Luckenbooths

Over the years, the row was extended and heightened until it consisted of seven tenement buildings of varying height, date and form, stretching the full length of St. Giles' from which it was separated by a narrow alleyway.

This passage was also known as the "Stinking Style", as criticised by the poet William Dunbar in his address To the Merchants of Edinburgh, c.1500 ("Your Stinkand Stull that standis dirk [darkly], Haldis the lycht fra your parroche kirk.").

Walter Scott's novel The Heart of Midlothian, published in 1818, includes the following description of the Luckenbooths shortly before their disappearance, He stood now before the Gothic entrance of the ancient prison, which, as is well known to all men, rears its ancient front in the very middle of the High Street, forming, as it were, the termination to a huge pile of buildings called the Luckenbooths, which, for some inconceivable reason, our ancestors had jammed into the midst of the principal street of the town, leaving for passage a narrow street on the north, and on the south, into which the prison opens, a narrow crooked lane, winding betwixt the high and sombre walls of the tolbooth and the adjacent houses on the one side, and the buttresses and projections of the old Cathedral upon the other.

To give some gaiety to this sombre passage (well known by the name of the Krames), a number of little booths, or shops, after the fashion of cobblers' stalls, are plastered, as it were, against the Gothic projections and abutments, so that it seemed as if the traders had occupied with nests, bearing the same proportion to the building, every buttress and coign of vantage, as the martlet did in Macbeth's Castle.

But, in the times we write of, the hosiers, the glovers, the hatters, the mercers, the milliners, and all who dealt in the miscellaneous wares now termed haberdashers' goods, were to be found in the narrow alley.

Henry Cockburn recalled Creech's shop as "the natural resort of lawyers, authors, and all sorts of literary idlers... All who wished to see a poet or a stranger, or to hear the public news, the last joke by Erskine, or yesterday's occurrences in the Parliament House, or to get the publications of the day, or newspapers - all congregated there, lawyers, doctors, clergymen and authors.