Jamaica Street

Jamaica Street is marked by a distinctive shift in scale from the grand, uniform stone architecture of Edinburgh’s surrounding New Town. While the rest of this district features wide, orderly boulevards, this small thoroughfare was once unique as a planned enclave of artisan housing. Most of the original late-Georgian tenements that characterized the street were demolished in the nineteen sixties and seventies after being condemned as slums. Where they once stood, the site was later redeveloped into the residential complex known as Jamaica Mews.