Victoria Street, Edinburgh

Before 1829 the way up from the Grassmarket to the Lawnmarket was the West Bow: a very steep, very narrow lane that zig-zagged up the slope and was useless for carriages. Edinburgh World Heritage dates the new street to 1829–1834 and names Thomas Hamilton as its architect.

When George IV Bridge was thrown across the Cowgate valley, the city needed a road to feed it from the west. The answer was to demolish much of the upper Bow and sweep a new, broad, curving street across the hillside instead — Hamilton being the same neo-classicist whose Greek work stands on the other side of the valley.

The twist is in the styling. Hamilton was a classicist, but the condition attached to the new buildings was that they be built in an 'Old Flemish' manner, drawing on the details of George Heriot's Hospital up the hill. So the crow-stepped gables, the little turrets and the general air of antiquity are Victorian stage-dressing on a Georgian traffic scheme. That is not a criticism — it is the reason the street photographs the way it does, and it makes Victoria Street one of the earliest pieces of conservation-minded townscape in Britain, done before anyone had the word for it.

India Buildings, 1864, and its bartizan

One building on the street gives the game away. India Buildings, on the south side, went up in 1864 to a design by David Cousins in the Scots Baronial style, complete with a bartizan — a small corner turret borrowed from medieval castle-building — at the top. Its first tenants were the British Linen Bank, the Scottish Chamber of Agriculture and the Geological Survey of Scotland, and older Edinburgh residents still know it as the city's registry office.

Victoria Street and the West Bow are one road, not two

This confuses people daily, because the street signs change halfway down. The City of Edinburgh Council's list of public roads settles it: its entry for Victoria Street reads "Including WEST BOW From GEORGE IV BRIDGE south-westwards, north-westwards, south-westwards and southwards to the GRASSMARKET", with carriageways and adjacent footways adopted for maintenance. One road, adopted as one length, signed under two names.

In practice: the upper, curving, colour-painted stretch that everyone photographs is signed Victoria Street; the short dog-leg at the bottom, where the buildings straighten up and the road runs into the Grassmarket, is signed West Bow. If a booking, a bus stop or a shop address gives you a West Bow number, you are looking at the bottom end of the same street.

Motor traffic no longer runs through it. The Council ran the closure as an experimental traffic order and councillors voted in May 2025 to keep it, and its consolidated waiting and loading restrictions for Victoria Street and the West Bow took effect on 16 February 2026. We could not find a single Council visitor page that says this in plain words — it exists only inside traffic-order paperwork — so treat what you will actually meet as the fact: a street with deliveries on it in the morning and pedestrians the rest of the day.

Hamilton's hillside problem was that the ground on the north side sits a full storey higher than the roadway. His answer was to build the street twice: shops at road level, and above their roofs a stone-arcaded pavement with its own buildings, its own addresses and its own doors. That upper pavement is Victoria Terrace, and it is a public right of way with no gate and no hours.

There are two ways up. At the top, the terrace simply runs off the Upper Bow beside the Lawnmarket, so if you come from the castle end you arrive on the upper level without climbing anything. From the street itself, a flight of stone steps climbs at each end of the arcade. They are worn, they are stone, and in rain they are slick — the one genuine hazard on a street that otherwise has none.

What the terrace gives you is height, a foreground of stone arches and a roof. Standing under the arcade you look down the full curve of shopfronts with the roofline of the Grassmarket beyond, and because you are covered, it is the one place on this street where a rain shower does not end the photograph.

The same address, two levels, two kitchens

The clearest way to understand the double street is to look at one business that occupies both floors of it. Howies Victoria sits on the street at 10–14 Victoria Street, EH1 2HG; directly above it, on the south-facing terrace at 4–6 Victoria Terrace, EH1 2JL, is the same company's all-day room, Scotts Kitchen — the operator's own words are that you "look up from Howies Victoria and you'll find Scotts Kitchen … on the sweeping South-facing terrace above". Same building, two postcodes, one storey apart. Both are in the shops and kitchens section with their published hours.

One practical consequence: the terrace faces south and catches sun from mid-morning, while the street below it is in shadow for most of the day between October and March. If you are choosing where to sit outside, that is the whole decision.

Nothing documents it. There is no statement from the author naming this street, no film scene shot here — none of the eight films used Edinburgh as a location — and no plaque, sign or heritage record on the street that makes the claim. Edinburgh World Heritage's own page on Victoria Street does not mention it at all: it talks about Thomas Hamilton, Old Flemish facades and a brush shop. What exists is a resemblance, an industry of tours and merchandise built on that resemblance, and two rival streets — Candlemaker Row and Cockburn Street — whose supporters make the same argument with the same amount of proof, which is none.

So the honest position is the one this guide takes everywhere: the connection is undocumented, the street is worth walking anyway, and if the wizarding angle is why you came, a guide who knows which parts are real is a better purchase than a queue for a shop doorway. The Harry Potter page separates what is documented — the handprints at the City Chambers, the hotel suite where the last book was finished — from what is claimed, and the two-hour walk that runs this street with the kirkyard states plainly in its own listing that no film scenes were shot in Edinburgh. That is the tour we would take.

The practical effect on your day is real, though, whatever you believe about the origin. Between about 11:00 and 16:00 in summer the pavement outside the wizarding shops narrows to single file, and the doorways with the best paintwork have a permanent queue of people photographing each other in front of them. The photograph section is written around that.

Two things decide the photograph: the crowd and the shade. The crowd is thin before 09:00 and after about 18:30, and it is at its worst from late morning to mid-afternoon, all summer and every day of the August festival weeks.

The shade is structural — the street runs along a north-facing slope with tall buildings on the south side, so the shopfronts everybody photographs sit in shadow for much of the day in winter and get their best light early on a summer morning, when the sun is far enough north to reach down the curve.

Put the two together and the answer is the first hour after sunrise in summer, and simply 'as early as the shops opening at 10:00 allows' in winter, when sunrise is after 08:30 anyway. Colour survives shade well here because the paint does the work; what does not survive is a crowd standing in your frame.

The rain version is worth planning for rather than fearing. The arcade on Victoria Terrace is roofed, the cobbles and setts throw reflections, and a wet street at dusk with the shop lights on is the picture most people fail to take because they went back to the hotel.

Four places to stand, in order of how good they are

Take them in this order and you will have the street in fifteen minutes.

• Under the arcade on Victoria Terrace, about a third of the way along — the classic frame: stone arches in the foreground, the full curve of shopfronts below, roofs beyond. Roofed, so it works in rain.
• The top of the steps at the George IV Bridge end — height without the arcade, and the only angle that shows how steeply the street drops.
• The bend itself, standing in the roadway — where the curve is tightest and both sides of the street are in shot. Watch for delivery vans in the morning.
• The West Bow corner at the bottom, looking back up — the view that shows the street as a wall of colour rising out of the Grassmarket; best in the afternoon, when the upper facades catch what light there is.

Start at the top. From the Lawnmarket, turn down George IV Bridge and the street opens on your right after about a minute, and you finish at the bottom in the Grassmarket where the pubs are.

You get the curve revealing itself in front of you, which is the way the photographs are taken. Doing it the other way round is a climb, and a fairly steep one — the whole point of the 1830s scheme was to make a gradient a horse could manage, not a gradient you would not notice.

The surface is setts and worn stone, the pavements are narrow, and the steps between the two levels have no lift and no ramp. If steps are out of the question, the road level is walkable end to end and the terrace is reachable on the flat from the Upper Bow beside the Lawnmarket — that is the step-free way onto the upper level, and it is not signposted anywhere on the street.

There is no visitor parking and no reason to arrive by car: through traffic has been removed and the surrounding streets are controlled residential parking. The nearest tram stops are St Andrew Square and Princes Street, and Lothian buses run along the nearby bridges and the Grassmarket approaches; a city single is £2.40 (about $3.30) and a day ticket £6.00 (about $8.20), with contactless capping at £5.70 (about $7.75) on Lothian's own Tap Tap Cap.

What is not here

No public toilets on the street, no visitor centre, no ticket office and no left luggage. The nearest public conveniences are in the Grassmarket and on the Royal Mile. Everything on Victoria Street is a private business with its own door and its own hours, which is worth remembering on a Sunday morning, when several of them simply do not open.

Come at 08:30. Walk down George IV Bridge, take the street from the top so the curve opens in front of you, and stop under the arcade on Victoria Terrace for the photograph while it is still empty. Have breakfast on the terrace at Scotts Kitchen, which opens at 09:00 and faces south — the only kitchen here that covers the good hour.

By 10:00 the shops are opening and you have the street to yourself for another half hour. Do the level you are on first, then take the steps down and walk the road level to the West Bow corner, which puts you in the Grassmarket for lunch or a two-minute walk from Greyfriars Kirkyard up Candlemaker Row. If you want the history rather than the paintwork, the Old Town history walk covers this street and the ones around it in two hours for £18 (about $24).

If you are only here for the wizarding connection, read the honest version first, then let the Harry Potter guide sort the documented sites from the claimed ones. And if you arrive at two in the afternoon in August to find the street solid with people: that is normal, the photograph is not going to happen, and the terrace above is where you will still get a clear view.

The rest of the city, with the same hours-price-map treatment on every page, starts from our Edinburgh guide.