MOROCCO LAND/MID COMMON CLOSE

This reconstruction of an eighteenth century tenement was executed by architect Robert Hurd, who was also responsible for other sympathetic postwar development at this end of the street.

A figurative cast of a moor taken from the building next door has a poignant association.

A local resident , Andrew Gray was sentenced to death for rioting, He fled to Morocco. Having amassed a fortune there, he returned to Edinburgh only to be met with the unfortunate news that his cousin (daughter of the Lord Provost) had caught the plague.

Gray visited the Canongate tenement at which the girl stayed and administred a successful cure to her.

In due course they married and continued to live there. A more pragmatic explanation for the efigy may be that it signposted a tradesman’s place of business.