Plan a town as a park is cut through a forest: with many straight streets, squares from which several streets branch, and broad entrances, so that there is regularity in the details and variety, even a certain disorder, in the whole.
Terraces that face the view
Build the outer streets on one side only, so that every house looks across open gardens to the landscape beyond, and keep the far side of the street free of building.
Princes Street faces south across the valley of the drained Nor’ Loch to the Castle rock and the Old Town; Queen Street faces north towards the Firth of Forth. Craig’s plan built each on one side only, and the residents of Princes Street later went to law to stop building on the other side, which is why the gardens are still there.
The one-sided street, or terrace, became a favourite device of Georgian town planning, from the crescents of Bath to the terraces of Regent’s Park: a row of houses given a view and composed as a single façade towards it.
Related rules
Lay out a town as a gardener lays out a forest park: wide, straight streets as its avenues, squares where they meet, well-marked entrances, and within that order enough variety of buildings that the whole never becomes monotonous.
Do not leave the fronts of houses to the whim of each builder: let the authorities fix their line, height and design so that a street or square is composed as a whole, and vary the designs from one street to the next so that uniformity does not become tedium.
On a ridge, run the principal street along the crest and make it the widest; set a square at each end of it; lay two more streets along the flanks, and narrow lanes between them for coach-houses, shops and lesser houses.
End each long street on a monument: put a church on the axis of the main street at the far side of each square, so that the view along it finishes on a portico and a dome or steeple.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Terraces that face the view”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/craig-one-sided-streets. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.