On Edinburgh's New Town, and what it means to plan a city from the beginning
James Craig was 22 when he won the competition to plan Edinburgh's New Town in 1766. The plan he submitted was implemented almost exactly as drawn over the following sixty years.
James Craig was 22 when he won the competition to plan Edinburgh's New Town in 1766. The plan he submitted — a grid of three parallel streets connected by a series of perpendicular streets, with a square at each end — was implemented almost exactly as drawn over the following sixty years. What is remarkable about this is not that a 22-year-old designed it, but that the city built it: 250 hectares of new development, consistently executed in sandstone and neoclassical detail, without the plan deviating substantially from Craig's original conception.
The New Town is not a historically preserved area. It functions as a residential and commercial district for a city of half a million people, and it has been doing this for two hundred years. The Georgian facades contain offices, apartments, hotels, and the National Portrait Gallery. The ground floors of George Street have been boutiques and banks and, currently, a mixture of both. This continued use is what preserves the fabric with an authenticity that a protected-area approach would not: the buildings are used, maintained, and adapted because they serve a purpose, not because they are categorised.
Robert Adam's north facade of Charlotte Square, designed in 1791 as a single palatial composition rather than as individual houses, is the New Town's most resolved piece of architecture. The facade treats twelve separate townhouses as a unified building with a central pedimented section and flanking wings — a device borrowed from English country house design and applied to urban terracing. The individual property boundaries are invisible in the elevation; the architectural argument is the collective whole.
The relationship between the Old Town and the New Town — separated by the valley of the former Nor' Loch, now the Princes Street Gardens — is the spatial argument that defines Edinburgh more than any individual building. The medieval verticality of the Old Town faces across the valley to the Georgian horizontality of the New Town. Two urban models separated by two hundred metres and two centuries produce, facing each other, a definition of what a city can be by contrast.
Craig's plan works because it is simple enough to be built correctly at scale and flexible enough to accommodate the variations that 250 years of use will always introduce. This is the quality of successful urban plans: they are frameworks, not specifications. The details fill in over time; the structure remains.