Warehouse, 24 Broughton Street, Edinburgh

The neoclassical building at 24 Broughton Street in Edinburgh, listed Category B since 1966 and long catalogued simply as a warehouse, is in fact the last surviving home of one of Scotland's most remarkable congregations: St Oran's Church, the Gaelic-speaking congregation of the Church of Scotland whose story stretches from the Highland migrants of the early eighteenth century to 1948, and whose tradition of Gaelic worship continues at Greyfriars Kirk to this day. Built in 1843-44 for the Catholic Apostolic Church and attributed to John Dick Peddie, for whom it would be the earliest completed design, the temple-like building served Edinburgh's Gaelic congregation from 1875 until the union of 1948, and now stands in commercial use, the only building occupied by the congregation that still survives.

Gaelic worship in Edinburgh began with the Highland migrants who, by the late seventeenth century, had settled in the city in significant numbers, frustrated for decades by the scarcity of Gaelic-speaking ministers and by Kirk rules binding them to Highland parishes. The breakthrough came with Neil McVicar, a Gaelic-speaking Highlander appointed minister of the West Kirk in 1707, whose parish outside the city walls counted three to four hundred monolingual Gaelic speakers, perhaps a tenth of its population; he preached in Gaelic even before the Presbytery formally charged him to do so in 1710. After McVicar's death in 1747 and the brief lay ministry of the poet Dugald Buchanan in the 1760s, prominent citizens led by the burgess William Dickson raised £300 to build a formal Gaelic chapel near the White Hart Inn in the Grassmarket, a favourite haunt of Highlanders. Opened in summer 1769, the simple T-plan chapel seating 800 at Castle Wynd was the first designated Gaelic-speaking place of worship in the Scottish Lowlands, the model for Gaelic chapels that soon followed in Glasgow, Perth, Dundee, Greenock and Paisley. Its first minister, Joseph Robertson of Clan Gregor, resumed the name MacGregor when the clan's legal suppression ended in 1774, and under his enthusiastic ministry the city's Gaelic community became renowned for its probity; the great Gaelic poet Duncan Ban MacIntyre was his friend and a regular worshipper. Because no full Gaelic Bible yet existed when the chapel opened, the church's reader translated the readings into Gaelic himself.

Overcrowding drove the congregation to build the larger Gaelic and English Chapel of Ease at Horse Wynd, near the future Chambers Street, opened in 1813 with seats for over a thousand; the two congregations united in 1815 as the New Gaelic Chapel, the Castle Wynd building sold and later demolished. In 1835 the chapel was raised to a parish quoad sacra with a ministry to all Gaelic speakers in Edinburgh rather than any territory, confirmed by the Court of Teinds in 1850 as the Gaelic Church and Parish of Edinburgh. Then came the Disruption of 1843, which split the Church of Scotland: the entire body of office-bearers and almost the whole congregation walked out to join the Free Church, founding the rival Gaelic Free Church, later known as St Columba's, and leaving, as a later minister lamented, "not a hoof behind". The remnant slowly recovered, appointing Alexander MacKellar in 1846, and under Donald Tolmie Masson, minister from 1862 to 1897, congregational life strengthened with evening services, a Sabbath school and a choir.

The Edinburgh Improvement Act of 1867 created Chambers Street through the site of the Horse Wynd chapel, and the congregation, compensated with £6,000, vacated in 1870 and worshipped at the Protestant Institute on George IV Bridge until 1875, when it purchased the former Catholic Apostolic church on Broughton Street. Peddie's building presents a five-bay pedimented façade, its three recessed central bays divided by Ionic pillars between outer bays framed by Doric pilasters, with three round-headed doors below a continuous architraved panel and a deep apse with three round-headed windows at the rear. In 1900, likely prompted by the union of the Free and United Presbyterian churches that year, the congregation adopted the distinctive name "St Oran's", having also considered St Kessog and St Chattan. The church's plate told its people's story: two silver communion cups of 1821, bought with the effects of Sergeant John Munro of the Royal Scots and inscribed in Gaelic to the Gaelic congregation of Edinburgh according to his will, were carried off by the Free congregation at the Disruption and recovered only by petition in 1854. A plaque commemorated the minister John Campbell MacGregor, who died in 1916 of wounds sustained in the First World War, and a brass memorial of 1921 named eighteen members of the congregation killed in that war, now preserved at Greyfriars Kirk. The church was renovated in 1930, gaining an Estey organ.

By then the congregation was dwindling, as Gaelic declined and the Free Church's St Columba's, recruited as one session clerk put it from the Mackenzies, MacLeods and Macdonalds of Ross and Cromarty while St Oran's drew its Campbells, Shaws and Macdougals from Argyll, rejoined the Church of Scotland through the denominational unions of 1900 and 1929. The General Assembly concluded that two small Gaelic congregations in Edinburgh were unnecessary and from 1930 pressed for union, against the stubborn resistance of St Oran's people, whose session clerk declared on the eve of the final decision, "We feel we have nothing in common with the people of St Columba's" — the rivalry, complete with intermittent litigation over funds and property, having run for over a century. The Assembly prevailed, and on 4 July 1948 the two congregations united as the Highland Church, worshipping in the St Columba's buildings. The Broughton Street church was sold to Messrs Nairn for commercial use in 1950 and partitioned internally into three storeys with a basement, later serving as a clinical science research facility. The Highland Church united with Tolbooth St John's in 1956, and since that congregation joined Greyfriars Kirk in 1979, Greyfriars has held a weekly Gaelic service, maintaining unbroken the tradition begun beside the Grassmarket in 1769; the bicentenary was marked in 1969 with a service at the site of the first chapel and a commemorative plaque. The quiet neoclassical front on Broughton Street remains the one stone witness to two centuries of Gaelic Edinburgh.