Scots in London: townhouses, identity, and the metropolis, 1660-1800

Abstract

This thesis examines the townhouses occupied by the Scottish elite in London’s West End during the eighteenth century. Following the Restoration in 1660 and the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, landowners travelled from Scotland to spend lengthening sojourns in the British metropolis where they mingled in fashionable high society and indulged in the full range of luxury goods and services which the capital had to offer. At their core were politicians beholden first to the court at Whitehall and, after 1707, to the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, but many more individuals and families came simply to participate in the London social season, constituents of a common British elite linked by prosperity, fashion, and the mores of metropolitan life. Complained of in Scotland for their absentee and anglicised lifestyles, the eighteenth-century Scottish elite are likewise absent from most considerations of Georgian London. This study attempts to redress this lacuna in scholarship by drawing on a rich body of neglected primary sources held in archives across the country to rediscover the Scottish residences of the West End. Using a mixture of leases, inventories, financial accounts and correspondence, alongside published almanacs and tax registers, it provides an architectural framework to Scottish presence in London for the first time. The buildings and their contents serve as a lens through which to understand the lifestyles of the elite and how these changed through experience of the capital. Against the backdrop of Anglo-Scottish integration, both in London and within the wider British state, these houses emerge as important forums for the creation of a Scottish identity in the eighteenth century that was interlinked with new conceptions of Britishness. The research therefore attempts to make a twofold contribution to scholarship, both enhancing knowledge of London and its buildings, and shedding light on anglicisation and identity at home in Scotland.