Edinburgh Street Historians – Unique Historical Walking Tours

About the Founder

Edinburgh Street Historians is the brainchild of its founder, Fraser Horn. Edinburgh-born at the old Royal Infirmary, now the Edinburgh Futures Institute, Fraser began life as a baby in an area of the city bordering the centre called Corstorphine. He attended school, then the University of Edinburgh and has spent much of his life in the City of Edinburgh excluding a 6-month stay in the Highlands and a 3-year sojourn to Prague. He learned how to become a performer through poetry performances, teaching English, and pretending to be Freddie Mercury at karaoke.

In his leisure time, he seeks the best hot chocolate in Edinburgh with his dog, Augie. The pair of them are real tastemakers in this city. Recently, he compiled a lot of it into this recommendations page.

In his work time, he populates this website with as many articles as he can because he is legitimately in love with his home city.

About the Website

AI Use

We have a philosophy. It is a human centric ideal. Edinburgh as a city is one of the great cities of learning and human progress. It is the place where the great philosopher David Hume developed empiricism. This is the idea that you should found your ideas based on data gathered from your senses instead of just thoughts. This made its way into the website. None of our articles or images uses AI.

Our founder wrote more on this topic before. We can see the benefits of AI in certain areas, but view it as unnecessary for what we do. We are communicators, human storytellers. It is amongst the oldest human traditions. Telling stories of the past is an essential part of being human. Making sure those stories are accurate through actual verified research is a core part of what it means to deliver excellence.

This is not the easy way. There are countless tools and experts on offer who say they could produce faster research. It can be tempting to turn to the machine which offers instant improvement. But at its heart, we are motivated by a love of the task. These articles are written by human hands and researched by history-trained brains. This makes our website different, as it is created by a dedicated team rather than a technological unpaid intern.

As well as the tours, the website is a labour of love. This may not be the most common thing in the modern world. But we have a philosophy and it is human first.

Advertising and intrusion

Most websites these days are a chore to visit. Cookie banners, pop-up ads, autoplay video, we will have none of that on this website thank you. The closest thing we have to advertising is in some of our articles and our recommendations page which recommend places but this is completely non-intrusive, actually helpful to people looking for things, and all I’ve been given by any of them is the occasional free meal or a coffee. Maybe I should ask for more!

The point is, this website should be a delight to visit in comparison to most others.

About the Street Historians

Edinburgh Street Historians is a walking tour company which delivers high quality tours, entertaining and educational. We preserve the story of the beautiful city we all share. We are stewards of the tales of the past, and we are performers who make these stories relevant for the present day. Our guides are Edinburgh-based to offer our guests authentic interactions with trained and qualified guides who actually live in the place they’re talking about. Every one of us is motivated by our love of the city and how much we treasure it.

We are local, independent, well-educated, properly trained, insured, licensed, and a really good time.

You can book our tours easily on our Ticket Tailor page, right here. We encourage you to do so to ensure there are enough guides, and we sometimes give gifts to our guests and need numbers.

If you’d like to know how free walking tours work, you can find the Edinburgh Street Historians policy here.

For more information on us, you can consult this post about our logo.

For more information on the yearly tour for charity on behalf of the Edinburgh Hospital for Children and Young People, you can find information here.