For a city that once favoured burning women alive because they had proven more successful than menfolk, Edinburgh has blossomed into a metropolis of hipster culture and refined splendour. As time’s onward march slowly replaced the city’s plague pits with pedestrianised green space, and murderer William Burke became renowned as an exhibit in Edinburgh University rather than for his grave-robbing prowess, the Scottish capital morphed into the blueprint of urban jealousy. Other corners of the country could only watch as Edinburgh set a standard that few can match, let alone imitate.
From playing host to cutting-edge festivals amid world class heritage-driven renovation, Edinburgh glows with a tourist scene that focuses on those now-celebrated warnings from history. It’s certainly a place where the past won’t politely stay buried, instead opting to rattle its’ chains beneath the streets and haunt anybody who dares order a flat white with oat milk. Beneath the shadow of the castle, Edinburgh doesn’t tolerate flimsy surfaces or second-rate goods. Which is why Flooring Superstore feels right at home.
We don’t go for inferior laminate or flawed carpets. We take pride in providing interior foundations that can withstand the pace of Edinburgh living – regardless of whether you prefer muddy exercises at Murrayfield, or posh gastronomy at Gordon Ramsay’s Bread Street Kitchen. Plus, should David Rizzio ooze red all over your hardwood flooring, our boards are thick enough to re-sanded and remove the evidence. If only Lord Darnley, had heard of us at the time. Tisk.
A Dark City…
Edinburgh has borne witness to some of humanity’s darkest, yet also most ambitious and foundational narratives. Many a trial has been endured here, sponsored by macabre body-snatching and religious torment. The witch persecutions, the last execution of which occurred in 1727, has birthed countless tales and fictional works that Auld Reekie has ultimately benefitted from accordingly, but the burning anguish and ever-lasting anxiety of humanity’s ability for cruelty has been absorbed into the city’s DNA. You can still feel the injustice echoing along pub-lined streets of the Grass Market. Ghosts are certainly watching from the cloisters and cobbles.
Some 4000 known individuals were accused of witchcraft, with more than half of them given the BBQ treatment. Whereas other places would scramble to feverishly brush such history under the carpet, Edinburgh has instead turned that trauma into atmosphere.
It’s the same scenario with Mary King’s Close and the under-city streets of Edinburgh’s vaults; an extensive labyrinth of unventilated rooms that welcomed illegal activity and destitute families – most of whom were left to perish during the Great Fire of Edinburgh, prior to sealing Edinburgh’s vaults for generations. Naturally, upon rediscovery during the 1980s, these catacombs are now a rather popular tourist experience.
Then came William Burke and William Hare, who murdered people before selling the bodies for anatomical dissection. There’s supply chain issues, and then there’s that. Burke and Hare were not resurrection men in the classic sense. They did not simply dig up the dead. No, that would have been vulgar and too much like hard work. They streamlined the process. Why wait for death when you could provide it?
Edinburgh gave the world medicine, philosophy, literature, and architecture, sure, but we forever fixate upon the dank avenues of misfortune. That is Edinburgh’s gift of being both unruly yet fabulous in the same breath. Few cities boast the architecture of a sermon and the nightlife of a guilty conscience. Every close off the Royal Mile simmers with “a terrible thing happened here, but please do enjoy the gift shop and tablet retailer”.
Other cities have exercised civic branding to aid their position on the world’s stage. Edinburgh, however, has gone for a unique “we used to execute women for being inconvenient and supported John Knox during his stretch of lesser morals, but now we have artisan doughnuts and a restaurant that serves only chicken wings” approach. The doughnuts are most excellent, by the way.
Edinburgh isn’t all urban legend and gouls, though. Auld Reekie holds a romanticism that would leave William Wordsworth speechless.
…full of love
Rain-chined cobbles and gothic silhouettes aside, Edinburgh harbours a cityscape with sudden views that make people stop mid-sentence. Stand on Calton Hill at dusk, or climb Arthur’s Seat to view the glittering historic capital below, and Edinburgh does what all great romantic cities do. It makes the ordinary seem cinematic.
Its' love stories, naturally, are not all neat boxes of chocolates. The romance often comes with heartbreak and scandal. Take Mary, Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley - married in 1565, Darnley was murdered at Kirk o’ Field in Edinburgh in 1567, turning passion, ambition and betrayal into one of the city’s darkest romantic dramas. His murder remains unsolved to this day.
Then there is Robert Burns and Agnes Maclehose, better known by their deliciously theatrical pen-names, Sylvander and Clarinda. Their Edinburgh affair in 1787–88 was intense, largely conducted through letters, and apparently unconsummated — which, frankly, only made it more combustible. Burns later drew on the relationship for “Ae Fond Kiss”, one of the great songs of parting, proof that in Edinburgh even restraint can catch fire.
Sir Walter Scott also knew the city’s ache of love. His youthful attachment to Williamina Belsches ended painfully, and the University of Edinburgh’s Walter Scott archive notes how deeply the disappointment marked him. Later, he met Charlotte Carpenter and married her in 1797, but that first wound lingered like mist around the Castle Rock.
Edinburgh’s most famous love story may not be romantic at all, but it is pure devotion - Greyfriars Bobby. The loyal terrier is said to have guarded his master John Gray’s grave in Greyfriars Kirkyard for 14 years. Whether embroidered by legend or not, it remains one of the city’s most beloved tales, because loyalty is love when it comes with four paws.
Which brings us to Trainspotting; Edinburgh’s great cultural slap across the face.
Edinburgh's cinematic world
Irvine Welsh’s world did not arrive wearing a tartan bow tie. It kicked the door in, swore at the furniture, and exposed a city beyond postcards. The novel is rooted in Edinburgh and Leith, while Danny Boyle’s 1996 film was famously set in Edinburgh, fighting against all that UNESCO polish. Edinburgh did what Edinburgh always does. It absorbed the insult, metabolised the trauma, and made it part of the brand. That is the city’s genius. It turns shame into theatre, horror into heritage, and moral ambiguity into a walking tour.
Then, just when you thought the place had exhausted its talent for cultural contradiction, Harry Potter arrived. Edinburgh became a pilgrimage site for people wearing scarves in August and looking for magic in café windows. J.K. Rowling wrote parts of the early Harry Potter books in Edinburgh cafés, including The Elephant House, though she later clarified that the idea itself began earlier; the café remains strongly associated with the Potter mythology and reopened after fire damage in December 2025.
This is peak Edinburgh. A city that once feared witches now runs an international economy on wizard nostalgia. The moral arc of history is long, but in Edinburgh it bends towards merchandise.
And yet, there is something beautiful in that. Edinburgh and its’ people understand imagination. It understands double lives. It gave Robert Louis Stevenson the atmosphere for Jekyll and Hyde, with Deacon Brodie — respectable tradesman and city councillor by day, burglar by night — often cited as an influence on Stevenson’s great study of split morality. Edinburgh knows that everyone has a front room and a cellar. A polished public face and a locked drawer. A Georgian façade and something feral behind the skirting board.
That is why crime fiction fits Edinburgh like a black wool coat. Sir Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels have spent decades dragging readers through the city’s underbelly; Rankin’s own site describes Rebus as tackling Edinburgh as “a crime scene waiting to happen”. Edinburgh should put it on a welcome sign under a council crest: Edinburgh: A Crime Scene Waiting to Happen. Please Keep Left.
Edinburgh does not need the soft-focus treatment. It deserves better than twee. It deserves language with teeth, because the city itself has teeth — old stone incisors, sharpened by rain, class tension, literature, and the kind of winter wind that makes you reconsider every choice since birth.
Why Flooring Superstore is proud to serve Edinburgh
Flooring Superstore is proud to serve Edinburgh because homes here are not blank boxes. They are battlegrounds of taste, history and weather. They are tenement flats with ceilings high enough to make an airline pilot nervous. They are New Town rooms where every cornice looks like it has opinions. They are Leith apartments full of plants, records and excellent intentions. They are family houses, student lets, renovated wrecks, coastal hideaways, and stairwells that have heard more scandal than a tabloid lawyer.
A good floor in Edinburgh has to do many things. It must survive boots wet from Princes Street Gardens. It must endure dogs returning from Holyrood Park in a state best described as “archaeological”. It must handle dinner parties where someone says “gentrification” with the same tone Burke used for “fresh body”. It must flatter furniture bought in Stockbridge, Leith, Morningside and, let’s be honest, occasionally Facebook Marketplace at midnight after one Woodrow's whisky too many.
From its Edinburgh showroom at Unit 2B, Seafield Road Retail Park, Flooring Superstore serves the city and surrounding areas with carpets, vinyl, real wood flooring, laminate flooring, LVT, floor and wall tiles, artificial grass, large samples, expert staff, and fitting and measuring services. In plain English, it helps Edinburghers choose floors that can cope with Edinburgh — which is no small brief. This city can weather-test a laminate just by opening a window.
Ok, so Edinburgh is far from perfect when looking back through the mist of bygone centuries, but perfection is boring. Edinburgh is not beige. If anything, Edinburgh is charcoal, oak, blood-red velvet, wet slate, candlelit gold, landlord magnolia, festival-poster pink, and the deep green of Arthur’s Seat after the summer rain. It is a city that deserves floors with backbone, and that’s exactly why we are proud to serve the good people of (arguably) Scotland's most cultured city.