Edinburgh, as we all know, is brimming rich history, particularly around the city centre. From the castle, to the dungeons, to the Royal Mile, pretty much every significant city centre building has a fascinating past.
Most of us probably unknowingly walk past various pieces of history every day around the capital without even knowing so.
If you walk around the New Town for long enough, and watch with an eagle eye, past all the upmarket shops and restaurants, and focus on the intriguing architecture, you may notice something rather peculiar.
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You may notice, particularly around Dundas Street, that many of the windows on the top floors of various tenement buildings have their windows boarded up, something that you'd often see as a result of a fire.
It can look very strange. Perhaps they are just empty properties, or even very shy home owners?
Commonly, people often think the practice of concealing windows links back to a 1696 tax called the window tax, and some inventive tax-dodging by the property owners of the day.
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A building attracted taxes if it had at least seven windows or attracted a rent of at least £5, Glasgow Live reported. So to avoid paying the levy, some people blocked up one or two of their windows.
The term "daylight robbery" is often linked to the window tax - even though the phrase was not recorded until the 20th Century. Victorian health campaigners were scathing, saying it was a ‘tax on light and air’ by the time it was abolished in 1851.
According to National Records of Scotland information released in 2013 , the philosopher David Hume paid a levy on his 18 windowed home in the New Town between 1773-4.
But that tax was to be repealed in 1851, meaning there would be no reason for more modern building to have blocked up windows.
And anyway, NRS archivists believe that talk of people boarding up their windows on masse because of the tax was more myth than reality.
It was only the more well off citizens of the day who were hit significantly by the tax, and blocking up a window would save a few shillings per year according to the Scottish Government. Unlikely then to have been an attractive cost-saving option for the already wealthy.
So, why do so many building in the city have blocked up windows? According to the Scottish Government, the answer is a little more simple than the myth would have us believe.
Symmetry was one of the key principles of Georgian architecture between 1714 and 1830, and the lack of it was seen as a design flaw: many of the city's buildings made after the mid 17th century still have missing windows that were constructed to conceal their chimneys.
Simply put, in order to maintain the buildings’ symmetrical facades, architects of the time designed buildings specifically with blocked up windows.
This article was originally published on June 19, 2020.
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