The buildings are complemented by the profusion of mature trees, spacious garden settings, stone boundary walls and green open spaces.

[2] The Grange was predominantly developed around 1830, when the growing middle class of merchants and professionals in Edinburgh were looking for secluded location where to raise their families.

The Grange had the advantages of physical separation from the overcrowded medieval city and offered individual dwellings in a predominantly suburban setting in contrast to the tenements of the Georgian New Town.

Houses were built with their own private gardens surrounded by high stone walls; this was in contrast with the communal living of the more central areas.

On 16 June 1376, King Robert II granted the superiority of the barony and lands of St Giles to his eldest son, John, Earl of Carrick, Steward of Scotland.

[6] On 29 October 1506, St Giles Grange passed to John Cant, a Burgess of Edinburgh, and his spouse Agnes Carkettle,[7] and in 1517 they granted the use of 18 acres (73,000 m2) of land to the nuns of St. Catherine of Siena.

The original tower house appears to be of a very early date, possibly the 13th century, ornamented with two turrets and a battlemented roof; its position was isolated at the eastern end of the Burgh Muir, which at that time consisted of waste tracts of moorland and morass, stretching out southward as far as the Braid Hills and eastward to St. Leonard's Crags.

[10] The mansion, The Grange House, was enlarged over the centuries, a major restoration being carried out by Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, Bt.

[11] On 16 May 1836, Lord Cockburn recorded in his diary: "There was an annular eclipse of the sun yesterday afternoon....it was a beautiful spectacle......I was on the top of the tower at The Grange House, with Sir Thomas Dick Lauder and his family."

One was placed at the entrance to a stretch of Lover's Loan, a centuries-old path which was preserved in a late 19th-century redevelopment and is marked out with high stone walls separating it from the gardens on either side.

In 1835 Earl Grey (of Reform Bill fame) stayed with Sir Thomas Dick Lauder at The Grange House, and commemorated his visit by planting an oak tree in a conspicuous spot in The Avenue, upon the bank of the north side, not very far from the ivy-clad arch.

[16] It includes a very interesting "Egyptian portal" to the land of the dead for the wife of a William Stuart (died 1868) on the north wall, by the sculptor Robert Thomson.

[22] Goodwin relocated from The Grange after the vandalism to which his property there was subjected[23] but has since returned after his wife's throwing him out of their family home in Colinton due to revelations of his marital infidelity.

[24] Oil tycoon Sir Bill Gammell, an old school friend of Tony Blair and who had George W Bush as a wedding guest, purchased property in The Grange.

[3] Other notable residents of The Grange include writer D. M. Macalister (1832–1909) who was a renowned minister of the Free Church of Scotland and served as Moderator of the General Assembly in 1902–03.

[25] Max Born, Nobel Laureate and former Tait Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh lived at 84 Grange Loan.

Raffalovich's exposition of the view that a homosexual orientation is both natural and morally neutral was a notable contribution to the late 19th century literature on the subject.

[31] The Grange was a principal filming location for the BBC Three comedy drama Pramface, which starred Scarlett Alice Johnson and Sean Michael Vereyoles.