Historic Edinburgh
There is some uncertainty about the early history of Edinburgh, many of the records having been lost in early invasions. However, Edinburgh is believed to have taken its name from Edwin of Deira who fortified the castle rock around 617AD.
Edinburgh has a long history, that pre-dates photography by many centuries. Yet, some of the buildings painted by the 17th and 18th century artists and photographed by the mid-19th century photographers can still be recognised today.
Edinburgh was originally a walled town, extending less than a mile down the ridge to the east from Edinburgh Castle. As recently as 1763, the area of Edinburgh was only about 1 square mile.
Its boundaries expanded gradually, and by 1840, when photography came to Edinburgh, the area covered was about 4 square miles. The City's expansion, with the creation of the New Town, was well underway.
The population of Edinburgh has gradually grown. It was about 100,000 in 1811, 160,000 in 1841 and 270,000 in 1891, and is about half a million today.
In 1707, at the time of the Act of Union, Edinburgh was a small capital city, little more than a single street running west to east down a defensive crag from the Castle to Holyrood Palace, with narrow lanes - or wynds - branching off on both sides, in a layout that resembled the bones of a fish.
An overcrowded population, numbering in the region of 35,000, was crammed into tenement dwellings, some many stories high, to make the best use of the limited space, with commercial premises at street level.
A few miles to the north, was the port of Leith, a separate burgh devoted to trade and fishing, whose fortunes were tied to the capital, particularly through the supply of luxury goods from Europe and beyond. All around and easily viewed from the prominences of the city were the dairies and market gardens that provided Edinburgh's food, along with a scattering of mansion houses in a picturesque landscape.
Social intimacy was a feature of community life in Edinburgh throughout the first half of the 18th century. The wealthy and the poor lived in close proximity with face-to-face relationships, often in the same tenements though on different levels; the first and second floors having the highest social cachet.
They also frequented the same inns and alehouses, and the numerous clubs and societies that thrived in the 'Enlightenment'. Edinburgh embraced a wide spectrum of members from the educated artisan to the great aristocrat. Despite the rigours of the climate, and the notoriously filthy state of the streets and wynds, much of the social and commercial life of the city was conducted out of doors, in the regular markets and in the communal promenading that occurred each day.
Edinburgh had long supported the institutions of government, such as the law courts and the Church. In the last years of the independent Scottish parliament, another 'government' institution was created - the Bank of Scotland, founded in 1695 - which set in motion the development of Edinburgh as a financial centre.
Educational establishments, notably the University, also shaped the 'professional' character of the city. Yet the fortunes of Edinburgh languished in the first half of the 18th century.
The Act of Union took the Parliament, and many of the prosperous governing classes, south to London. The poorer elements of the population expanded, causing further problems of overcrowding and disease in the tightly hemmed-in spaces of the medieval old town.
Economic stagnation in Scotland as a whole also created an air of despondency, and political upheavals, such as the Porteous Riots of 1736 and the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, were a cause of much concern.
Responding to these multiple problems, in an act of outstanding vision, the Town Council of Edinburgh, under the leadership of Provost George Drummond, announced an architectural competition to design a New Town for Edinburgh.
First proposed in 1752, the intention was to create a new and spacious cityscape of wide, symmetrical street, terraced town-houses, specialised shopping facilities and open squares and gardens on a separate green-field site immediately to the north.
The Old and New Towns were separated by a body of water known as the 'Nor Loch'. This was crossed by the construction of an artificial 'Mound' - using the excavated earth from the basements of new buildings - and was eventually drained to create Princes Street Gardens.
The New Town project was designed to house the wealthy, and to attract back to Scotland the absentee noblemen who now lived in London. These people, it was hoped, would spend their money in Scotland and support the kinds of luxury businesses and modern commerce that would bring much-needed prestige and prosperity to the capital city.
It was a patriotic project, with the names of the streets and the squares chosen to celebrate the Union and the Hanoverian monarchy, as well as the culture of Scotland. It was also designed to reflect new aspirations, as Scotland - following the blue-print described by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations - sought to enter the modern market age.
Built in several stages from the 1760s to the 1830s, the New Town of Edinburgh was the largest planned city development in the world at that time, and it proved an outstanding success in bringing commercial and cultural dynamism to the city.
The demand for luxury products to furnish the new houses supported a range of fine shops on Princes Street. Carriage-makers flourished since the broad, straight streets were now able to support a more sophisticated wheeled traffic than was ever possible in the Old Town.
The Carron Iron Company near Falkirk - the largest business in Scotland - produced an array of fancy domestic iron wares for the New Town, including cast iron grates to designs by Robert Adam. All of these developments generated a significant surge in well-paid working class employment. There was a parallel demand for professional people, many of whom lived in the New Town.
Other aspects of Edinburgh's economy flourished in response to public investment. The financial industry was an area of particular growth, as new banks came into existence to service the needs of government and the landed gentry, and increasingly to provide financial support for the developing industrial giants of the west of Scotland in cotton, coal, iron and eventually, by the mid-19th century, in engineering and ship building.
Reflecting this growth, major bank buildings, dominated by the Bank of Scotland's new headquarters on the Mound, became prominent features of the cityscape.
The importance of Edinburgh as a financial centre was further developed in the early 1800s with the founding of a number of insurance companies, in response to the growing market for life insurance. Firms of stock brokers and investment managers were an established part of the scene by the 1820s, making Edinburgh the most important financial city in Britain outside London.
The presence of large numbers of legal and educational institutions, in addition to generating significant buildings such as the new University, also gave rise to a series of magnificent libraries, reflecting the unique place of Edinburgh in the European Enlightenment. One of the most spectacular was the Library of the Writers to the Signet (solicitors), adjoining the High Courts in the Old Town.
Education, government and law spawned a massive printing and publishing industry, with some of the household names of British publishing being based in the city. Some of the greatest publications of the period - notably the Encyclopaedia Britannica - were first produced in Edinburgh.
Sir Walter Scott, a novelist of international renown and a lawyer by profession, was a central figure in the literary and legal milieu of early 19th-century Edinburgh. And inspired by the popularity of the Romantic movement, there was a major growth in European interest in Scotland as a tourist destination. Large numbers of visitors now travelled to Edinburgh en route to the Highlands, and these included such famous figures as Mendelssohn, the composer, in the 1820s.
By the late 18th century, Edinburgh already enjoyed a remarkable reputation as a city of intellectual brilliance and beautiful architecture. Many new public buildings were built at great expense in the Greek neo-classical style, giving rise to its sometimes being called the 'Athens of the North'.
A series of fine churches, the Assembly Rooms in George Street, the Register House at the east end of Princes Street - a government building to house the public records of Scotland - and the Napoleonic War monuments on Calton Hill, were of a type that could rival the great buildings of any city in Europe.
There were several notable buildings associated with the advance of the medical profession and the unrivalled reputation of Edinburgh as a centre of medical education.
The Old Town, though still overcrowded, benefited from the general buoyancy of Edinburgh, with new building projects at the Courts and Exchange. There were also new traffic intersections, running north-south across the High Street to link the Mound with George lV Bridge, and further east at the Tron Church, linking another southern route to the new North Bridge and the road to Leith.
The port of Leith was not left behind in this dash for growth. New quays were added to the harbour to accommodate the growing traffic, and there was a new customs house in the classical style. With a growing reputation as a seaside resort, the development of golf links and the building of numerous 'marine villas', Leith supported its own genteel society, focused on a new Assembly Rooms.
It was testimony to the prestige of Edinburgh that at the height of this 'golden age', in 1822, King George lV made his celebrated visit to the Scottish capital - the first British monarch to travel north to Scotland in over a century.
The occasion was marked with great pomp and splendour with much of the ceremony - in full tartan regalia - organised by Sir Walter Scott as one of the leading lights of Scottish society.
By this stage, the people of Edinburgh were justly proud of their flourishing city, whose population had expanded to 138,000 in 1821. But gains in space, in amenity and beauty, with new luxury housing and conspicuous consumption for some was inevitably socially divisive.
The rich and the poor lived increasingly separate lives. Face-to-face relationships were gradually eroded - by social exclusivity in the New Town, and by the increasingly indoor life of most of the higher classes. The professional and gentry families that dominated wealthy society now had few occasions for contact with the working class.
The squalor of life for the poor in the overcrowded and disease-infested Old Town became increasingly marked. There were cholera outbreaks in the early 1830s, and such infamous outrages as the Burke and Hare murders of the 1820s - committed in order to supply medical students with anatomy subjects - gave a sinister edge to the 'douce' image of Edinburgh.
Like all great cities, Edinburgh had become a place of contrasts - of good and bad, desirable and undesirable. This was the price that was inevitably paid for the rise and prosperity of the capital of Scotland.
