Edinburgh has hundreds of wonderful old tenement buildings… and in many of them, while the individual apartments have been renovated time and time again over the years, the common stairwells have remained almost completely untouched.
Tenement stairwells may be dark and dank. They may be cold, stony, beautiful, dusty or madly off-kilter. Often there are some strange, liminal spaces in these old stairwells: ancient cupboards that are no longer used, weird little doorways leading to the back garden, or even completely fenced-off sections of stairway that once lead to a little-used cellar.
Some stairs have been worn down by the passage of feet over decades… if not a century or more! Many still have strange levers, rusted doorbell mechanisms or mysterious hatches in the walls. Some stairwells have really beautiful ornamentation covered over by years of paint and dust.
We love seeing the wonderfully strange and creepy stairwells of Edinburgh. In fact, we’re working on a video about them… and we’re looking for as many photographs of old tenement stairwells in Edinburgh as possible.
If you live in a tenement, and wouldn’t mind sharing a picture of any interesting features in your stairwell, we’d love to include it in the video. Just let us know by what name you’d like to be credited!
We’ll be collecting and collating stairwell pictures until the 1st of June 2025. The best way to send one to us is by email: hello@ghostsociety.co.uk. We’ll respond to every picture that’s sent to us to let you know if we can use it… and to offer a sincere thanks for being part of our weird little video!