186 High Street, Edinburgh

188 High Street in Edinburgh is a commercial building designed by George Smith in 1845. It is a narrow, four-storey structure with an attic, featuring three bays and a Scots Jacobean style. The building has a distinctive corbelled and shouldered wallhead gable. On the ground floor to the left, there is a basket-arched pend leading to Borthwicks Close, while the right side has a later frontage for a police centre.

An ornamental bracketed cornice runs between the ground and first floors, and the first-floor windows are adorned with cornices and strapwork pediments. There is a cill course at the second floor, with ornamental cornices above it. The third floor windows have projecting bracketed cills. The wallhead attic gable is corbelled out and breaks the eaves, featuring a bipartite segmental-arched window in the centre, which has a shouldered hoodmould and a needle finial at the apex.

To the rear, the building rises to six storeys and includes another corbelled gable on the west elevation. The windows throughout are timber sash and case, with configurations of 12, 8, and 4 panes. The roof is covered with grey slate, and the building has particularly broad axial ashlar stacks, clay cans, and cast-iron rainwater goods.