St Paul's and St George's Church

In 18th-century Edinburgh, Episcopalians met for worship in small chapels around the city. There were three Non-Juror Chapels and three Qualified Chapels. On 18 August 1708, George Haliburton, Bishop of Aberdeen, licensed Robert Blair to be the first Episcopalian priest of a new congregation which began its life meeting in a room in Half Moon Close on the Castle Hill in Edinburgh. This new congregation was founded by John Smith, a barrister, who came to Scotland following the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, to serve as Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer of Scotland. Rent for the new meeting house amounted to £6 per year. The church was later made a collegiate church and as the…

St Paul's and St George's Church is a noted structure in the early part of Edinburgh's New Town, and stands out as one of the few Gothic Revival buildings in an area largely made up of Georgian Neoclassical architecture. The Scottish architect Archibald Elliot began work on the new church of St Paul in 1816. Designing it in a Perpendicular style on a nave-and-aisle floorplan, he modelled the building on King's College Chapel, Cambridge, complete with crocketted pinnacles and buttresses and four octagonal turrets on the corners, inspired by those on St Mary's Church, Beverley in Yorkshire. The exterior sandstone is richly decorated with Gothic strapwork and topped with a crenellated parapet.…