Ainslie Place: The Oval of the Moray Estate
Why is it significant?
You have just crossed an invisible line. Around you the houses no longer stand in straight rows: they curve in a long, stretched oval around a garden of old trees, and the stone is darker, the doors heavier, the windows more solemn. This is the Moray Estate.
Key Facts
| Place | Ainslie Place: The Oval of the Moray Estate |
|---|---|
| Address | Ainslie Place, Edinburgh EH3 6AR, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95340, -3.20960 |
| Part of Walk | Edinburgh's New Town: Georgian Squares, Crescents and the Plan That Built a City |
| Generated | Generated |
You have just crossed an invisible line. Around you the houses no longer stand in straight rows: they curve in a long, stretched oval around a garden of old trees, and the stone is darker, the doors heavier, the windows more solemn.
This is the Moray Estate. The land here belonged to the Earls of Moray, and by the 1820s the New Town had grown right up to their boundary. So the Earl decided to develop it himself, and in 1822 he hired the architect James Gillespie Graham to lay out something more ambitious than a grid. The result is a sequence of shapes, one leading into the next: a crescent, then this oval, Ainslie Place, then a twelve-sided circus just to the north.
The oval takes its name from Margaret Ainslie, the wife of the Earl. And the Earl was a strict landlord. Buyers had to build their façades exactly to the architect's elevations, and the feuing conditions kept out shops and workshops, so that this would remain a purely residential quarter of the very prosperous.
Notice how different it feels from George Street. Craig's town of the 1760s was light, flat and rational, the dream of the Enlightenment. Fifty years later, taste had turned grander and more theatrical: rusticated ground floors, giant columns, rooflines that march in step. The New Town grew in stages over about seventy years, and you can almost read the decades in the stone as you walk.
The garden in the middle is still private, as most of the New Town's gardens are. Residents pay a subscription and carry a key, and on a summer evening you can hear them on the other side of the railings while you stand outside. Leave the oval by its northern side, along the short Great Stuart Street, and the street will open into the most dramatic space of the whole estate.