The Lawnmarket is the upper stretch of Edinburgh's Royal Mile, running downhill from the castle esplanade towards St Giles' Cathedral. Its name derives from the French word for linen and the old Scots "laun," a market where cloth and produce from the surrounding countryside were sold. King James III formalised a cloth market here in 1477.

The street's most famous resident was Deacon William Brodie: a master cabinet maker and town councillor who maintained two mistresses, five illegitimate children and a gambling debt, funding all three by leading a gang of burglars for over twenty years. He was hanged on the Lawnmarket in 1788. A teenager named Robert Louis Stevenson owned a chest built by Brodie's hands, and wrote his first outline of a play about the double-lived Deacon at just thirteen. The idea would eventually become Jekyll and Hyde.

VoiceMap's tours follow this thread closely, tracing Brodie's workshop to the close that still bears his name and connecting the Lawnmarket's respectable surface to the darker lives unfolding behind it.