The Great Fire of Edinburgh remains one of the most destructive disasters in the city's history, and its origin was almost absurdly mundane: a workshop fire on the second floor of a building in Old Assembly Close, one of the countless narrow alleys running off the High Street, started by James Kirkwood's engraving business on the evening of 15 November 1824. Edinburgh had only just established its first permanent, professional fire brigade two months earlier, under the pioneering firemaster James Braidwood — a genuinely significant figure in the history of organised firefighting — and his new force reached the scene quickly. Even so, they struggled in the crucial first hour simply to locate a working water supply in the cramped Old Town streets, and by the time proper firefighting got underway around 11pm, six full storeys of the building were already burning.
What followed over the next five days demonstrated exactly why the Old Town's dense, narrow closes had long been recognised as a fire risk. Flames spread rapidly through the tightly packed tenements surrounding Old Assembly Close, pushed along by a southwesterly wind that carried burning embers across rooftops toward Fishmarket Close and beyond, engulfing buildings that had no direct connection to the original blaze. By the time the fire was finally brought fully under control, 13 people were dead, around 400 homes across some 22 tenement buildings had been destroyed or badly damaged, and close to 500 families found themselves homeless in the run-up to a Scottish winter. The city's own civic infrastructure took a direct hit too: council buildings, the Old Assembly Hall and Kirkwood's original print works were all lost.
The fire's most visually dramatic moment came on 16 November, when it reached the Tron Kirk itself, one of the High Street's most prominent landmarks. The church's spire caught alight, and molten lead began pouring from its burning roof onto the street below — an image contemporary accounts returned to repeatedly, the sight of one of Edinburgh's most recognisable buildings apparently being consumed from the top down in full view of a horrified crowd, before firefighters finally managed to save the main structure of the kirk even as its original spire was lost.
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