I was born and raised in Edinburgh and used to fish the Water of Leith with my friends and we bought our fishing tackle and bait from a shop in Leith. Yet, until last week, I had never heard of ‘Old Bourse’.
The Ordnance Survey book of 1856 gives this description:
Old Bourse Object: Exchange or Market Place [Situation] At the N. [North] end of Queen Street. This exchange or Market Place, for the Merchants of Leith during the Regency of Mary of Guise, stood at the South Corner of Queen Street [formerly Known as the Paunch Market] immediately underneath the old Shipping Company's Office which was formerly supported by pillars, forming a piazza below. These pillars are now built into the northeast wall of the house alluded to, therefore are no longer visible from the outside.
This is the only photograph that I have been able to find of Old Bourse [taken before it was demolished]:
The Ordnance Survey book continued:
"During the Regency of Mary of Lorraine there was established in this district a sort of exchange, where the merchants of the period met to transact business. This place of meeting was Called the Burss being a Corruption of the French word Bourse which in that language designates a place appropriated to the purpose just mentioned. This resort Maitland conceives was situated at the lower end of the Paunch Market now Queen Street a conjecture which he considers is strengthened to use his own words by the remains of three piazzas on the Southern side either for shelter or for Shops. The spot to which Maitland alludes is the South Corner of Queen Street immediately underneath the Old Shipping Company's Office which was formerly supported by pillars thus forming a piazza below. These pillars are now built in, and form that shop lately occupied by Mr Milner druggist and are therefore no longer visible from the outside"
Ordnance Survey map c1856:
I wish Old Bourse had survived. The very idea of piazzas with pillared roofs, as places to ‘exchange goods’ [most likely freshly caught fish], reminds me of such surviving piazzas in Venice.
For a while the pillars to Old Bourse survived inside the Apothecary of Dr Robert Milner:
