Underground Edinburgh

Today I took a tour of the Edinburgh vaults. Edinburgh is a very hilly city, and it's built in levels. One of the main streets, South Bridge, is in fact a bridge, even though you can't tell when you're on it. It has 19 supporting arches, and only 1 is visible (on Cowgate!), so it's hard to tell that it's a bridge. Anyway, these 19 supporting arches form vaults under the whole length of South Bridge. Here's a picture I took from a sign that kind of diagrams what it looks like:

South Bridge Vaults:

The bridge was built in the 1700s, and until the 1830s, they were in constant use. At first, they were used as workshops. The conditions were really, really awful and it was just a bad place to be. Eventually the workers moved to other locations. When the workshops were closed, other people moved in. New businesses were started, like gambling halls and brothels. The vaults were also used as places to conduct illegal trading and to store things, like bodies from body snatchers (who made a very lucrative living by selling bodies to the University of Edinburgh Medical School). Very poor people also lived down there.

The vaults were filled in in the 1830s, and remained relatively untouched until the 1980s, when a pub owner, whose pub stood over the vaults, started excavating them secretly. There's a cool story about how one of his barmen, a Scottish rugby player, helped a Romanian rugby player escape from the Romanian secret police in 1989. The Romanian was trying to escape the Romanian uprising and seek asylum in Britain, so he hid in the vaults until it was safe for him to come out, and he was granted asylum in Britain. Now he's a PE teacher in England.

Mercat Tours, the company I went with today, took over the excavations after that. They've found all kinds of artifacts and stuff down there and they now know a lot about what kinds of businesses and people were down there. It was all very fascinating.

Of course the vaults are considered to be the most haunted place in Britain. There are tons of stories about ghosts and stuff that live down there, and you can reserve a spot to spend the night in the vaults and investigate paranormal activity... Mercat does ghost tours too obviously but I did a historic one.

A lot of the pubs and clubs in Edinburgh, especially the ones by me on Cowgate, are built in these vaults so I've been in them many times, but it was really cool to see what they looked like without being modified. Mercat has left them pretty much the same as when they excavated them, just adding in a few lights.

Here are a couple pictures from the vaults. It was really dark down there, but my camera flash made it look lighter. The second picture is what it looked like without flash.

What the vaults look like without a camera flash:

Wine storage cubbies: