A tenement is a type of building shared by multiple dwellings, typically with flats or apartments on each floor and with shared entrance stairway access. They are common on the British Isles, particularly in Scotland. In the medieval Old Town, in Edinburgh, tenements were developed with each apartment treated as a separate house, built on top of each other. Over hundreds of years, custom grew to become law concerning maintenance and repairs, as first formally discussed in Stair's 1681 writings on Scots property law. In Scotland, these are now governed by the Tenements Act, which replaced the old Law of the Tenement and created a new system of common ownership and procedures concerning repairs and maintenance of tenements. Tenements with one or two room flats provided popular rented accommodation for workers, but in some inner-city areas, overcrowding and maintenance problems led to shanty towns, which have been cleared and redeveloped. In more affluent areas, tenement flats form spacious privately owned houses, some with up to six bedrooms, which continue to be desirable properties.

Edinburgh is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 council areas. The city is located in south-east Scotland, and is bounded to the north by the Firth of Forth estuary and to the south by the Pentland Hills. Edinburgh had a population of 506,520 in mid-2020, making it the second-most populous city in Scotland and the seventh-most populous in the United Kingdom. The wider metropolitan area has a population of 912,490.