Most buildings on this street now belong to Edinburgh University, but during the Enlightenment it was a highly sought-after address. According to the university, the following aristocrats inhabited the street in 1780:

• No. 2 The Earl of Aboyne
• No. 3 Lord Blantyre
• No. 4 The Earl of Dalhousie, after whom Dalhousie Land was named
• No. 5 Dr. Gregory
• No. 8 The Earl of Hynford
• No. 11 Elizabeth Wemyss
• No. 12 Colonel Tod
• No. 13 The daughter of the celebrated judge Lord Monboddo

No. 13 was where James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714 – 1790) arranged "learned suppers" for many of the intellectuals of the time, including the mathematician John Gregory, historian William Robertson, and the philosopher Adam Ferguson.  Although a law graduate and eventual Justice of the high court, he is famous today as the founder of modern comparative historical linguistics.  In his work entitled The Origin and Progress of Language he provided evidence language skills evolved in response to changing environment and social structures.  But perhaps more striking, on the basis of this evolution, he was also the first to put forward what is currently termed the single-origin hypothesis, or the theory that man originated at a single region of the earth.