Barclay House ...

... home of The Scotsman newspaper.

The Scotsman was launched in 1817 as a liberal weekly newspaper by lawyer William Ritchie and customs official Charles Maclaren in response to the "unblushing subservience" of competing newspapers to the Edinburgh establishment. The paper was pledged to "impartiality, firmness and independence". After the abolition of newspaper stamp tax in Scotland in 1850, The Scotsman was relaunched as a daily newspaper priced at 1d and a circulation of 6,000 copies.

In 1953 the newspaper was bought by Canadian millionaire Roy Thomson who was in the process of building a large media group. The paper was bought in 1995 by David and Frederick Barclay for £85 million. They moved the newspaper from its Edinburgh office on North Bridge, which is now an upmarket hotel, to modern offices on Holyrood Road designed by Edinburgh architects CDA, near the subsequent location of the Scottish Parliament Building.

In December 2005, The Scotsman was acquired, in a £160 million deal, by its present owners Johnston Press a company founded in Scotland and now one of the top three largest local newspaper publishers in the UK.