Architecturally, Edinburgh’s Old and New Towns are utterly disparate. In the Old, everything is higgledy-piggledy; in the New – now more than 200 years old – order and harmony prevail.
The Old Town lies to the south of Princes Street Gardens. Its backbone is the Royal Mile, described by the writer Daniel Defoe in the 1720s as ‘perhaps the largest, longest and finest Street for Buildings, and Number of Inhabitants…in the world’. Then it was lined with tall, narrow tenements, some with as many as 14 storeys, where aristocracy, merchants and lowly clerks all rubbed shoulders in friendly familiarity in dark stairways, and through which ran a confusing maze of wynds (alleys), courts and closes.
A new order
In 1766 James Craig, an unknown 23-year-old, won a competition for the design of the New Town. His submission was a ‘gridiron’ consisting of two elegant squares – Charlotte and St Andrew – linked by three wide, straight, parallel streets: Princes, George and Queen. Robert and John Adam, Sir William Chambers and John Henderson, premier architects of the day, all contributed plans for glorious Georgian buildings. During the first part of the 19th century, the New Town was extended by the addition of an extraordinary grouping of squares, circuses, terraces, crescents and parks, all maintaining the neoclassical idiom and permitting the New Town to boast the largest area of Georgian architecture in all Europe.
The Georgian House on Charlotte Square.
Mockford & Bonetti/Apa Publications
Stepping inside the past
