George Street

This guide to George Street in Edinburgh follows a fifteen-year-old junior clerk who began work at the Commercial Bank of Scotland's grand head office here in 1888, a boy later known as the Bard of the Yukon for his gold rush poetry. It traces how a street laid out in the 1760s for quiet residential living was instead swallowed by banking, filling Victorian counting halls with clerks bent over ledgers six days a week. The grandest of those halls still stands at number fourteen, built in 1847 under a coffered dome by architect David Rhind.