.

This is where modern misunderstanding enters. The Close feels shocking now because contemporary urban life has trained us to expect separation. Homes are sealed from workplaces. Waste disappears without effort. Noise is managed. Space is allocated. The past had no such divisions.

The sensory reality of the Close explains much. Sound would have travelled constantly through shared stairwells. Footsteps. Arguments. Crying. Coughing. Smell would have been unavoidable. Stone holds moisture. Organic matter lingers. There was no escape from other people’s lives.

This enforced proximity shaped behaviour and health. It shaped social relations. And it shaped how reformers later judged the Old Town as something to be hidden rather than healed.

Edinburgh’s Enlightenment is often celebrated as a triumph of intellect and reason. Philosophers, scientists, economists, and writers transformed European thought from within the city. The New Town stands as architectural proof of that confidence. Straight streets. Symmetry. Air. Light.

But progress involved spatial choices.

Rather than rehabilitating the Old Town, Edinburgh redirected its attention. What did not fit the new civic image was concealed. Mary King’s Close was not repaired. It was buried beneath institutions that symbolised stability, order, and commerce.

This pattern was not unique to Edinburgh. Cities across Europe managed poverty and disease by moving them out of sight. Edinburgh’s case is simply more literal. The city constructed its future directly on top of its unresolved past.

Over time, the absence of visible history invited invention. By the nineteenth century, Mary King’s Close had ceased to exist in public consciousness as a lived space. By the twentieth, it re-emerged as a curiosity. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it had become associated with hauntings and apparitions.

There is no evidence that Mary King’s Close was considered haunted during its occupation. The ghost narrative is modern. It thrives because it is easier to fear imagined spirits than to confront the reality of lives constrained, neglected, and buried through civic choice.

Mary King herself did not haunt the Close. She lived and worked in a city that demanded resilience and offered limited protection in return. Her name survives because property records survive. Most others remain anonymous.

Standing in those underground rooms now, scale asserts itself. Ceilings are low. Walls are thick. Light does not behave naturally. You are aware of how carefully the space has been prepared for comprehension. Lighting guides the eye. Interpretation reassures.

Closing your eyes interrupts that order. It restores uncertainty. History was not lived as explanation. It was lived forward, without knowing what would come next.

When you emerge back onto the Royal Mile, the transition is abrupt. Noise. Colour. Movement. The city resumes its confident surface. Yet the knowledge remains that beneath your feet lies a version of Edinburgh that was not corrected, only covered.

This is why Mary King’s Close matters.

It is not an underground curiosity. It is evidence of how cities respond when growth exceeds care. How progress often depends on selective visibility. How intellectual achievement can coexist with structural neglect.

Mary King’s Close teaches us that what feels uncanny is often simply what has been hidden too long. The stone endures because stone endures. What it holds is not a ghost story, but a record of how a city organised itself, and what it chose to leave behind in order to move forward.

That is why the space feels heavy. Not because it is haunted, but because it is honest.

And perhaps that honesty is the most unsettling thing of all.