A guide to exploring Edinburgh author Muriel Spark's Bruntsfield remembered in her memoir

Nestled between an Italian restaurant and an estate agent in Bruntsfield Place lies an unassuming, and easily-missed, black door.

There’s nothing about the tenement that would make anyone passing want to stop and look. But it was in one of those flats at number 160 that Muriel Spark took her first breath on February 1, 1918.

Born Muriel Camberg, she was the youngest child of Bernard Camberg, an engineer, and his wife Sarah.

She entered a world in which her street was still lit by gas lamps, BBC radio broadcasts were years away, and soldiers were being sent to fight in the Great War.

Little did her parents know that more than 100 years later, in an era of always on communications and falling attention spans, their daughter would still be seen as one of the country’s most influential and celebrated authors.

It is clear, upon reading Spark’s autobiography Curriculum Vitae, that the author held fond memories of her upbringing in the Scottish capital.

In the memoir, published in 1992 some 14 years before her death, she admitted that she was unable to remember her childhood in chronological order but instead said her memories “occur in bright flashes, illuminating every detail of the scene”.

Among those scenes illuminated in her mind were the shops on Bruntsfield’s bustling high street and beyond, which she visited with her mother during the years she was growing up.

There was the Buttercup Dairy Company, which stood at 48 Warrender Park Road, where Spark would buy butter and eggs.

She remembered being served by a “pink and white complexioned girl, with her hair in a cap and wearing a sparkling white overall”, which echoes the ‘cow and girl’ murals which featured in every one of the Buttercup Dairy’s shops.

Spark also remembered getting meat from W.M. Christie butchers - which still serves customers at 186 Bruntsfield Place to this day - just doors down from Lauders’ shoe shop and William Todd’s grocers.

A stone’s throw from her front door was Bruntsfield Links, which Spark said she “loved in all seasons”.

The author detailed her memories of making the first footprints in the early morning snow while walking to school for Greek classes, and practising golf with her big brother Philip and his friends “in the long summer evenings of Scotland”.

Fans of the author can retrace her steps through the Links, from Bruntsfield Terrace to Whitehouse Loan, via Muriel Spark Walk which was named in her honour in 2018.

The path leads to James Gillespie’s Primary and High Schools, which were then known as James Gillespie’s High School for Girls. It was there that Spark was educated over 12 years from the age of five.

The school inspired the Marcia Blaine School of her most famous novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, with her teacher Christina Kay, who she described as a “character in search of an author”, also having inspired the titular character.

For anyone who wants to continue their tour of Muriel Spark’s Edinburgh beyond Bruntsfield and Morningside, while taking in breathtaking views of the castle, the Miss Jean Brodie Steps can be found on the Vennel, just off Grassmarket.

Also named in 2018, to coincide with what would have been Spark’s 100th year, the site is one of several prominent locations used for the filming of the 1969 adaptation of the novel which starred Dame Maggie Smith as the famous teacher.

Other locations across the city where shadows of Spark’s childhood can be found include Blackwell’s bookstore on South Bridge, which was once a James Thin shop where the author bought her first school books.

Spark and her family would often take long walks in the Braid Hills and at Blackford Pond on weekends.

The author said walks there made her feel a “close affinity” with Edinburgh writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who died in 1894.

She said: “The Braid Hills, the Blackford Hill and Pond, the Pentland Hills of Stevenson’s poems, his ‘hills of home’ were mine, too.”

In 1937, the author met and became engaged to Sydney Spark and the pair moved to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.

Spark wrote that she “longed to leave Edinburgh and see the world” and cited this as a possible reason for agreeing to marry Sydney, who was 13 years her senior.

The pair went on to have a son, Robin, and separated in 1940 after just a few years of marriage. But see the world she did, having left Africa for London in 1944.

From there, she moved to New York for several years followed by Rome and then Tuscany, where she died aged 88 in April 2006.

But it is to Edinburgh and Spark’s ‘hills of home’ that fans of the author - whether they be aspiring writers or keen readers - will flock in order to retrace the steps of her childhood and schools days, which she described as “the most formative years of my life, and in many ways the most fortunate for a future writer”.