Buccleuch Parish Church

The former Buccleuch Parish Church on Chapel Street is the oldest surviving religious building in Edinburgh's Southside, opened in January 1756 as St Cuthbert's Chapel of Ease and now, after two and a half centuries of remarkable changes, home to St Andrew's Orthodox Church, the city's Orthodox community. A Category C listed building, plain and Gothic with a cruciform plan and a short lucarned spire, it carries on its porch a trefoil datestone reading "ERECTED 1755: RESTORED 1866", and in its kirkyard lie some of the most colourful figures of Enlightenment Edinburgh, including the cabinet-maker and double-life criminal Deacon Brodie.

In the mid-eighteenth century the parish of the West Kirk, St Cuthbert's, surrounded almost the whole burgh of Edinburgh, its population swelling fastest in the district south of the Old Town now called the Southside. The West Kirk resolved on a chapel of ease, one of the first in Scotland, issuing subscription lists in 1754 with the inducement that anyone subscribing £5 or more could vote in electing the minister, and acquiring a plot at the western end of Crosscauseway by the Boroughloch; the historian Roy Pinkerton suggests the established church was also spurred by the recently founded Anti-Burgher meeting house nearby on Quarry's Close. Built for 1,200 worshippers at an estimated £642, the chapel opened in January 1756, a plain vernacular building that Hugo Arnot soon hailed as "a plain genteel building", though James Grant in 1880 remembered it before its renovation as "a hideous and unpretending structure". At first the West Kirk's ministers preached in rotation until James Roy became the first dedicated minister in 1758. The surroundings were then largely rural, but the building of George Square and Buccleuch Place soon brought a well-to-do congregation including many of the city's leading figures; the young Lord Cockburn worshipped here. A three-stage bell tower was added in 1763, receiving in 1791 a bell cast by John Meikle in 1700 and inscribed "For the West Kirk, 1700", and a new north aisle and gallery followed in 1810 when the congregation revived under Henry Moncrieff-Wellwood.

In 1834 the General Assembly raised the chapel to a parish quoad sacra as Buccleuch Parish Church, and the Buccleuch Parish School opened facing the Meadows in 1839. The Disruption of 1843 nearly destroyed it: the ministers Henry Grey, Robert Gordon and Patrick Clason all became prominent Free Churchmen, Clason leading much of the congregation out of the establishment, and when the post-Disruption minister left in 1851 closure loomed. Rescue came from the Edinburgh University Missionary Association, led by Archibald Charteris, which made the church its base for home mission work and gathered so large and enthusiastic a congregation that by 1857 a full-time minister could again be supported, the Court of Teinds confirming full parish status in 1859. Under Finlay Mathieson the church was renovated in 1866 by the architect David MacGibbon, who refaced the building in the Gothic style, set a clock in the east wall, replaced the old tower with the short north spire, added the bowed apse-like south aisle, and installed stained glass including a window given by the Marquess of Bute in memory of his ancestor Flora Mure Campbell, buried in the kirkyard. Electric lighting came under John Campbell in the 1880s and 1890s and the first permanent pipe organ, by Eustace Ingram, in 1899. Membership peaked at just over two thousand in 1928, but the mid-century decline of the Southside, its working-class congregation dispersing to peripheral housing schemes while the University of Edinburgh expanded around the church, brought the long endgame: after repeated failed union schemes through the 1960s, Buccleuch united with Nicolson Street and Charteris-Pleasance on 7 September 1969 as Kirk o' Field Parish Church, and the building was sold to the University of Edinburgh, which used it as a furniture store, the interior partitioned into two floors.

The kirkyard, opened for burials in June 1763 and consecrated the following year, irregularly, by an Episcopal bishop, to the reprimand of the Presbytery, occupies ground that once held the windmill pumping water from the Boroughloch for the town's brewers, remembered in Windmill Street and Windmill Lane. Here lie the physician Andrew Duncan, the song anthologist David Herd, the great schoolmaster Alexander Adam, the blind poet-minister Thomas Blacklock, and Charles Darwin, uncle of the naturalist; a plaque on the Chapel Street wall commemorates Alison Cockburn, who wrote the lyrics of "The Flowers of the Forest", and against the north wall rests William Brodie, Deacon Brodie himself, respectable craftsman by day and burglar by night, the inspiration for Jekyll and Hyde. The kirkyard closed to new lairs by 1820, and in 1904 a large corrugated iron hall erected at its centre forced the monuments to the boundary walls; soon after, the session briefly considered letting the hall for the fashionable craze of roller skating, until the prospect of youths skating over the dead spilled into outraged letters in the local press and the idea was hastily dropped.

The building's third life began with the Orthodox Community of St Andrew, founded in 1948 by Archpriest John Sotnikov, a Russian chaplain of the Polish Army, whose first congregants were mostly Polish ex-servicemen worshipping in Slavonic. Under his successor from 1984, Archimandrite John Maitland Moir, a Scottish convert from Episcopalianism, English became the principal language of worship, and the growing community, part of the Archdiocese of Thyateira, bought the former Buccleuch Parish School in 2003 and, having outgrown it with attendance around 250, secured the former church itself, completing the purchase on 17 April 2013, the very day of Father John's death at eighty-eight. The interior keeps the pulpit, organ loft, galleries and timber screens with their Art Nouveau door handles and stained-glass panels from its Presbyterian centuries, while Orthodox worship now fills the old chapel of ease in English, Greek, Slavonic and Romanian — the third tradition to pray within walls raised beside the Boroughloch in 1755.