SCOTTISH LISTED PROPERTY SHOW


SAVE THE DATE THE


ASSEMBLY ROOMS, EDINBURGH


27 OCTOBER 2018 WWW.LPOC.SCOT


Listed restaurants and hotels


We thought we would start our new series of listed places to eat and stay with Edinburgh: Te Café Royal


B


enjamin Franklin frowns with concentration as he pulls the lever of a printing press,


while Michael Farraday casts a thoughtful gaze, captured in his laboratory on the point of discovering electro magnetism. Below them, drinkers and diners in The Café Royal continue their conversations, perhaps unaware of the great men portrayed above them.


The six scenes capturing key moments of scientific revelation are among the treasures of The Café Royal, a pub and dining room tucked behind the main thoroughfare of Princess Street in Edinburgh. Customers stepping in from the cobbled street through the revolving door are met with etched glass, carved wood, tiled walls and gilded ceilings.


Built in 1862 and opened as The Café Royal Hotel and Oyster Bar in 1863, the café is a flamboyant exercise in Parisian Baroque by local architect Robert Paterson, whose more typical works included churches, the


Portobello police station, tenements and prison buildings in the rather more serious Scottish Baronial style.


Visitors today experience the café largely as it was following alterations in 1893, when the Lunch Room and Smoking Room were amalgamated to create the handsome Circle Bar, dominated by a sweep of marble-topped bar beneath a gold and green coffered ceiling.


The Doulton & Co tiled panels that line one wall had originally been exhibited at the International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art held in Edinburgh in 1886. The painter John Eyre was then the artistic director at Doulton & Co, Lambeth. His romantic paintings were manufactured as tiles by Katherine Sturgeon and WJW Nunn at the Doulton factory and are now mounted on the wall in wooden frames as a gallery.


The Oyster Bar, for which the café is still renowned, features eight elaborate stained glass windows depicting scenes of popular outdoor pursuits. A tennis player in long whites and a jaunty hat is poised to return a shot while an archer in Robin Hood-style costume, a kilted and elaborately bearded


hunter and a fisherman carefully tying a fly suggest country scenes a far cry from life in the throng of central Edinburgh.


Despite its evident importance as a city landmark, The Café Royal narrowly avoided being demolished in 1969 to make way for an extension to the Woolworths then on Princess Street. A vigorous campaign to save it mounted by the Edinburgh Planning Office and a petition signed by 8,700 people saved the property and resulted in its A-listed status.


Currently owned by Belhaven Pubs, the polished brass, chandeliers and crisp white marble floors would be familiar to the Victorian customers who first frequented the café. Then as now, the imposing figures of George Stephenson and his Rocket and Robert Peel experimenting with calico printing look down on a shifting crowd of happy customers below.


The Café Royal 19 West Register Street, Edinburgh EH2 2AA 0131 556 1884


Listed Heritage Magazine September/October 2018 51


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