The first New Town of Edinburgh as it stood around 1830: a grid of three parallel streets on a ridge between two squares, the outer streets built on one side only to look over gardens, every long view closed by a public building, and one square given a single palace front.
Laugier had asked, in 1753, that a city be designed like a well-planned park: broad, straight streets for order, squares and varied buildings for delight, and the fronts of houses held to a common rule by the magistrate so that no private whim spoils the street. Edinburgh’s New Town, built from 1767 on the plan of the young James Craig, is the most complete demonstration of those ideas in Britain. Three parallel streets run along the crest of a ridge (George Street in the middle, the widest, with a square at each end; Princes Street and Queen Street along the flanks, built on one side only so that their houses look out over gardens), with narrow lanes between for coach-houses and lesser dwellings.
The houses were built plot by plot by private owners, but the council’s conditions fixed their line, height and material, so the streets read as long, even terraces of three-bay stone houses. Only Charlotte Square, at the west end, was given a single architectural design: Robert Adam’s palace fronts of 1791, in which a dozen houses share one rusticated base, one pedimented centre and one cornice. The long views were to end on churches in both squares; at the west St George’s dome closes George Street, but at the east Sir Lawrence Dundas took the church site for his own villa, and St Andrew’s Church moved into George Street.
Click a building to see which rule placed it. The Castle and the Old Town lie off the plan to the south, beyond the gardens of the drained Nor’ Loch; the Mound and the North Bridge lead to them.