11 Lothian Street, Edinburgh EH1 1HE
It was here that Charles Darwin lodged in the house of Mrs Mackay when a medical student in Edinburgh in 1825-27. He was not an enthusiastic student and left without finishing his degree. In Edinburgh he met Robert Edmond Grant, a lecturer in John Barclay’s anatomy school and an enthusiastic advocate of evolution. On one of their regular zoological collecting trips together Grant apparently ‘burst forth in admiration’ of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s evolutionary theories. Darwin later claimed, perhaps disingenuously, that he had listened to Grant ‘as far as I can judge, without any effect on my mind’.
No public access. The original building no longer survives.
Charles Darwin (1809–82).
Robert Edmond Grant (1793-1874).
Plaque marking the site of Darwin’s lodgings.
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