23 Albert Street, built in 1875 as “24 dwelling houses forming the whole of the Tenement, with the exception of Wareroom on Street Floor and Storage in Basement.” There are now only 22 flats. No word on what happened to the other two.

Former residents include:

1991—Fritz and Susie Van Helsing, newlyweds who were considering jumping from their top-floor window to escape their burning flat when the fire brigade arrived and persuaded them to wait until they could be rescued. The Daily Record ran the story with the headline, “Dracula Bride In Fire Terror”, and who can blame them?

Fritz had only recently legally adopted the name he’d been calling himself since 1977, when, as a teenaged horror fan, he’d moved from Inverness to Edinburgh, where he soon became a well-known fixture in the city’s emerging punk scene as a drummer, DJ, writer and enthusiastic promoter who arranged many local bands’ first gigs. A former bandmate said, “In terms of living the rock and roll life on a minimal budget, he took it about as far as you can. He was a punk first and foremost—it was his whole life.”

He contracted hepatitis C in the 1980s as a result of his heroin habit and, despite being clean for decades, died of blood poisoning in 2012, at the age of fifty-one.

1954—William George Rae, a nineteen-year-old youth, who, when ordered to leave the Palais de Danse in Fountainbridge due to his poor behaviour, “started pushing the manager about when he was collecting his coat”. His friend Tom Ballantyne, punched the manager on the jaw. Both were fined £5.

1949—Isabella  McFetters, a forty-eight-year-old woman who was fined for shoplifting boxes of stationery, a tap head, some spoons, a scrubbing brush and a flour sifter. The bailie, who fined her £2, said that shoplifting was “becoming a regular disease” in the city.

1942—George Douglas, a twenty-four-year-old airman who was invalided out of the RAF and was sailing home from his overseas posting when his ship, a passenger transport with women and children on board, was torpedoed by a German U-boat.

After five days crowded on to a single lifeboat, a hundred survivors were picked up by an Italian submarine—according to George, “The Wops treated us well, giving us cigarettes, chocolate and wine”—and were taken to a Vichy French internment camp near Casablanca.

George escaped when the prisoner were moved during the allied invasion of Morocco, and arrived home in Albert Street on 31 December—one year after leaving Scotland—in time to celebrate Hogmanay with his wife and son.

1916—David Bryden, a widowed train driver whose youngest son, John, joined the navy after his sixteenth birthday and died aged seventeen when his ship, HMS Invincible, was blown up in the battle of Jutland, with the loss of 1,000 men.

The following year, David’s eldest son, David, a Lance-Corporal in the Black Watch, was shot by an Ottoman soldier in Palestine. He died after a month in a casualty clearing station, aged twenty-eight.

When the war that killed his sons broke out, David was already suffering from a chronic kidney condition, which worsened over time, eventually killing him at the age of sixty-one, in 1925.

1916—Robert Small, a private in “McCrae’s battalion”, which was largely composed of Scottish sportsmen and sports fans. Robert—a fan, not an athlete—died from wounds received on the first day of the battle of the Somme, along with 19,240 other British soldiers.

1915—David Angus, a steelworker who had been a volunteer in the Leith battalion of the Royal Scots for twelve years when he was mobilised in 1914. He spent six months guarding the Forth before the battalion was ordered to leave for Gallipoli.

Along with 400 or so soldiers, David boarded a train bound for Liverpool, from where they were to sail. Near Gretna, their train collided with a stationary passenger train and overturned on to the northbound track, where, a minute later, it was hit by the Glasgow express.

The engines exploded; the wooden carriages burst into flames. More than 200 soldiers died, including David. Many were completely incinerated, most were burned beyond recognition. The remains that could be found were buried in a mass grave in Rosebank cemetery, off Leith Walk.

1914—Jemima Burgess, a twenty-seven-year-old golf ball maker who had left her husband, George Smith, in 1910, a year after their wedding and a few months after the birth of their child. “The marriage was unhappy from the start, owing to the drunken habits of the husband, who repeatedly beat her.”

1906—Richard Grant, a labourer who was on an express train bound for Montrose when, during a blizzard,  it ran into the back of a local train that was just pulling out of Elliot Junction, south of Arbroath. Richard was killed, along with 21 other passengers.

“Most of the injuries which have caused death,” reported the Evening News, “are about the lower extremities, the unfortunate victims evidently being seated when the crash came, and thus got pinned in between the seats as the train was telescoped.”

1898—David Dewar, a fifty-five-year-old railway porter in the Leith Walk goods station, who eased the burden of his labours by appropriating occasional barrels of beer from untended wagons, secreting them in empty vans and, by means of a brass tube, drinking their contents over a period of days. He was sentenced to 10 days in prison, and a £10 fine.

1898—Robert Banks, the fifteen-year-old ringleader of a gang of boys who funded trips to a fair in Iona Street by robbing small boys and girls of their pennies. Robert would seize a child and force them up against a wall while his henchmen, all around the age of ten, rifled their pockets.

Robert was known locally as “a very bad boy”; the others were “respectable, intelligent-looking boys” who had never caused trouble until falling in with Robert. When caught, Robert was sent to a reformatory; the others were freed on the promise of their parents to punish them.

One of the gang, 10-year-old William Kerr, also lived in no.23. In later life, when he was employed turning brewery waste into oilcakes, he married Jemima Burgess, the divorced golf ball maker mentioned above. They were married for 28 years, until Jemima’s death from a stroke at the age of 61, in 1948.

1897—Isabella Wyllie, a seven-year-old girl who was taken by her parents to visit family in Jedburgh, where she was attacked by a dog. A witness said, “The dog ca’d her doon and gripped her by the arm” leaving her with “a pretty large wound, just behind the left arm-pit.”

The dog belonged to Robert Storrie, a labourer, who—when charged with “keeping a lurcher that was dangerous to the lieges”—explained that he had just finished a six-week prison sentence and the dog had not been properly looked after while he had been away.

It emerged that the dog was notorious in the town, and several people testified that it had attacked them and their children. The Provost ordered that Storrie destroy it in the presence of a police officer.

“I’ll not do it,” said Storrie. “They can just gang and do it themselves.” When told that he would be fined 20s for every day he let the dog live, he agreed to let the dog be drowned in the town’s tan pit.

Storrie’s final words, before the Provost silenced him, were: “It’s an awfu job—ye canna keep a dog. That’s three dogs I’ve had destroyed since I came here—for doing nothing, none o them. I never get a dog keepit. I’ll get a pack o hoons, I think, and that’ll maybe be plenty.”

1895—George Hodgins, a twenty-year-old man who was arrested for the murder of John Inglis, who lived in a nearby tenement. George had come to the aid of his brother-in-law, Hugh Gordon, who was fighting with a group of young men whom he felt had insulted his wife.

Standing at the stair door, George said he would fight anyone who was his height and weight. John Inglis said, “I’m your man,” and George jumped on him, knocking him to the ground. “When they rose,” one of the young men said later, “they got into grips, then fell further along the street.” George got up and “roaring that he was ‘not one of them’ ran back up the stair.” Inglis ran after him, but was pulled back by a friend, who led him away. Inglis then fell to his knees, blood soaking his shirt, and died in a neighbour’s flat a few minutes later. He had been stabbed in the heart.

Although all the young men testified in court that only George had struck Inglis, and Hugh Gordon testified that George had come back to the flat holding a knife and saying that he had “jagged somebody”, George pled not guilty, and the jury returned a verdict of not proven.

From the premises on the tenement’s ground floor, W C Anderson supplied Victorian locals with five blends of tea: Good, Strong, Fine, Fine-Flavoured and Best, as well as fresh roasted coffee. These days, Santosa does much the same thing, along with yoga classes and holistic massage therapy.