George Heriot's School

George Heriot’s School stands on Lauriston Place in Edinburgh, a private day school set in sandstone buildings around a large quadrangle. The main block was begun in 1628 outside the old city walls, close to Greyfriars Kirk and overlooked by Edinburgh Castle. Parts of the 17th-century Telfer Wall form the school grounds, and the original north façade faced the Grassmarket across Heriot Bridge. Three rubble sides were refaced in Craigleith ashlar in 1833, and a south gatehouse by William Henry Playfair was added in 1829. The chapel interior of 1837 is by James Gillespie Graham with help from Augustus Pugin, while the hall of 1893 has a hammerbeam roof. The school is worth the journey for its early 17th-century origins and the long line of architects who shaped it. George Heriot, a royal goldsmith, left more than £23,000 in 1624 to found a hospital for poor fatherless children and those of fallen burgesses. After Cromwell’s troops used the building as barracks in 1650, it opened as a school in 1659 with thirty children. Duncan McLaren, Lord Provost in the 1850s, expanded the Trust’s outdoor schools to educate almost 5,000 pupils by the 1880s without charging fees. Visitors find a turreted quadrangle framed by William Wallace’s and William Aytoun’s masonry, with a niche statue of Heriot on the north side. The chapel’s Gothic details and the hall’s timber roof are highlights, while the 1911 chemistry block and the 1887 science block add later layers. The grounds include a granite war memorial of 1922 for the school’s dead of the two world wars, and fragments of the old city wall remain part of the boundary.