Moray Place: Twelve Sides of Grandeur
Why is it significant?
Walk into Moray Place and try counting the sides as you turn. You will reach twelve: a vast polygon of palace fronts, with giant columns and pediments standing up out of the terrace every few houses, and in the centre a dense private garden of trees.
Key Facts
| Place | Moray Place: Twelve Sides of Grandeur |
|---|---|
| Address | Moray Place, Edinburgh EH3 6BX, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95470, -3.20860 |
| Part of Walk | Edinburgh's New Town: Georgian Squares, Crescents and the Plan That Built a City |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into Moray Place and try counting the sides as you turn. You will reach twelve: a vast polygon of palace fronts, with giant columns and pediments standing up out of the terrace every few houses, and in the centre a dense private garden of trees.
This is the climax of the Moray Estate, begun in the 1820s, and it is the New Town at its most theatrical. Where Charlotte Square hides several houses behind one palace front, Moray Place repeats the trick around a whole twelve-sided circus. Every façade looks across the garden at another façade, as though the buildings were the audience and the trees the stage.
The Earl of Moray built himself a house on the square, so he could keep an eye on his investment. And it attracted exactly the kind of residents he wanted. Francis Jeffrey, the lawyer and critic who edited the Edinburgh Review, one of the most feared literary magazines in Britain, lived here. Those were the years when Edinburgh's lawyers and writers really did believe they were running the intellectual life of Europe from these drawing rooms.
Here is the secret that most visitors miss. Behind the northern houses the ground does not continue flat. It falls away in a steep, wooded bank, all the way down to the Water of Leith, and those slopes are private pleasure gardens for the residents. So the grandest square in the New Town sits on the edge of a ravine, and the houses on that side have fronts on a city square and backs on what feels like a country glen.
It was not built quickly or cheaply. Houses here were enormous, needed many servants, and changed hands slowly. Today many are divided into flats, but from the street the circus looks as it was meant to. Leave by Darnaway Street to the east, then turn left down India Street, a steep descent, to the curved terraces of Royal Circus.