[1] It is located on the corner of Broughton Street and York Place in the east end of Edinburgh's New Town, and is protected as a category A listed building.

On 18 August 1708, George Haliburton, Bishop of Aberdeen, licensed Robert Blair to be the first Episcopalian priest of a new congregation which began its life meeting in a room in Half Moon Close on the Castle Hill in Edinburgh.

In 1774, the congregation moved to their newly built church at the east end of the Cowgate (now St Patrick’s RC).

The pew which Walter Scott's family used may now be seen in the side chapel in St Mary's Cathedral in Palmerston Place.

The site at the east end of York Place had previously been occupied by some small buildings and backed onto Brown's Coachyard, which had been the main coach station for Edinburgh for some years.

[6] Inside the Church the balconies were taken down, staircases removed and the organ moved from the West End to its current position.

The organ, by John Snetzler, was originally in the Cowgate Chapel, but was rebuilt in the York Place building by J Bruce in 1818.

Designing it in a Perpendicular style on a nave-and-aisle floorplan, he modelled the building on King's College Chapel, Cambridge, complete with crocketted pinnacles and buttresses and four octagonal turrets on the corners, inspired by those on St Mary's Church, Beverley in Yorkshire.

[2] A growing congregation created a need to accommodate a larger number of worshippers, and in the early 21st century a project was undertaken by Lee Boyd architects to renovate the church.

New glass-fronted aisle galleries were constructed (re-instating the interior balconies that had been removed in the 1890s) and doubling the capacity of the church.

A steel and glass entrance pavilion was also constructed outside the west door, and the church hall was demolished and replaced.