The story of the Edinburgh underground vaults is a short, sharp rise and fall: built with confidence in the 1780s, ruined by water within a generation, and lost from memory for more than a century before they were found again.
Building South Bridge, 1785–1788
Georgian Edinburgh was booming and needed to expand south across the deep Cowgate valley. South Bridge was built between 1785 and 1788 to the design of architect Robert Kay and opened on 1 August 1788. From the High Street it reads as a continuous street of shops; in reality it rides on nineteen stone arches, and the hollow interiors of those arches were fitted out as around 120 vaults on multiple levels.
The coffin legend
Folklore says the first crossing of the new bridge was a coffin — the funeral of an elderly resident who had been due to open it but died first — supposedly cursing the structure. It is a good story and told as legend, not fact.
Trade, then damp
At first the vaults were a practical success: cobblers, tanners, smelters, wine merchants and tavern-keepers all used them as cellars and workshops. But the masonry was never properly waterproofed. Damp seeped in, floods followed, and stored goods spoiled. Legitimate businesses began leaving as early as the mid-1790s, and within about thirty years of opening the vaults were more or less abandoned by respectable trade.
The city's poorest
The empty chambers did not stay empty. As Edinburgh's Old Town became desperately overcrowded, the vaults filled with the city's most destitute residents, alongside illicit whisky stills, taverns and brothels. Conditions below the bridge were squalid and dark, without daylight, drainage or clean air. By the middle of the 19th century the vaults were cleared, sealed and, in time, forgotten — buried under the everyday traffic of the streets above.
Rediscovery in the 1980s
For more than a century the vaults were a rumour. That changed in the 1980s, when the former Scottish rugby internationalist Norrie Rowan broke through into the chambers while working on the Tron Tavern above. The rediscovery opened the way for excavation and, eventually, for the guided tours that run today. Even now only one of the nineteen arches is open to visitors; much of the network remains sealed or used as private event space.
Burke and Hare — a careful note
Many tours mention Burke and Hare, and it is worth being precise. William Burke and William Hare did murder sixteen people in 1827–1828 and sold the bodies to the anatomist Dr Robert Knox; Burke was hanged in January 1829. But their crimes are tied to the lodging houses and the medical school around Infirmary Street, not to these vaults, which were already abandoned by then. Where you hear them linked to the chambers, treat it as atmosphere rather than record.
Fact vs. legend
The vaults are real history; several of the most famous tales attached to them are folklore. Good guides know the difference, and so should you — it makes the true story more interesting, not less.
What remains today
Only one of the nineteen arches is open to visitors, and even that is a fraction of the original network. Other chambers survive as private event spaces, bars and storage, while many remain sealed behind the foundations of later buildings. What you walk through on a tour is therefore a carefully opened window into a much larger buried structure — enough to grasp the scale, the damp and the darkness that defined life below the bridge, without the whole warren being safe or open to the public.
Want to walk the history for yourself? Compare the guided routes on Edinburgh Underground Tours and choose a history-led tour or a ghost walk.