Royal Terrace: Playfair's Whisky Row
Why is it significant?
Royal Terrace runs on and on beside you, one of the longest Georgian frontages in Edinburgh, with columned centrepieces breaking the rhythm every so often like a drumbeat. On your right the gardens climb toward the hill, and on your left the city falls away to the north.
Key Facts
| Place | Royal Terrace: Playfair's Whisky Row |
|---|---|
| Address | Royal Terrace, Edinburgh EH7 5AB, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.95680, -3.17580 |
| Part of Walk | Calton Hill, Edinburgh: Monuments, Martyrs and the Athens of the North |
| Generated | Generated |
Royal Terrace runs on and on beside you, one of the longest Georgian frontages in Edinburgh, with columned centrepieces breaking the rhythm every so often like a drumbeat. On your right the gardens climb toward the hill, and on your left the city falls away to the north.
This is part of what is called the Calton scheme, or the Eastern New Town. Around 1819 William Henry Playfair, the same architect whose temples you saw on the summit, drew a plan to wrap the whole hill in terraces. Instead of a grid, the streets follow the contours of the slope, like rings around a tree, with gardens in between. Building began in the early 1820s, but it went slowly, and the eastern end of this terrace was not completed for decades.
Royal Terrace earned a nickname: Whisky Row. Many of the houses were bought by prosperous wine and spirit merchants, and the story goes that they chose the upper floors here so they could watch their ships coming up the Firth of Forth into Leith, and know before anyone else that the cargo had arrived. Whether every merchant really stood at the window with a spyglass, nobody knows, but it is a very Edinburgh kind of legend.
Look at the scale of it. On the flat land Craig built a disciplined grid; on the hill, Playfair built something closer to a stage set, with long, continuous façades that you are meant to see from far off, from the north of the city and even from the sea. Between this terrace and the next one lies a large private garden, laid out on the slope of the hill itself, open only to keyholders.
The plan was never fully built, and some of the land around the eastern side was left open. That is part of why Calton Hill still feels wild in the middle of a capital city. At the eastern end of Royal Terrace, follow the curve of the road south as it bends around the hill into Regent Terrace.