Biography | Adam Smith — He Died in This Canongate Townhouse

People look for a philosopher's deathbed beside a university.

Adam Smith died in a 1690s townhouse off the Canongate.

He took the lease of Panmure House in 1778, the year he received his commission as a Commissioner of Customs for Scotland.

The post paid £500 a year, with another £100 for the salt duties, on top of the Buccleuch pension he was told to keep.

The house stands in Lochend Close, now numbered as 4 Lochend Close and listed at 115 Canongate.

It had been built in 1691-93 for Lieutenant Colonel George Murray and later held by the Earls of Panmure.

Smith lived here with his mother until her death in May 1784, and with his cousin Janet Douglas until her death in 1788.

From these rooms he saw four further editions of The Wealth of Nations through the press, and he was still revising The Theory of Moral Sentiments.

The Customs Board sat him in the old Royal Exchange on the High Street, a short walk up the Mile.

On 17 July 1790 he died in the house, aged sixty-seven.

The Canongate burial register later named the cause as a decay.

The north wing in which he died was taken down in 1838 when the grounds were given over to a metal foundry.

The surviving L-plan block is Category A listed.

After a mid-century restoration it served a boys' club and then social services; Heriot-Watt's Edinburgh Business School bought it in 2008 and reopened the repaired house in 2018.

It is the only residence of his that still stands.

The visitor can walk from this close to the kirkyard where he was buried five days later.

Do not treat the present seminar rooms as the original death chamber.

That wing is gone.

Photo: Panmure House, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait etching after James Tassie's 1787 medallion, public domain.