Scotland’s capital was in a desperate state, plagued by social problems and limited space. Then a young, unqualified architect came up with a plan for Edinburgh New Town – and it heralded the greatest period in the city’s history

One night in September 1751, a six-storey tenement in Edinburgh’s city centre collapsed without warning. Such events were by no means unusual in the Scottish capital, but in this case the building was no slum – it had stood on one of the city’s grandest streets, and the fatalities were from some of Scotland’s most prestigious families.

Surveys were ordered, and many other buildings found to be in a similarly precarious condition; they were pulled down, leaving much of the centre in ruins. The city needed to be comprehensively rebuilt, and rethought. How it went on to do this would have profound consequences – not just for Edinburgh and Scotland, but for our very conception of what a city should be.



The story of how Edinburgh New Town came to be is a modern one, but also distinctly municipal. Eighteenth-century Europe was a period of rapid expansion as towns and ports prospered through trade, business and empire. It was during these years that Saint Petersburg was erected upon the marshes of the Baltic coast, and Lisbon resurrected from its earthquake of 1755.

But in contrast to these epic projects, the crown had nothing to do with the New Town. Scotland hadn’t had a Royal Court since James VI had decamped to England in 1603, and even by the 1750s, the London-Edinburgh stagecoach could still take up to 10 days. The transformation of Edinburgh would have to be done by the city itself.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Edinburgh’s Old and New Towns are both designated Unesco world heritage sites. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

The need was certainly acute, and not just because of its dilapidated housing. Nowadays the historic city centre around Edinburgh Castle, the Old Town, is a bewildering delight of winding passages and cobbled lanes, full of pubs, restaurants, boutique shops and arts venues. But in the 18th century it represented the very worst in medieval squalor. Prone to fires, repeatedly ravaged by disease, it was notorious for its drunkenness, malevolent ghosts and violent crime. The 50,000 residents and freely wandering livestock were trapped in its narrow streets, defensive walls, steep ravines and tottering tenements.

Dr Nick Phillipson at the University of Edinburgh points out that the “what on earth do we do about Edinburgh?” question had been recognised for generations, but by the 1750s it had become desperate. With increased transatlantic commerce and a growing linen industry, people were flocking to a medieval city which was not only beset by social problems, but had also run out of space. There were marshlands to the south, while to its immediate north was the North Loch – a foul lake flooded in the 15th century to bolster the city’s defences, but for 300 years a repository for sewage and household waste.

Edinburgh’s governing council was an unpromising vehicle for municipal improvement of the scale required. A permanent oligarchy of 25 or so men appointed from a handful of trade guilds, it had limited finances, was hobbled by sectarian divisions, and conducted most of its meetings in taverns. But in George Drummond (Lord Provost and “the founder of modern Edinburgh”), they had a leader with the energy and talent to drive through the transformation of the city.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest George Drummond, the ‘founder of modern Edinburgh’. Illustration: Chronicle/Alamy

Born in 1688, Drummond was an early instance of the tireless urban administrator; the Joseph Chamberlain or Robert Moses of his age. Born into neither wealth nor nobility, Drummond attended the Edinburgh High School, was taken on as a secretary at the Board of Customs, and rose to become city treasurer by the age of 29.

Drummond dedicated his life and career to improving the city. His achievements included establishing Britain’s first university medical school and founding the Royal Infirmary Hospital. But it was only after the final defeat of the Jacobite rebellion, and becoming Lord Provost of the council for the second time in the late 1740s, that Drummond could fulfil his lifelong ambition to expand Edinburgh to the north.

Following the disaster of 1751 and the space it provided, Drummond immediately launched a public subscription for the construction of a Royal Exchange. He could sense there was a new spirit in Edinburgh and was determined to make the most of it. As Phillipson says, by the 1750s booming international trade meant “there was a new culture of optimism in Scotland, a belief in economic progress and the values of civic society”.

The Royal Exchange (now the offices of Edinburgh city council) was an impressive, if not necessarily popular, replacement for the meeting point used by the city’s merchants for centuries, but Drummond had only just begun. His long-term vision for the city had always been outwards, to the north, and in 1752 he launched the Commission of Proposals for Public Works, with an ambition to “improve and enlarge the city and to adorn it with public buildings which may be for the national benefit”.

The resulting document, authored by the scholar Sir Gilbert Elliott, is what Phillipson describes as a “masterpiece of its kind, a beautifully produced work of government policy”. The case for the expansion of Edinburgh is put forward in strikingly modern terms: “Wealth is only to be obtained by trade and commerce, and these are only carried on to advantage in populous cities. There also we find the chief objects of pleasure and ambition, and there consequently all those will flock whose circumstances can afford it.”

Almost identical arguments are made today by city leaders seeking investment in the infrastructure and culture necessary to attract skilled workers and private capital.

Drummond had been involved in the council acquiring 100 acres of fields on the far side of North Loch almost 40 years earlier, but it was only now, with the proposals for public works endorsed, that the city boundary was officially extended to encompass them. Even with his prodigious talent for fundraising, it would take Drummond another 10 years before he had marshalled the necessary finances via all the mechanisms at his disposal: custom revenues, duties on ale, public loans and the seized assets of Jacobite rebels. Future income would be dependent on selling residential lots of the development “off plan” to private individuals.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Houses in Edinburgh New Town: ‘Defined by its generous space, open views, light and order.’ Photograph: Murdo Macleod/The Guardian

The choice of design was not made on the usual basis of patronage. Instead, in one of Drummond’s last administrative acts, the council ran a competition, inviting submissions from across Scotland. As with pretty much every architecture competition ever run since, the process was a controversial one.

The judging panel established a familiar pattern in selecting a proposal by James Craig to be the best of the six received, awarding him a medal for his efforts and then deeming it unsuitable for construction. It would take another year of wrangling, negotiation and redesign before a scheme was finally agreed and work could actually start – just after Drummond’s death at the age of 78.

An architect without qualifications

Craig was an unlikely choice for chief designer, and one can appreciate the council’s concerns. Apprenticed to one of the city’s leading masons from the age of 16, he displayed notable draughtsman skills, and was soon absorbing himself in architectural treatises and learning as much as he could about surveying, building materials and town planning. Abandoning his apprenticeship in his early 20s, he set himself up as an architect without qualifications, and immediately entered the council’s competition.

Craig never had the chance to go on the Grand Tour of European antiquities, let alone visit the new cities being built in North America, but his vision for New Town reflected his deep study of classical architecture, along with the latest thinking in urban design. Beginning with Princes street, the wide boulevard running along the far shore of the North Loch, the New Town of Edinburgh was intended to be just that: not a continuous extension of the city centre but constructed apart, to an entirely different design, philosophy and layout.



In contrast to the Old Town’s medieval herringbone street pattern, it was rigidly structured on the gridiron plan, with three parallel wide roads (Princes street, George street and Queen street) running east to west while north-south ran the main thoroughfare and minor streets. And while the Old Town was indelibly associated with the dark granite citadel, the New Town was built from a distinctive white sandstone.

The buildings themselves adhered to classical orders, were solidly constructed and broad rather than tall. There would be no more tottering tenements or narrow passages; instead, the New Town would be defined by its generous space, open views, light and order.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest James Craig by artist David Allan. Illustration: First Press & Scottish Daily Record Group, 1999-2000

Although built for Edinburgh’s wealthy middle classes, the elegant squares, gleaming terraces and fine gardens were much more than residential ornaments. The New Town provided both the setting and inspiration for the greatest period of Edinburgh’s history – the Scottish Enlightenment. It was in these decades that the city transformed itself from “auld reekie” into the “Athens of the north”; Europe’s leading centre for philosophical inquiry, scientific experiment and debate .

And it wasn’t a royal court or even a university that housed this, but the city itself. As the historian James Buchan put it, “Edinburgh’s New Town is intriguing not merely as a suite of handsome buildings, but as the material expression of ideas of civilian life.”

David Hume moved there at the earliest opportunity (Saint David street, just off Princes street, was named ironically after the atheist philosopher), and it was at his dinner parties that some of Europe’s greatest intellectuals would gather: Adam Smith, the historian William Robertson, the political philosopher Adam Ferguson and the chemist Joseph Black. Social clubs sprang up, and institutions were founded to promote learning and debate: the Assembly Rooms, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Royal Scottish Academy. No less a figure than Voltaire was forced to begrudgingly acknowledge: “Today it is from Scotland that we get rules of taste in all the arts.”

As Edinburgh grew in fame and wealth, so it did in size. In 1791 Robert Adam, the most famous British architect of his day, designed Charlotte square, the last section of the original plan to be built. Located at the west end of George street, mirroring St Andrew square to the east, it is regarded by many as the jewel in the crown of the New Town and one of the finest neo-classical squares in Europe (its garden provides the setting each year for the Edinburgh Book Festival). Finally, the dreaded Loch North was drained and landscaped into Princes Street Gardens.

The initial trickle of property lots bought from the council steadily increased year on year, as more and more of the middle classes moved across, and the New Town developed further northwards until the city reached the port of Leith. Although suburbs such as Morningside in the south would be built later, the change was irrevocable – within 50 years, Edinburgh’s wealthiest residents had almost entirely deserted the Old for the New Town. The social geography of Edinburgh remains much the same to this day.

Craig, however, enjoyed little reward himself. Much of his plan was implemented by other architects who were closer to council members and the new Lord Provost. With no talent for business and prone to arguing about money, Craig never worked at the same scale again. He remains a relatively unknown figure in architectural history, with many assuming that Robert Adam was responsible not just for Charlotte square but for the design of the New Town as a whole.

The last in his family line, Craig died of consumption in 1795 and was buried in an unmarked plot. His books, drawings and equipment all had to be sold to pay creditors, so none of his original sketches for the New Town survive. It was not until the 1930s that the Saltire Society erected a gravestone for him.

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But Craig’s vision for New Town endures. Designated a Unesco world heritage site, it stands with the Georgian crescents of Bath and the Victorian villas of Hampstead as one of Britain’s most celebrated urban residential areas. And it is a cityscape that Craig would still recognise today – there are many more shops, bars and restaurants, and most of the houses have been converted into flats, but very few original buildings have been lost.

Yet in recent years, the city of Edinburgh has been less happily governed. The prolonged and costly saga of the tramway, failed attempts to address traffic congestion, and the dismay that has greeted development plans for the east end are all testament to a planning authority that has lost its way. The much reviled council estates in Craigmillar have been flattened but the city’s public housing has not been adequately replaced, and Edinburgh is experiencing some of the steepest house price inflation in Britain.

The Scottish government has expressed its determination for Edinburgh to spearhead a bright and prosperous future. Its economic strategy looks forward to “a country with an international outlook and focus, open to trade, migration and new ideas”. The vision is laudable but, as well as looking outward, Edinburgh’s leaders would do well to draw inspiration from its own history: from the harmonious plans of its architects, the wisdom of its political philosophers, and the tireless energy of its administrators who, out of disorder and poverty, constructed one of the world’s great cities.

Tom Campbell is the author of The Planner, published by Bloomsbury Circus. To order this novel for £10.39 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com

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