EdinburghGaelic Dun Eideanncapital city of Scotland, located in southeastern Scotland with its centre near the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, an arm of the North Sea that thrusts westward into the Scottish Lowlands. The city and its immediate surroundings constitute an independent council area. The city and most of the council area, including the busy port of Leith on the Firth of Forth, lie within the historic county of Midlothian, but the council area also includes an area in the northwest, around South Queensferry, in the historic county of West Lothian.

Physically, Edinburgh is a city of sombre theatricality, with much of this quality deriving from its setting among crags and hills and from its tall buildings and spires of dark stone. Edinburgh has been a military stronghold, the capital of an independent nationcountry, and a centre of intellectual activity. Although it has repeatedly experienced the vicissitudes of fortune, the city has always renewed itself. Today it is the seat of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive. It , and it remains a major centre for finance, law, tourism, education, and cultural affairs. Area council area, 100 square miles (260 square km). Pop. (1991) city, 401,910; (1999 2004 est.) council area, 451453,710670.

Physical and human geographyCharacter of the city

Although Edinburgh absorbed surrounding villages and the Firth of Forth ports between 1856 and 1920, its aesthetic and political heart still lies in its small historic core, comprising the Old Town and the New Town. The Old Town, built up in the Middle Ages when the fear of attack was constant, huddles high on the Castle Rock overlooking the surrounding plain. The New Town, in contrast, spreads out in a magnificent succession of streets, crescents, and terraces. The medieval Old Town and the Neoclassical New Town were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995.

“This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop-scene in a theatre,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, the 19th-century Scottish novelist, essayist, and poet who was born in the New Town, “but a city in the world of reality.” The contrasts that make Edinburgh unique also make it typically Scottish, for, despite its reserved exterior, it is also a city capable of great warmth and even gaiety. Historically, its citizens have also been capable of great passion, especially in matters royal or religious. In 1561, for example, a mob spurred by the fiery Protestant preacher John Knox tried to break into the private chapel in the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–67), newly returned from France, was attending a Roman Catholic mass. In 1637 a riot in the cathedral of St. Giles in protest against a new service book provoked a Scottish revolt against Charles I and precipitated the War of the Three Kingdoms, which engulfed the whole of Britain in the 1640s and ended in Charles’s execution (see Bishops’ Wars; English Civil Wars). In 1736 the burgh


nearly lost its royal charter following the lynching of


John Porteous, captain of the city guard. The Porteous riots and lynching were a type of violent gesture common to the history of most old cities. Yet, even in this moment of deranged passion, the city manifested its complex character: needing a hanging rope, the mob descended on a shop and bought one.

A city long renowned for a somewhat inflexible respectability—when West Princes Street Gardens were turned over to the general public in 1876, smoking was forbidden—Edinburgh concurrently maintained a fascinating netherworld of ribaldry and drunkenness. A poet, jurist, or


novelist of sufficient distinction might succeed in inhabiting both worlds. One who clearly did was William Brodie, a member of respectable society—deacon of the Incorporation of Wrights and Masons and a town councillor—who by night was the mastermind behind a gang of burglars. Brodie was convicted and hanged in 1788 for his crimes, and his double life is reputed to have been part of the inspiration for Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Brodie’s Close, a public house on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, is named after him. Such “Edinburgh characters” abounded during the flourishing


Neoclassical period of the 18th and 19th centuries known as the Augustan


Age, when the city’s authors, critics, publishers, teachers, physicians, and scientists formed an intellectual elite of world influence. With the subsequent relapse of the city into a more provincial role, such noted eccentrics became virtually extinct.

The landscape

Until the late 18th century, Edinburgh followed a common European pattern by continually renewing itself on its original site, and the lack of space for outward expansion compelled each successive phase to conform to the original layout. Subsequently, when expansion became possible, the town quickly broke free of its medieval mold, and each new development was built adjacent to, rather than on top of, its predecessor. Consequently, the soaring vertical lines of the Old Town confront the expansive horizontal ones of the Georgian New Town, and both are encircled by acres of individually distinct Victorian suburbs and finally by a ring of 20th-century construction that makes its way toward hills and sea.


Edinburgh has a mild climate. Its proximity to the sea mitigates temperature extremes. Winters are relatively warm, with average daily minimum temperatures remaining above freezing; and summers are comparatively cool, with temperatures seldom rising much above 70 °F (21 °C). The prevailing easterly winds are often cold but relatively dry; warmer southwesterly winds coming off the North Atlantic Current often bring rain. Annual precipitation is moderate, averaging 27 inches (685 mm), and is evenly distributed throughout the year. Edinburgh lacks prolonged sunshine: on average it annually receives less than one-third of the possible sunshine for its latitude. But its ever-changing cloudscape partly compensates for this.

The city layoutEdinburgh now Landscape
City site

Edinburgh occupies some 7 miles (11 km) of north-facing slope between the Pentland Hills and the broad Firth of Forth estuary, where it merges with the once-independent seaport of Leith. Upthrusts of lava punctuate this slope. One of them, called Arthur’s Seat, the centrepiece of the royal park, has an elevation of 823 feet (251 metres) and dominates the city’s southeastern flank. The valleys between these striking hills were scoured deep and clean by glacial action in the Pleistocene Epoch



8 million to 10,000 years ago).

Edinburgh has been built on top of and around these obstacles so that the nearer one comes to the city centre, the more spectacular is the juxtaposition of natural and built environment, with terraces of stone confronting soaring thrust.



Edinburgh Castle, which, subtly floodlit every night, stirs even the habituated townsfolk. Glacial ice once flowed from the west and around the Castle Rock’s flanks, depositing the accumulated debris of a lateral moraine east of the rock to create a crag and tail formation. Along the crest of this tail, and down its steep sides, the Old Town was built from the


12th century onward.

The shortage of building space compelled it to expand skyward, and 10- and even 12-story tenements separated by narrow passageways were built in the 16th and 17th centuries.Two hundred yards

Some 600 feet (180 metres) north of the Castle Rock, across the valley that is now Princes Street Gardens, lies the New Town, a district that was planned and built in successive phases between 1767 and 1833. It offers a dignified tribute to the international taste of the Enlightenment and to the surveyor’s set square. Its design was overly regular to begin with, but later

developments paid

developments—as can be seen at the west end of Princes Street—paid more respect to natural contours and softened the regimentation of the right angle with curves and crescents. The New Town’s northwestern boundary is roughly the line of Edinburgh’s only substantial stream, the Water of Leith. The stream’s brief course from the Pentlands to the sea provided power for the mills of a series of villages—Dalry, Dean, Stockbridge, Silvermills, and Canonmills—that

grew up beginning in the 16th century. The former villages

experienced significant growth from the early 17th century onward. These villages, which sprang up largely as industrial centres with paper and textile mills, are now embedded in the 19th-century matrix of the town, providing fashionable, bijou residences.



City layout


Expansion from the Old Town

For centuries the barrier to northward expansion was the lake and encircling marsh—the North Loch, or Nor’ Loch—that choked the valley along the foot of the moraine and the Castle Rock. King James II (reigned 1437–60) originally had


the lake created from swampland as a defense against attack. Even when it was drained and the land was firmed, access to the north had to await the ability of civil engineers to span the valley with a bridge. This was achieved in 1772 with the completion of the North Bridge—70 feet (21 metres) high, 1,130 feet (344 metres) long, and canted steeply northward; today’s steel-arch structure dates from 1895.

In the centuries between the founding of the Old Town and the beginning of the New Town, Edinburgh eased itself down the southern flank of the moraine.

A marketplace known as the

Its original markets were all held along the High Street. By the 1330s a second, parallel street called the Cowgate (originally called the Southgate) had been built, at a lower level, at the foot of the steep slope to the south. Halfway down the Cowgate is King’s Wall, the Old Town’s first known defense, which was constructed in the mid-15th century. At the west end of the Cowgate, the Grassmarket was built in the shadow of the Castle Rock, and

a roadway known as Southgate (later as Cowgate) led eastward to the Augustinian abbey of Holyrood (later the site of the Palace of Holyroodhouse). The town then

by the 17th century it had become the Old Town’s main market for sheep and cattle—as well as the location of its public executions. Edinburgh, in effect, is a two-tier town, and the steep slope between its two main streets has made travel difficult for medieval horses and modern tourists alike. Farther to the south, beyond the Magdalen Chapel (built between 1541 and 1544)—the last of Edinburgh’s pre-Reformation churches and now ironically owned by the Scottish Reformation Society—the town slowly climbed the facing slope of the adjacent moorland. Candlemaker Row,

despite the dangers inherent in exposing a southern flank to English assault. Well before the North Bridge was built, this southern suburb had grown up, dignified with fine churches—Magdalen Chapel (1544), Greyfriars (1612)—and the

the home of a noxious and inflammable trade that was pushed for safety reasons to the edge of the burgh, is a short street that runs in a northwest-southeast direction and marks the southern limits of the Old Town. At the top of this steep street, just outside the old Bristo Port (or gate) and on the site of the pre-Reformation Franciscan friary, Greyfriars, the town’s first post-Reformation church, was built in the early 17th century to house the growing population of the southwest quarter. Little remains of the Flodden Wall, built in the years after the traumatic Scottish defeat at the Battle of Flodden (1513) to guard against English attacks. Near Greyfriars is the original site of the “Toun’s College” (later the University of Edinburgh), granted a royal charter in 1582, at the Kirk o’Field, where Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, second husband of Mary, was assassinated in 1567. The medieval collegiate church no longer exists, as the magnificent “Old College,” designed by Scottish architect Robert Adam in 1789, now sprawls across the site. Farther south is the university’s main campus, which encircles the formal gardens of George Square. Edinburgh’s first real suburb, George Square was

composed in a

laid out in 1766—nearly 20 years before the first stages of the building of the New Town; although only part of two sides of the square—with its original small-scale domestic

architecture that

architecture—survives amid the bleak concrete tower blocks of the modern university, it is noticeably friendlier than the somewhat bleak facades of the New Town.

Edinburgh’s bridges

In the 50 years following the building of the North Bridge, four other bridges were completed, enabling the city to expand where it pleased. Two of these, the South Bridge (1788) and the King George IV Bridge (1834), are multiple-arch constructions that span the Cowgate ravine. These new bridges opened the


south to rapid expansion. In the same period Waterloo Bridge, with its Regency Arch (1820), opened the eastern slopes of Calton Hill (northeast of the Castle Rock) to Regency building, while King’s Bridge (1833), leaping westward from the Castle Rock, was the vital link in the so-called “western approach.” Throughout the Victorian and Edwardian ages, the city grew in every direction, recording in its stone tenements and detached mansions every foible of changing taste: Neoclassical, Gothic, Scotch Baronial, Italianate, and a more recent profusion of 20th-century brick and concrete.

The Old Town

Edinburgh Castle, 443 feet (135 metres) above sea level, dominates the city. The Archaeological excavations have shown that the Castle Rock may , previously thought to have first been fortified as early as the a stronghold of the Gododdin in the 6th century AD, but continual use of this strategic site has obliterated all material evidence of occupation before the 11th century. The principal surviving buildings have been altered to suit changing needs. They are of greater historical than architectural interest and date mainly from the 16th century, originated in the Bronze Age and has been occupied for some 3,000 years. Its first documented use as a royal castle dates from the reign of Malcolm III Canmore (1058–93), but successive phases of damage and reconstruction have been so extensive that little of substance before the reign of James IV (1488–1513) has survived. The small chapel of St. Margaret, the queen of Malcolm III Canmore, on the highest point of the rock, probably dates from the 12th century reign of her youngest son, David I (1124–53), and is the oldest surviving building.

The Royal Mile, which begins outside the Castle Esplanade, descends Castle Hill, the crest of rock linking the castle with the Palace of Holyroodhouse to the east. The Royal Mile is a street that bears several names—Castle Hill, Lawnmarket, High Street, and Canongate—recalling its medieval districtsAugustinian abbey of Holyrood and the royal burgh of Edinburgh, first mentioned in the period 1124–27, were both originally creations during the reign of David I. The Royal Mile bears several street names that are medieval in origin—Castle Hill, Lawnmarket (or “land market,” where the produce of the countryside was sold), High Street, and Canongate (reflecting the fact that Edinburgh was an abbot’s burgh and its superior was head of a religious house of Augustinian canons). The Old Town’s towering tenements press together along the crest. Because of its shortage of building space—only 140 acres (57 hectares)—the Old Town was compelled to expand skyward as its population increased sharply during the 16th and 17th centuries. It was only after 1600, however, that Edinburgh began to acquire its characteristic 6-, 10-, and even 12-story tenements. This upward expansion—symbolized by Gladstone’s Land, a six-story tenement in Lawnmarket that is now a museum—let very little light into the narrow passageways and gave the Old Town its herringbone settlement pattern. The cliff face of houses is broken by wynds (narrow, winding stone lanes leading down either side of the ridge) and closes or vennels (entryways into courtyards, around and behind which are yet more buildings).

A number of important buildings line the Royal Mile. At its heart is the High Kirk of Edinburgh, the cathedral of St. Giles , of (the High Kirk of Edinburgh) of the Church of Scotland. It has a fine late-Gothic nave and a magnificent 15th-century crown tower: an open spire with eight flying buttresses supporting a sculptured turret. Much , aping the imperial crown that Scottish kings claimed to possess from the reign of James III (1460–88) onward. Sadly, much of the exterior stonework is a fairly crude 19th-century restoration.

Behind St. Giles, in Parliament Square, is Parliament House, which was built by the town council between 1632 and 1639 with the aid of private contributions when Charles I threatened to move the law courts elsewhere. Parliament Square lies over the site of the medieval graveyard where John Knox, the most celebrated figure of the Scottish Reformation, was buried; thus, Knox has no marked grave or tombstone, save for a small plaque above one of the designated parking spaces between the church and Parliament House, which now houses the supreme civil and criminal law courts of Scotland. Although Parliament House is now one of the city’s finest buildings, its construction by Charles I was originally opposed by many in Edinburgh, which was forced to finance the enormous costs of its erection. The Scottish Parliament met there from 1639 to 1707. The supreme civil and criminal courts of Scotland now sit in the building. The Parliament House complex is adjacent to the National Library of Scotland, successor to the earlier Advocates’ Library, of which the founded in the 1680s; the philosopher David Hume was once its librarian.

Opposite St. Giles, slightly to the east, is are the City Chambers. The This building, completed in 1761 as the Royal Exchange but never used for that purpose, faces the Mercat Cross (Market Cross), the hub of the old city. Before James VI left Scotland and its capital to claim the throne of England as James I in 1603, the Mercat Cross was, in a very real sense, the centre of the kingdom of Scotland. In the 18th century it was a focal point of the Scottish Enlightenment, home of some of the world’s foremost economists and philosophers (e.g., Hume and William Robertson). Indeed, William Smellie, printer for the University of Edinburgh and editor of the first edition of Encyclopædia Britannica, the oldest English-language encyclopaedia, immortalized the Mercat Cross, noting a remark made by an English visitor at the height of the city’s reputation: “Here I stand at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius and learning by the hand.” Part of the original pillar of the Cross cross was used in a late 19th-century reconstruction undertaken at the expense of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. Royal proclamations are announced from its tower platform by members of the Court of the Lord Lyon (the Scottish equivalent of the College of Heralds).

Almost opposite the Tron Kirk, where all incoming goods once passed over an iron scale (tron) and Some 300 feet (90 metres) to the east of Mercat Cross was another symbol of the burgh’s status—the tron, or weighbeam, where all incoming goods were weighed. It was also the site of the Tron Kirk (built 1637–47), Edinburgh’s second post-Reformation church and now a tourist information centre, where the North and South bridges later cut across the crest of the ridge, . Almost directly across from the kirk is Anchor Close, where William Smellie , printer for the University of Edinburgh and editor of the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, printed the 1787 edition of the Poems of Robert Burns. Smellie introduced Burns to the conviviality of a club called the Crochallan Fencibles; the poet, in return, regaled them with the bawdy songs entitled titled Merry Muses of Caledonia (first published in 1800).

Noteworthy Among the noteworthy buildings along the High Street and Canongate sections of the Royal Mile include the is John Knox House, which stands close to the Netherbow, the main gate of the royal burgh until the 18th century. Now a museum, the house provides a glimpse of an older Old Town (though its forestair probably dates from the 1550s, part of the house itself was originally built in the late 15th or early 16th century; century). Other notable buildings along this stretch of the Royal Mile are Moray House, a 17th-century town house now used as a teacher-training college; the Baroque-fronted Canongate Church (1688–90), whose graveyard contains the tombs of the 18th-century poet Robert Fergusson and the political economist Adam Smith; Acheson House (1633), containing the Scottish Craft Centre; Huntly House, containing the Civic Museum; and the old Canongate Tolbooth (1591). Queensberry House (1681), acquired by William Douglas, 1st duke of Queensberry, as a town house in 1686, served as a barracks and a hospital; closed in 1995, it was redeveloped and is now the focal point of the Scottish Parliament complex. The 17th-century inn in White Horse Close, once the terminus of the London coach, has been splendidly restored as a group of private homes.


Away from the crowded buildings, at the lower end of the Royal Mile, is Holyrood. The Augustinian abbey, built on the first available expanse of solid ground at the foot of the volcanic crag and tail, was founded in 1128 and rebuilt about 1220. The ruins of the nave are impressive examples of the bold, imaginative work of the period. The Palace of Holyroodhouse, which shouldered the abbey aside, comprises an early 16th-century wing, built by French and Scottish masons in the reign of James V (1513–42), and a 17th-century quadrangle court and facing wing. It is the British sovereign’s official residence in Scotland. Facing the palace along Holyrood Road is the site of the new Scottish Parliament complex, scheduled for completion during the first decade of the 21st centurywhich opened officially in October 2004. South and east of the palace is Holyrood Park, which includes the Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat as well as three lochs.

Princes Street Gardens

The Princes Street Gardens, laid out between the Old and New towns in the drained lake bed of the old North Loch, have a distinct character. Flowers are set out in beds that are changed several times a year, and a floral clock planted in 1903 (the first in the world), which embowers a quarter-hour cuckoo, has some 24,000 plants in its 36-foot (11-metre) circumference. Among the lawns, flower beds, and groves are recreational areas, a bandstand, an outdoor dance floor, and numerous memorials, the most conspicuous of which is an 1844 Gothic spire, 200 feet (60 metres) high, that rises above a statue of Sir Walter Scott and his hound, Maida.

For the first 100 years of its existence, West Princes Street Gardens was the private amenity of Princes Street proprietors. In 1876 this tract was opened to the public, which had always had access to the eastern gardens. The Mound, a causeway of rubble and earth from New Town construction, forms the division between the two gardens. On the Mound are two neo-Grecian temples to the arts: the Royal Scottish Academy (1832) and the National Gallery of Scotland (1859). Atop the Mound, near the Royal Mile, stands New College, the home of the University of Edinburgh’s faculty of divinity. Attached to it is the Assembly Hall of the Church of Scotland (1859), which served as the temporary meeting place of the new Scottish Parliament beginning in between 1999 and 2004. The skyscape viewed from the New Town reveals Edinburgh’s best piece of architectural one-upmanship: the enormous Gothic spire of the (Highland) Tolbooth Church (1844; now the Hub, or Edinburgh Festival Centre) at the head of the Royal Mile is framed in an architectural embrace by the twin towers of the New College (1850). The original embrace was scarcely friendly: the Tolbooth was designed as a church and the meeting hall of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland; New College was planned as a church and theological college for the rival Free Church, set up after the bitter Disruption of 1843. The Disruption, which split the Church of Scotland apart—some two-fifths of the ministry and three-fifths of parishioners left the Church of Scotland for the Free Church—is recaptured in stone at the head of the Mound. Railroad tracks—now almost concealed by landscaping—were laid through the middle of the Princes Street Gardens in 1847, and trains bound for Glasgow and the north pass under the Mound. The rails terminate in the east end of the park at Waverley Station.

The New Town

In 1767 the town council approved plans for the New Town as a suburban residential district, designed only for people “of a certain rank and fortune.The architect, James Craig, set out a vision of order and space: a grid five streets deep and seven streets wide with a broad central axis terminating in grand squares at each end. St. George’s Church would anchor the western end of the scheme, St. Andrew’s the eastern. In the process , Princes Street, the southernmost of the new streets, was lined only on its north side with residences, which faced the castle across the valley. Symbolic of Scotland’s new role (from the Act of Union in 1707) as “North Britain,” the streets were named for members of the Hanoverian dynasty, which had originated with George I (1714–27). When built, the New Town was deliberately designed without shops or places of entertainment, as it was meant to provide a new privacy and gentility; it was anticipated that the crowded Old Town would remain the hub of commerce and business. The arrival of the railway changed the face of Princes Street, however, and residential space gave way to shops and hotels. Princes Street became the main shopping street and the principal thoroughfare of the city, and few original buildings remain behind the shop fronts. The Register House (1772–921774–92), at the east end of Princes Street facing the North Bridge, is the finest of the city’s buildings by the 18th-century architects James and Robert Adam. It houses Now the National Archives of Scotland, it and West Register House, situated at the opposite end of the New Town in Charlotte Square, house part of the national records of Scotland. In the remainder of Craig’s New Town, much has been done to restore and improve the amenity of the streets and squares. In St. Andrew Square the Royal Bank of Scotland, built as a town house in 1772–74 for Sir Lawrence Dundas when he was the member of Parliament for Edinburgh, is a fine example of an 18th-century mansion and has a stunning Victorian banking hall (1858). In George Street is the parish church of St. Andrew, an oval building with a fine plaster ceiling and an elegant spire. On the north side of Charlotte Square, the Georgian House, managed as a museum by the National Trust for Scotland, is completely furnished , from kitchen to bedrooms , with all the appurtenances of late 18th-century Edinburgh elegance.

At the east end of Princes Street, Calton Hill rises above the central government office of St. Andrew’s House (19371939) and the adjacent Royal High School (1825–29), considered for a time in the 1990s as the site for the new Scottish Parliament. It is crowned by the 19th-century architect William Playfair’s City Observatory (1818) and a charming Gothic house by Craig, built for the astronomer royal. Behind this rise 12 columns of an intended replica of the Parthenon that was designed by Playfair in 1822 as a memorial to the Scots who died in the Napoleonic Wars. Construction of the memorial was abandoned when funds fell short in 1830. Down the slope to the south stands the tiered circular tower of the Nelson Monument (1807). This ambitious scheme to build a series of symbolic monuments to mark Edinburgh’s elevation to the status of “a splendid and magnificent city”— a “Modern Athens”—remained unfinished, though the hill gave rise to the city’s nickname as the “Athens of the North.” Although the area is still sometimes called “Edinburgh’s disgrace,” the view westward from the National Monument atop Calton Hill at sunset, with Princes Street and the Gothic steeple of the Scott Monument (completed 1844; inaugurated 1846), honouring Sir Walter Scott, foreshortened below it, remains one of the most famous and compelling visions of Edinburgh.

To the north, on the flat plain toward the Forth, the Royal Botanic Garden, at its finest when the great rhododendrons are in bloom, offers from its crest a superlative vista of the New Town backed by the distinctive skyline of the Old Town.

The people

Edinburgh’s population is largely a mixture of middle-class professionals and nonprofessionals. Both are more prosperous than their ancestors, most of whom emigrated from the surrounding countryside and small towns to provide the 19th-century city with unskilled and semiskilled labour. The workforce has changed considerably since then, and now white-collar workers outnumber blue-collar workers. Most of the population is native to Scotland; about one in eight residents was born in England, representing by far the city’s largest immigrant group. There are small percentages of Irish, Chinese, and South Asians, as well as a sprinkling of new immigrants from continental Europe. But the most striking element in the city’s demographic composition is its student population. Edinburgh’s universities enroll tens of thousands of students, many of whom come from overseas (notably from the United States and from countries of the European Union and Asia) and contribute to the cosmopolitan character of the city. There are other unexpected features of life in Edinburgh. Edinburgh’s white-collar workforce commutes both into the centre of the city and out from the centre to new virtual villages of suburban low-rise office blocks in places such as Gyle and Leith. The commuting belt extends well into Fife, across the Forth Estuary to the north, and as far west as Glasgow, resulting in overcrowded trains and highly congested roads.

A very different city

has a relatively small percentage of people from other countries.The economyIndustryEdinburgh is today

from Scotland’s largest city, the sometimes maligned Glasgow, Edinburgh is changing faster than Glasgow and has a more assured future, particularly since the late 1990s, when it regained its full status as a capital city. Edinburgh largely escaped the motorway schemes of urban planners beginning in the 1960s that proved detrimental to Glasgow’s centre. The two cities have a different historical legacy too. Glasgow experienced a far greater influx of both Roman Catholic and Protestant immigrants from Ireland in the 19th century. As a result, at the turn of the 21st century Glasgow was split about evenly between adherents of Roman Catholicism and those of the Church of Scotland. In Edinburgh, by contrast, members of the Church of Scotland greatly outnumber Roman Catholics, though the proportion of those of all the main denominations who attend church regularly is quite low. Perhaps more significant, some one in three of the city’s inhabitants professes no religion. Although Muslims make up only a small percentage of the overall population, their presence is especially visible in the city centre and is marked by a large mosque near George Square that was completed in the 1990s.

The economy
Manufacturing, finance, and other services

Contemporary Edinburgh is, as it was in the 18th century, predominantly a provider of services. Less than one-tenth of its labour force now works in the manufacturing sector, while service-related industries employ nearly seven-eighths. The pre-World War II staples of brewing, baking, and book printing have all declined. Electrical and electronic engineering and research

and engineering

, much of it related to defense and much of it drawing on the scientific skills of the town’s


universities, has become the largest industrial employer. The main service industries are public administration, law, medicine, financial services, education, and tourism. Edinburgh is second only to London as a British tourist city.

The port of Leith, about 30 miles from the open sea, became a part of the six-port Forth Ports Authority in 1968 and was extensively modernized in the 1970s. Grain, foodstuffs, and wood products are among the imports; outbound shipments include coal, whisky, and metals. Granton, Edinburgh’s other port town, is also under the authority. Granton Harbour still accommodates barges and other commercial craft, but parts of it have been reclaimed for industrial and residential development. Plans also exist for a yachting harbour at Granton.

Commerce and finance

Edinburgh has long been an important centre for financial and legal services. The city’s institutions financed much of the development of the

American West

western United States, including ranching, railroads, timber, and mining, and thereby laid the basis for its fortune. As the centre of Scotland’s legal system, Edinburgh has a flourishing legal profession, which ranks second only to banking as the highest-paid profession in the city. The city houses a large international conference centre, built in 1995, that attracts both business and tourist trade.


The city is served by First ScotRail, the regional rail carrier. There is frequent train service to London and the major Scottish cities as well as regular service to other parts of Scotland and England. Edinburgh has two central railway stations: Waverley (the second largest in Britain) and Haymarket. Edinburgh’s airport

has no direct transatlantic service but does offer

offers international service

to continental Europe

. The city has no subway system but has excellent bus service; buses, aided by dedicated bus lanes, thread their way through the city’s congested roads faster than private automobiles.

Administration and social conditions

The port of Leith, about 30 miles (50 km) from the open sea, became a part of the six-port Forth Ports Authority in 1968 and was extensively modernized in the 1970s. Grain, foodstuffs, and wood products are among the imports; outbound shipments include coal, whisky, and metals. Leith, which is host to the decommissioned royal yacht Britannia, still accommodates barges and other commercial craft, but large parts of it have been reclaimed for retail and residential development. There also have been ambitious plans for the shoreline stretching west from Leith to Granton, including a yachting harbour, hotels, residential housing, and retail complexes. Across the Forth, in sight of the famous Forth Bridge, where the anchorage is deeper, larger cruise ships moor, and there is regular ferry service to Belgium from part of the former naval base of Rosyth.

Administration and society

The Scottish Parliament is responsible for legislation concerning health, education, housing, economic development, regional transport, the environment, and agriculture. The leading parliamentary party or coalition elects a first minister, who heads the Scottish Executive (the word government was avoided so as to preserve ultimate authority in the Westminster Parliament), which implements Scottish legislation. Directly below

the Scottish goverment

this tier of government is the

popularly elected

City of Edinburgh Council,

which implements

whose members are elected to four-year terms and implement Scottish laws at the local level.


The council oversees services such as local planning, education, social services, housing, roadways and traffic, fire fighting, sanitation,


parks and recreation, libraries, city museums, and elections.

Municipal services

Edinburgh, similar to other Scottish cities, traditionally provided an array of public services, including subsidized housing, to its residents. In the late 20th century, however, the level of public services decreased, as it did across the whole of Britain. A large part of the better publicly owned council housing was sold to tenants, and gas and electricity utilities were privatized. A decline in social service

funding has

funding—an attack on what critics called the country’s “dependency culture” and first occasioned by cuts in local authority funding after Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in 1979—has been partly compensated for by volunteer organizations. The city council protected remaining council services but faced a difficult battle balancing extra expenditures with providing a favourable climate for businesses. Edinburgh also struggles because of the prominence of education in its economy, as full-time students, who form a significant proportion of the population, pay no council tax. Relatively high youth unemployment, as well as a lack of entertainment or recreational amenities (especially in some post-World War II suburbs), has made the

city notorious

city—particularly its dilapidated public housing schemes on its outskirts—notorious for drug abuse, petty violence, and more serious crime.


Even before the foundation of the Edinburgh faculty of medicine in 1726, the healing arts were both practiced and taught in the city. With the opening of the great new Royal Infirmary in 1748, however, Edinburgh became one of the world’s chief medical centres

in the world


Today the

The city now has more than 10 hospitals. Edinburgh’s medical community offers a range of health services unsurpassed anywhere in the United Kingdom. A state-of-the-art hospital in Edinburgh’s southeastern suburb of Little France has replaced the old Royal Infirmary.


The City of Edinburgh maintains a system of state schools that provide free primary and secondary education. The city also provides free nursery schools and schools for children with special needs as well as a program of community education for youth and adults. In addition, Edinburgh


has several fee-paying independent


schools—more than any other Scottish city—whose pupils dress in different distinctive blazers and rarely wear overcoats, even in winter.

The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is the city’s largest university. A world-renowned intellectual centre for much of its history, it offers a range of undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional programs. Its law faculty and administrative offices are sited in Old College; divinity at New College; arts and humanities at George Square; science and engineering at King’s Buildings, some 2 miles (3 km) to the south; and medicine at the new hospital at Little France. Heriot-Watt University, dating from the earliest days of the Industrial Revolution, was one of the first of Britain’s new technological universities. Much of its operation has been transferred to a satellite campus outside the city centre at Riccarton. Napier University, founded in 1964 as Napier College, became a university in 1992. Jewel and Esk Valley College offers a range of postsecondary vocational courses. The Edinburgh College of Art offers courses in the fine arts and various aspects of environmental design, including architecture, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning. The city is also home to one of three branches of the Scottish Agricultural College.

Cultural life

Since 1947


the city has been an international focal point for the arts during the three weeks of its annual

summer festival.

Edinburgh International Festival, held in August. There are, in fact, two festivals—the official one and the sprawling Fringe Festival, housed in dozens of churches and other halls across the city. Hundreds of thousands of visitors come for the theatre, ballet, music, films, and art expositions


and the general excitement

, which

. The festival closes with a skirl of the Scottish bagpipes, part of the Edinburgh Military Tattoo (held annually since 1950), before the castle gate and with a spectacular fireworks display, with the castle as its backdrop. The tattoo, the most popular single event at the festival, attracts foreign contingents from around the world as well as regiments with a more obvious connection to Scotland (e.g., those from Commonwealth countries). Concerts and energetic revelry are also part of Hogmanay, a celebration of the Scottish New Year in December. Other festivals include a science festival (April), a blues and jazz festival (July–August), a book festival (August), and a film festival (August). The city has also been the setting for notable novels that were written by Edinburgh natives and later turned into popular motion pictures, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886); Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), which provides a portrait of the city in the 1930s; and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), which examines the city’s nihilistic underbelly at the end of the 20th century. The home of the celebrated crime writer Alexander McCall Smith and of children’s novelist J.K. Rowling, Edinburgh was declared UNESCO’s first City of Literature in 2004.

A major cultural institution is the National Galleries of Scotland. It includes the National Gallery on the Mound, with a fine international collection of art as well as a representative collection of Scottish painters, including many with particular connections to Edinburgh. Each year the National Gallery hosts a temporary exhibition of its collection of watercolours by J.M.W. Turner. Under the direction of the National Galleries are the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (one of the first such in the world) and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which has a good collection of French Impressionist works. The National Museums of Scotland operate several Edinburgh museums, including the Royal Museum, with extensive international and natural history displays; the Museum of Scotland, which contains exhibits on Scottish history and became the first new national museum in Britain in more than a century when it opened in 1998; the National War Museum, housed in Edinburgh Castle; and the Museum of Flight, which is located some 20 miles (30 km) from the city and features a Concorde aircraft. Usher Hall boasts excellent facilities and is the home of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Edinburgh has three major theatres and a number of smaller ones, including the Traverse, which is a world leader in contemporary theatre. Among the larger venues, the refurbished Festival Theatre puts on a variety of performances, including ballet and opera; the Royal Lyceum hosts various dramatic performances; and the Playhouse Theatre specializes in touring musicals. Queen’s Hall, housed in a former 19th-century church, is home to the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. The Edinburgh Zoo (founded 1913) contains a world-renowned penguin breeding colony.

The city has a large number of recreational facilities. In addition to spectator sport venues, it has within its boundaries 9 miles (14 km) of coastline for boating, several beaches, and numerous golf courses. Indeed, golf has been played in Edinburgh since 1457. It has two professional football (soccer) clubs, Heart of Midlothian and Hibernian (with ties to the Protestant and Roman Catholic communities, respectively), whose fierce but generally friendly competitiveness mirrors the “Old Firm” rivalry between Glasgow’s (“Protestant”) Rangers and (“Roman Catholic”) Celtic. There are also scores of bowling greens, public football


and hockey fields, cricket pitches, tennis courts, putting greens, and short-hole golf courses. The Meadowbank Sports Centre, just east of the city centre, has facilities for more than 30 sports. The Royal Commonwealth Pool is one of the finest in the United Kingdom.

Until the early and mid-20th century, Edinburgh was a major centre of the publishing industry in the United Kingdom. Today the city’s media are generally dominated by London, though The Scotsman (founded 1817), a daily newspaper, is still influential throughout Scotland. The British Broadcasting Corporation maintains a presence close to the new Scottish Parliament building, but most of its Scottish operations are based in Glasgow. Local radio programs, mostly supplied by Radio Forth, have a niche audience.