The suburb is largely composed of residential streets of tenement housing, such as Waverley Park and Milton Street, built in the mid-1890s on the grounds of Comely Gardens, a pleasure garden belonging to a local mansion, which operated along the same lines as London's Vauxhall Gardens.
The Elsie Inglis Memorial Hospital (officially Elsie Inglis Memorial Maternity Hospital) was a hospital in Abbeyhill, Edinburgh, Scotland, and was founded in 1925 as a memorial to Elsie Inglis.
The loop via Piershill and Abbeyhill was retained and used as a diversion for slower trains, and in both 1970 and 1986 a temporary passenger halt at Meadowbank was built for the duration of the Commonwealth Games.