St Paul's Parish Church, Edinburgh

St Paul's Parish Church was a parish church of the Church of Scotland in the St Leonard's district of Edinburgh, on the south side of the city beneath Arthur's Seat. Its building served as a church between 1836 and 1942, then passed through a curious afterlife as a theatre and a school annexe before being demolished in 1980 — the site is now occupied by St Leonard's Police Station, familiar to readers of Ian Rankin's Rebus novels. Though the building is gone, the congregation's story traces in miniature the whole turbulent arc of 19th- and 20th-century Scottish church history: established kirk, Disruption, Free Church, United Free Church, and reunion.

St Paul's was founded in 1836 as part of the Church of Scotland's Church Extension Scheme, the great campaign to plant churches in Scotland's expanding industrial districts — in this case the crowded neighbourhood of St Leonard's. The church opened for worship on 4 December 1836, with trustees who included distinguished figures such as the physician John Abercrombie, the Rev. John Paul and the Rev. John Bruce. Robert Elder was inducted as the first minister, with Robert Smith Candlish — soon to be one of the leaders of the Disruption — preaching at the installation. The General Assembly had erected St Paul's as a parish quoad sacra on 30 May 1836, and the Court of Teinds recognised the status on 28 May 1838. The building itself, designed by the architect George Smith, was a squat neoclassical structure with an Italianate bell tower.

Under Elder the congregation grew to between 450 and 500 members — and then came the Disruption of 1843, when over four hundred ministers walked out of the established Church of Scotland to found the Free Church. Elder led almost his entire congregation out with them. What followed at St Paul's was unusual: the congregation kept its building. Construction had been largely funded by a donation of over £2,000 from Agnes Hunter of Glencorse, which meant the church belonged to the congregation rather than to the Church of Scotland, and was largely free of construction debt. The Court of Session allowed the congregation to remain on condition that it refund a £300 grant to the Church of Scotland — and so the building became St Paul's Free Church, one of the few Disruption congregations that never had to leave home.

The Free Church years were vigorous. When Elder was called to Rothesay in 1847 he was succeeded by William Maxwell Hetherington, whose Sunday night lectures on Old Testament history often drew large crowds. In 1851, during Hetherington's incumbency, the congregational halls became the site of the church's school; by the time his successor George Brown departed in 1876, the school had a roll of 500 pupils. After the Edinburgh School Board took over its management in the 1870s, the halls returned to purely congregational use. The church received its first organ in 1898. In 1900 the congregation followed most of the Free Church into the new United Free Church, and in 1929 — with the great reunion of Scottish Presbyterianism — it rejoined the Church of Scotland, becoming a parish church once more.

The end of congregational life came with the Second World War. After the death in 1942 of St Paul's last minister, John Bain — who had written the church's centenary history six years earlier — the congregation negotiated a union with nearby Newington East, and on 4 October 1942 the two became St Paul's Newington Parish Church. The St Paul's buildings were leased to Edinburgh Corporation as an annexe to the James Clark Technical School, the congregation retaining use of the halls. In 1948 the council converted the church into the Cygnet Theatre, but the theatre had ceased to function by 1954, when the building was again in use by James Clark Technical School and Preston Street School. Sold to a private buyer in 1958, the old church was finally demolished in 1980 to make way for St Leonard's Police Station.

One graceful gesture closed the church's story. At the union of the congregations, St Paul's communion plate was donated to St Andrew's Church in Malta, which had lost its own plate in the wartime bombing of the island — the silver of a vanished Edinburgh kirk serving communion still, far out in the Mediterranean.