Puddings, Printing and Palladianism: The Tron in its urban context

The Tron Kirk was not only an important addition to the religious buildings of Edinburgh, it was also an important intervention in the city and very quickly became a landmark and place of gathering.

This talk, which focuses mostly on the period between the 1640s and the 1824 (the year of the great fire that destroyed the Tron steeple), looks at the Tron in its urban surroundings from the tightly-knit fabric of the seventeenth century in an area of trade and commerce (including the pudding market) to the modernisations of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Foremost among those, of course, was the building of the South Bridge, which had a major impact on the fabric of the church as well as completely altering its urban surroundings. How and why that happened will be explored and the theme of trade and commerce will be a constant thread running through the talk, from the markets of the seventeenth century to the luxury shops of the early nineteenth.

We will follow up with a walk around the Tron area, linking the current urban and architectural fabric of the church and its surrounding buildings to the history of the site.