Edinburgh's New Town: Georgian Squares, Crescents and the Plan That Built a City

From the Melville column to Robert Adam's Charlotte Square, the oval and twelve-sided streets of the Moray Estate and Robert Louis Stevenson's Heriot Row: how Edinburgh drew itself a perfect grid, and who paid for it

Edinburgh · 12 stops · 28 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. St Andrew Square & the Melville Monument

   St Andrew Square, Edinburgh EH2 2BD, UK

   Stand in the middle of St Andrew Square and lean back until you find the small stone figure on top of that enormous fluted column. He wears a peer's robe and looks out over the rooftops as if he still owned them. That is Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville, and in his lifetime people called him, only half joking, the uncrowned king of Scotland.

   The square around you was the opening move of the New Town. In the 1760s almost everyone in Edinburgh, rich and poor, still lived stacked on top of each other in the tall tenements of the Old Town ridge across the valley. Then the city adopted a plan for a brand-new grid on the empty fields to the north, and this square was its eastern anchor, named after Scotland's saint.

   Dundas was a lawyer who became Home Secretary, Secretary of State for War and First Lord of the Admiralty, and for decades he controlled who got jobs, seats and favours in Scotland. In 1792, when William Wilberforce asked Parliament to abolish the slave trade, Dundas proposed an amendment adding one word: gradual. His defenders say it was the only version that could pass. His critics say it bought the trade fifteen more years... Britain finally banned it in 1807. In 1806 Dundas himself was impeached over the handling of naval funds, the last impeachment in British history, and acquitted.

   The column went up between 1821 and 1823, modelled on Trajan's Column in Rome, and the statue was hoisted to the top in 1828. In recent years, after a long campaign led by the scientist Sir Geoff Palmer, the city added a new plaque at its foot, dedicating the monument to the enslaved Africans whose suffering that delay prolonged. Some historians and Dundas's descendants dispute its wording. The argument is now part of the monument... and that may be the most honest thing about it.

   Now glance at the grand mansion set back behind its forecourt on the east side of the square. Remember it, because the walk ends there, and it hides the cheekiest land grab of the whole New Town. For now, cross to the west side and step into George Street. The first church on your right is our next stop.

2. 2. St Andrew's and St George's West: The Church of the Disruption

   13 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 2PA, UK

   On your right, a church with a slim needle of a spire and a columned portico stands right on the pavement of George Street, almost as if it had been squeezed in between the offices. In a way, it was. James Craig's plan had placed St Andrew's Church on the square you just left, as a grand eye-catcher at the end of the street... but somebody rich got that site first.

   So the church moved here, and it opened in 1784, built to an oval plan designed by an army engineer, Major Andrew Frazer, with the spire added a few years later. Why an oval? Presbyterian worship is all about the spoken word, and in an ellipse everyone sits close to the pulpit and everyone can hear. It was the New Town's own parish church, sober and elegant, and the last place you would expect a revolution.

   On the 18th of May 1843, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland gathered here. For ten years the Church had been fighting over one question: could a landowner impose a minister on a congregation that did not want him? That morning the retiring Moderator, David Welsh, read out a formal protest, laid it on the table and walked out of the door. Behind him came Thomas Chalmers and a long column of ministers, down George Street through cheering crowds, all the way to a hall at Canonmills, where they founded the Free Church of Scotland.

   It became known simply as the Disruption. Around 450 ministers, more than a third of the Church, gave up their manses, their churches and their salaries in a single day. Within a few years their followers had paid for hundreds of new churches and schools across Scotland, and families argued about it for generations.

   The painter David Octavius Hill decided to record that first Free Church assembly in one huge canvas, with some 450 real faces in it. To get the likenesses he turned to the brand-new art of photography... and the painting took him twenty-three years. Now carry on west along George Street, across Hanover Street past the bronze King George the Fourth, to the pillared doorway on the left.

3. 3. The Assembly Rooms: Where Walter Scott Confessed

   54 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 2LR, UK

   Find the portico of heavy Doric columns on the south side of George Street, with lanterns flanking the doors. Behind it are the Assembly Rooms, and for more than two centuries this has been the place where Edinburgh dressed up and went out.

   They opened in 1787, paid for by public subscription. The new residents of the New Town did not want to trudge back across the valley to the Old Town for their dances, so they built their own. An assembly was a very Georgian institution: dancing, card tables, tea, and a great deal of discreet matchmaking, all under strict rules about who could dance with whom and when the evening ended. The columned porch you see was only added in 1818, and a large music hall was built on behind in 1843.

   The most famous night here was the 23rd of February 1827, at a dinner in aid of the Edinburgh Theatrical Fund. Since 1814 a series of hugely successful novels, Waverley, Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, had appeared without an author's name. All of Britain called the writer the Great Unknown, and all of Edinburgh knew perfectly well who it was. After his publishers collapsed in 1826 and left him with crushing debts, the secret no longer protected anything. When a judge, Lord Meadowbank, raised a toast that alluded to the mystery, Walter Scott stood up and admitted, in front of the whole room, that the novels were his.

   The guests applauded as if it were news. Scott then spent the rest of his life writing to pay off those debts, and he very nearly managed it.

   The building is still in use, and every August it becomes one of the busiest venues of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, with comedians where the quadrilles used to be. Keep walking west along George Street, past the statue of William Pitt at the Frederick Street crossing, until you reach the next crossroads, where a bronze preacher stands in the middle of the road.

4. 4. George Street & Castle Street: Craig's Perfect Grid

   George Street at Castle Street, Edinburgh EH2 2HN, UK

   Stop at the crossroads where Castle Street cuts across George Street, and turn to look south. At the end of the street, filling the frame like a painted backdrop in a theatre, sits the Castle on its rock. That is no accident. That is the plan.

   In 1766 the town council held a competition for a new town on the fields north of the Nor' Loch, and the winner was a young, almost unknown architect called James Craig. His final plan, adopted in 1767, was beautifully simple: three parallel streets, a square at each end, and two narrow lanes in between. The outer streets, Princes Street and Queen Street, were to be built on one side only, so their houses would look out forever, south to the Old Town and north to the hills of Fife. George Street, the spine, was made extremely wide, and every cross street was lined up with a view.

   The names were a love letter to the new royal family. George for King George the Third, Queen Street and Charlotte Square for his wife, Princes Street for their sons, Hanover and Frederick for the dynasty. The story goes that the southern street was first meant to be St Giles Street, until the King objected, because St Giles was also the name of a notorious London slum. Craig even printed lines from a poem by his uncle, James Thomson, the author of Rule, Britannia, on his plan.

   Craig never had another success on that scale, and he died in 1795 far from rich. The city he drew, though, still stands almost exactly as he drew it, and since 1995 the New Town and the Old Town have together been a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

   The bronze figure in the road is Thomas Chalmers, leader of the Disruption you heard about. Just down North Castle Street, at number 39, Walter Scott lived for more than twenty years until his ruin, and at number 32 Castle Street, Kenneth Grahame, the author of The Wind in the Willows, was born in 1859. Continue west, and enter Charlotte Square at its south-east corner.

5. 5. Charlotte Square: Robert Adam's Last Masterpiece

   Charlotte Square, Edinburgh EH2 4DR, UK

   Step into Charlotte Square at its south-east corner and turn slowly on the spot. Four sides of pale stone wrap around a circular garden of trees, and above the roofs on the west side floats a great green dome.

   On Craig's plan this was going to be St George's Square, England's answer to St Andrew at the other end of George Street. It was renamed after Queen Charlotte, partly to avoid confusion with George Square, which already existed on the south side of the city. In 1791 the council asked the most famous architect of the age, Robert Adam, born across the Forth in Kirkcaldy, to design the façades. Adam died the following year. He never saw a single stone of it rise, and the square took about a quarter of a century to complete.

   Adam had drawn a church for the west side as well, but the council decided it was too expensive. The domed church you see instead is St George's, by Robert Reid, finished in 1814. In the twentieth century it became an archive building, West Register House, so the square's grandest feature ended up holding paperwork.

   In the middle of the garden rides Prince Albert, in bronze, by the sculptor John Steell. When Queen Victoria came to unveil her late husband's statue in 1876, she was so pleased that she knighted Steell on the spot. And from 1983 until 2019, every August, these private gardens filled with tents and readers as the home of the Edinburgh International Book Festival.

   One more birth to add to your list. Just around the corner, at 16 South Charlotte Street, on the 3rd of March 1847, a boy called Alexander Graham Bell was born... the future inventor of the telephone, whose father taught elocution in this city. Now walk up the east side of the square to the north side, and stand back far enough to see the whole of it at once.

6. 6. The Georgian House & Bute House: A Palace Made of Houses

   7 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh EH2 4DR, UK

   Face the north side of Charlotte Square and try to read it not as a terrace, but as a single building. There is a central pediment held up by columns, matching pavilions at either end, and a perfect symmetry from corner to corner.

   That is Robert Adam's great trick. Behind this one palace front are separate townhouses, each with its own owner, its own door and its own staircase. Every merchant or lawyer who bought one could feel he lived in a duke's palace, and the city got a façade worthy of a capital. Adam had used the same idea in London, but here, in honey-grey sandstone, many people think it reached perfection.

   Number 7 is the Georgian House. Its first owner, in 1796, was John Lamont of Lamont, the chief of a Highland clan, who moved into town like many of the landed families of his day. Today the National Trust for Scotland keeps it as it might have looked around 1800, from the dining room laid for guests upstairs to the kitchen, the wine cellar and the servants' world below stairs, where the real work of this elegant life was done.

   Next door, number 6, behind the central door, is Bute House. The family of the Marquess of Bute passed it to the National Trust for Scotland in the 1960s, it became the official residence of the Secretary of State for Scotland, and since 1999 it has been the official residence of Scotland's First Minister. When you see television crews waiting on this pavement, this is why.

   A few doors along, at number 9, lived the surgeon Joseph Lister, who taught the world antiseptic surgery, and at number 24 Douglas Haig, the First World War field marshal, was born in 1861. Leave the square at its north-west corner and walk gently downhill, along Glenfinlas Street, into a quieter and stranger kind of New Town.

7. 7. Ainslie Place: The Oval of the Moray Estate

   Ainslie Place, Edinburgh EH3 6AR, UK

   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.

8. 8. Moray Place: Twelve Sides of Grandeur

   Moray Place, Edinburgh EH3 6BX, UK

   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.

9. 9. Royal Circus: Playfair Tames the Slope

   Royal Circus, Edinburgh EH3 6SR, UK

   Here the New Town bends. Two great curving terraces face each other across a sloping, tree-filled garden, and the road runs between them like the string through a bow.

   By 1800 Craig's first New Town was practically full, and the city kept pushing north, down the slope toward the Water of Leith. This northern extension was planned from 1802, with long straight streets like Heriot Row and Great King Street. But a grid laid on a steep hill always runs into trouble at its edges, and this corner was the hardest.

   The solution came from William Henry Playfair, the architect who also gave Edinburgh its National Gallery and much of Calton Hill. He designed Royal Circus around 1820 as two crescents instead of a closed circle, so the street could swing round the contour and down toward the village below. Stand still for a moment and you can feel it: the ground under you tilts, and the two halves of the circus sit at different levels, yet the curves make it look effortless.

   Below Circus Place lies Stockbridge, once a separate village of mills, tanneries and washerwomen along the river. One of its most famous residents was the portrait painter Henry Raeburn, who was born there and later developed part of the land himself. He named the prettiest street, Ann Street, after his wife. So in a few hundred metres you pass from aristocratic polygons to a painter's private love letter.

   It is worth remembering who carried the coal up these hills and the water up these stairs. Behind every one of these elegant doors there were basements full of maids and cooks, often girls from the Highlands, working from before dawn. The New Town looks serene because so much of its labour was kept out of sight. Now leave the circus by Howe Street and climb uphill, it is steep, until you meet the long, straight terrace of Heriot Row on your left.

10. 10. Heriot Row & Queen Street Gardens: Robert Louis Stevenson's Window

    17 Heriot Row, Edinburgh EH3 6HP, UK

    Walk along Heriot Row until you reach number 17, and look up at the windows of the upper floors. Behind one of them, in the 1850s and 60s, a thin, feverish little boy lay awake through the long winter nights, coughing, with his face to the glass.

    Heriot Row was built between 1802 and 1808, with houses on one side only, facing the long private gardens of Queen Street across the road. It takes its name from George Heriot, goldsmith to King James the Sixth, whose charitable hospital owned this land. In 1857 the Stevenson family moved into number 17, and their only son, Robert Louis, born in 1850, grew up here.

    He was so often ill that his world was this room, his nurse Alison Cunningham, known as Cummy, and the street outside. Cummy filled his head with stories of Covenanters, martyrs and the devil. And every evening he watched for the lamplighter coming along with his ladder to light the gas lamps. Years later, in A Child's Garden of Verses, published in 1885, that man became Leerie, and the poem still makes Edinburgh readers misty-eyed.

    Now look across at Queen Street Gardens. Inside the railings there is a pond with a little island, and the local legend says that the boy at the window looked at that island long enough to dream up Treasure Island. Nobody can prove it, but nobody here wants to disprove it either. His father Thomas was a lighthouse engineer from the great Stevenson dynasty that lit Scotland's coasts, and the son was meant to follow him. He tried engineering, then law, and then he ran away into writing.

    Think of Jekyll and Hyde when you look at this row: respectable façade at the front, and a hidden life behind it. Stevenson knew both Edinburghs, the polished New Town and the dark closes of the Old. Continue east along Heriot Row to Dundas Street, then turn right, uphill across Queen Street into Hanover Street, and take the narrow lane of Thistle Street on your right.

11. 11. Thistle Street: The Lane Behind the Grand Façades

    Thistle Street, Edinburgh EH2 1DF, UK

    Thistle Street is the New Town with its collar loosened. After the wide, ceremonial streets you have just walked, this one is narrow and low, with smaller buildings, smaller doors and a much more human scale.

    That was the whole idea. In James Craig's plan, the grand streets, Princes, George and Queen, were for the gentry. Between them ran two modest lanes, Thistle Street here and Rose Street on the other side of George Street, for the people who kept the New Town working: shopkeepers, craftsmen, coachmen, stable hands. The mews and coach houses sat behind the big houses, and the lanes stitched the service world together.

    And look at those names again. Rose for England, Thistle for Scotland, and the two squares named after the patron saints of the two nations. When the plan was drawn, the Union of 1707 was only sixty years old and the last Jacobite rising barely twenty years past. Edinburgh was making a very public point: we are loyal, we are British, please send the investment north... It was politics in street signs, and it worked rather well.

    There is a sadder side to the story. As the professional classes moved north into these straight streets, the Old Town they left behind was abandoned to the poor. The tall tenements of the Royal Mile, where judges and porters had once shared a staircase, became some of the most overcrowded slums in Europe by the middle of the nineteenth century. The New Town's beauty and the Old Town's misery were two halves of the same move.

    Thistle Street has always been a little rougher, a little livelier, a place for workshops, taverns and small trade rather than for promenading. In a city that loves its façades, it is good to walk for a moment down the back of the stage. Return east to Hanover Street, then follow the grid back toward St Andrew Square and the stately house standing behind its forecourt on the east side.

12. 12. Dundas House: The Mansion That Stole a Church's Place

    36 St Andrew Square, Edinburgh EH2 2YB, UK

    Back on St Andrew Square, stand in front of the mansion on the east side, set back behind its forecourt like a country house that wandered into town. Three storeys of fine stone, a pediment, perfect Palladian proportions. And no church... which is exactly the point.

    On James Craig's plan this was the spot for St Andrew's Church, meant to close the long view down George Street. But Sir Laurence Dundas, one of the richest men in Britain, got hold of the plot first. Between 1771 and 1774 he built himself this mansion to designs by Sir William Chambers, the architect of Somerset House in London. The council grumbled, and then quietly moved the church to George Street, where you saw it at the start.

    This is a different Dundas from the man on the column. Sir Laurence made his fortune as a contractor supplying the British army in the wars of the mid-eighteenth century, and, like many great fortunes of that age, his also reached into Caribbean plantations worked by enslaved people. The New Town's elegance was built partly on money like this, and it is worth saying so while standing in front of it.

    Since 1825 the house has been the head office of the Royal Bank of Scotland. In the 1850s the bank added a banking hall behind it, crowned with a dome pierced by dozens of star-shaped windows, so that customers counted their money under a sky full of stars. Nearly two hundred years later, it is still a working bank.

    So the walk ends where it began, between two Dundases: a politician on a column and a contractor in a palace, both a little too powerful for the city's comfort. In between you have seen what that wealth paid for, the squares, the crescents, the twelve-sided circus, and the lanes where the work was done. Princes Street is just a few steps south of here... and from there, Calton Hill and its monuments are close at hand.