Ross McDowell / Tartan Compass
Crossing into the New Town changes the scale of Edinburgh: streets widen, views lengthen and the medieval city gives way to a deliberately planned capital.
The New Town is elegant, but there is much more going on here than the architecture suggests at first. The wider streets, formal gardens and grand façades belong to a bigger story about Scotland's intellect, trade and ambition, but you also have to look behind and below them at the working city. And that is really only the First New Town. Keep walking east or west and the story continues, with plenty that is quite easy to pass without knowing what you are looking at.
The First New Town began from James Craig's plan of 1767, but the area visitors now call the New Town developed through a succession of major schemes extending well into the nineteenth century. Squares, terraces, gardens and long sightlines created a very different urban experience from the crowded, irregular Old Town. That contrast is central to the World Heritage value of Edinburgh's Old and New Towns. The grand façades were only part of the plan. Basements, mews, service streets and working spaces sat behind and below them, while later commercial uses kept changing how the area functioned.
Long east-west streets open distant views, while squares and cross streets interrupt them in controlled ways. The planning changes how the city feels as well as how it looks. Behind the grandest façades, quieter streets, basement levels, lanes and mews reveal the working structure that supported the formal city above. Across the valley, the Old Town provides the comparison: narrower routes, greater vertical compression and a completely different street pattern.
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