Edinburgh

Edinburgh
/ed"n berr'euh, -bur'euh/ or, esp. Brit., /-breuh/, n.
1. Duke of. See Philip (def. 4).
2. a city in and the capital of Scotland, in the SE part: administrative center of the Lothian region. 470,085.

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I
City and council area (pop., 2001: 448,624), capital of Scotland.

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. Located in southeastern Scotland, the original burgh, now known as the Old Town, arose in the 11th century, around Edinburgh Castle, the royal residence of Malcolm III MacDuncan. In 1329 Robert the Bruce granted Edinburgh a town charter; it became the capital of the Scottish kingdom in 1437. The city was destroyed in 1544 in the border wars with England; its characteristic use of stone architecture began with this rebuilding. During the 18th century Scotland experienced a cultural and intellectual renaissance, and Edinburgh was home to such luminaries as David Hume, Adam Smith, Robert Burns, and Walter Scott. It was the birthplace of Encyclopædia Britannica (1768) and the Edinburgh Review (1802). The city expanded in the late 18th century with the development of the Georgian-style New Town, separated from the Old Town by a valley. Edinburgh is the centre of Scottish culture and education and is home to the University of Edinburgh, the National Library, the National Gallery, and the Royal Scottish Museum. It is the site of the Scottish Parliament, which first convened in 1999.
II
(as used in expressions)
Edinburgh University of
Philip duke of Edinburgh

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Introduction
Gaelic  Dun Eideann 
 capital 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 country, 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, and it remains a major centre for finance, law, tourism, education, and cultural affairs. Area council area, 100 square miles (260 square km). Pop. (2004 est.) council area, 453,670.

Character 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 (Stevenson, Robert Louis), 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 (Knox, John) 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.

Blake Ehrlich Archie Rule Turnbull Michael Lynch

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. 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.

 At the city's core is the Old Town's Castle Rock, a plug of black basalt sealing the vent of an extinct volcano. It stands 250 feet (76 metres) above the valley floor and is crowned by the famous 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.

      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—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 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.

Climate
      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, while 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.

City layout
      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 to the north, 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.

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. 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 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, 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 (Flodden, Battle of) (1513) to guard against English attacks. Near Greyfriars is the original site of the “Toun's College” (later the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, University of)), granted a royal charter in 1582, at the Kirk o'Field, where Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley (Darnley, Henry Stewart, Lord), 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 (Adam, Robert) 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 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—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.

Archie Rule Turnbull Michael Lynch

The Old Town
      Edinburgh Castle, 443 feet (135 metres) above sea level, dominates the city. Archaeological excavations have shown that the Castle Rock, previously thought to have first been fortified as a stronghold of the Gododdin in the 6th 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 (Margaret of Scotland, Saint), queen of Malcolm Canmore, on the highest point of the rock, probably dates from the 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 Augustinian 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 cathedral of St. Giles (the High Kirk of Edinburgh) of the Church of Scotland (Scotland, Church of). 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, 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, built by the town council between 1632 and 1639. Parliament Square lies over the site of the medieval graveyard where John Knox (Knox, John), 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 Parliament House complex is adjacent to the National Library of Scotland, successor to the Advocates' Library, founded in the 1680s; the philosopher David Hume (Hume, David) was once its librarian.

      Opposite St. Giles, slightly to the east, are the City Chambers. 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 (Robertson, William)). Indeed, William Smellie (Smellie, William), 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 was used in a late 19th-century reconstruction undertaken at the expense of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (Gladstone, William Ewart). 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).

      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 Smellie printed the 1787 edition of the Poems of Robert Burns (Burns, Robert). Smellie introduced Burns to the conviviality of a club called the Crochallan Fencibles; the poet, in return, regaled them with the bawdy songs titled Merry Muses of Caledonia (first published in 1800).

      Among the noteworthy buildings along the High Street and Canongate sections of the Royal Mile 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 15th 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 18th-century poet Robert Fergusson (Fergusson, Robert) and political economist Adam Smith (Smith, Adam); 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.

Holyrood
      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, which 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 (Scott, Sir Walter, 1st Baronet) 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 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 (Scotland, Church of); New College was planned as a church and theological college for the rival Free Church (Free Church of Scotland), 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 (Union, Act of) 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. Register House (1774–92), 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 (Adam, Robert). 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. 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 (Royal Bank of Scotland Group), 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 (1939) 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 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, 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.

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

Transportation
      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 offers international service. 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.

      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

Government
      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 this tier of government is the City of Edinburgh Council, 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—an attack on what critics called the country's “dependency culture” and first occasioned by cuts in local authority funding after Margaret Thatcher (Thatcher, Margaret) 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—particularly its dilapidated public housing schemes on its outskirts—notorious for drug abuse, petty violence, and more serious crime.

Health
      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. 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.

Education
      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 (Edinburgh, University of), 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 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. 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 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 (Spark, Dame Muriel)'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 many celebrated writers and publishers past and present—including crime writers Alexander McCall Smith and Ian Rankin and children's novelist J.K. Rowling (Rowling, J.K.)—Edinburgh was declared UNESCO's first City of Literature in 2004. (For Rankin's reflections on the city, see Sidebar: Edinburgh: A City of Stories.)

      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 (Turner, J.M.W.). 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 (Scotsman, The) (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.

Blake Ehrlich Archie Rule Turnbull Michael Lynch

History

The early period
Settlement of the region
      For the first settlers of Scotland, arriving at the onset of the postglacial period (as early as 7000 BC), the best access to the interior was provided by estuaries and rivers, with the Forth being among the most important. Its shoreline and mudflats show evidence of Stone Age explorers, who did not yet need the protection of the region's steep hills. Finds of swords and other metal objects suggest, however, that by about 1500 BC these peoples were using the crags of Arthur's Seat (also known as the Lion's Head), the area's highest hill, for defense. In the Iron Age, which in Scotland began about 700 BC, hill forts proliferated in the Lothians (Lothian)—the area in the immediate vicinity of Edinburgh—and the Borders, to the south. Excavations beginning in the late 1980s within Edinburgh Castle have proved what was long suspected—that the Castle Rock has been occupied since about 1000 BC. Holyrood Park, Blackford Hill, and Craiglockhart Hill all show signs of occupation in the late 1st millennium BC.

Strategic importance
      The Romans (ancient Rome) saw strategic rather than defensive value in the Edinburgh plain between the Pentland Hills and the Forth. During three or four decades in the second half of the 2nd century AD, the Antonine Wall, stretching across Scotland between the River Clyde and the Firth of Forth, was the northernmost defense in Roman Britain, and the site of Cramond (a major Roman garrison), a village on the Forth within the modern city boundary, was the point at which one of Roman Britain's major north-south roads terminated. (The find in the late 1990s of a sculpture of a lioness, dating from the 2nd or 3rd century AD, in the River Almond in Cramond underscores the importance of the site for the Romans.) The road, with major forts at Dalkeith and Inveresk on the southeastern approaches to the present city, cut through what is now the Meadows district of Edinburgh and guarded access to the Carse of Stirling (valley of the River Forth) and the approach to the west and north.

      The Votadini, the dominant Celtic tribe of the Lothians, with whom Rome had a relatively stable relationship, were the group most likely to have occupied the Castle Rock site. The Votadini capital was on Traprain Law, a cone-shaped hill (law) some 20 miles (30 km) east of the modern city, but it appears that about AD 500, after the Roman withdrawal from Britain, the capital was moved to the site of the present castle. A Welsh poem composed about AD 600 describes how a band of the Gododdin (as the Votadini were known in Welsh), from around a place called Din Eidyn, attacked an Anglian (Angle) force at Catterick in Yorkshire and was annihilated. Din Eidyn—“Eidyn's Hill Fort”—is clearly the Castle Rock site. In the following centuries Anglian invaders seem to have vanquished the Gododdin, and by AD 854 Din Eidyn (spelled Dun Eideann in Gaelic) had become Edwinesburh, burh meaning “fortress” or “fortified town.” This name later gave rise to the supposition that a Northumbrian princeling called Edwin had founded the town. The date of the poem, however, proves that the name predates Edinburgh's occupation by the Anglians of Northumbria. Although the Castle Rock site has been continuously occupied for at least 3,000 years, little is known of the town itself before the 11th or 12th century.

The medieval city
Mercantile growth
      In the early 12th century, St. Margaret's Chapel on the Castle Rock and the gate at the Netherbow to Holyrood Abbey, endowed by Margaret's son King David I, marked the limits of the Old Town, with the parish church of St. Giles between. Sometime in or (more likely) before 1127, David I granted Edinburgh the status of a king's, or royal, burgh, a privilege that promoted trade by allowing Edinburgh to act both as a market and as a centre for organized manufacture (particularly of cloth). When David instituted the earliest Scottish coinage, one of the king's mints was situated in Edinburgh. He also granted the monks (canons) of Holyrood their own burgh with their own jurisdiction, which came to be known as the Canongate. The High Street of Edinburgh ended and the Canongate began at the intersection called Netherbow, where Edinburgh's main town gate (port) was sited.

Political importance
      In 1329 King Robert I (Robert the Bruce; reigned 1306–29) granted Edinburgh a charter confirming its privileges as a royal burgh. The city profited from the sack and loss of Berwick (until that time Scotland's major port) in the Wars of Independence (1296–1328) fought with England. James II (reigned 1437–60) was crowned in Holyrood, and most of his parliaments were held in the burgh (on the site, adjacent to St. Giles, where the Tolbooth was erected in 1466). After the Wars of Independence, Edinburgh quickly developed into Scotland's major trading centre and was, by the reign of James III (1460–88), its capital; indeed, a royal charter during his reign described Edinburgh as “the principal burgh of our country.”

      The medieval burgh—churches and royal and civic buildings apart—was built of wood, and only the houses of the well-to-do had glazed windows and wooden doors. All domestic refuse and the offal of the skinners, butchers, and fishmongers were heaped on either side of the main street, forcing pedestrians to the centre of the thoroughfare. More than a dozen separate markets stretched along the length of the High Street in 1477. The graveyards—including that of St. Giles, in the town centre—were used as rubbish dumps. That Edinburgh was uncommonly nasty in this respect resulted largely from its physical setting and the absence of a convenient water supply. Until 1681 water had to be fetched from pumped wells in the Canongate. William Dunbar (Dunbar, William), the great Middle Scots poet of the 15th–16th century, wrote in trenchant verse:

May nane pass through your principal gates
for stink of haddocks and of skates,
for cries of carlings [old women] and debates [arguments]…
tailors, souters [shoemakers], and craftis vile
the fairest of your streets does fyle [defile]…

      To the moderate prosperity of the late medieval burgh, King James IV (reigned 1488–1513) added a touch of European Renaissance culture. He patronized the arts of both culture and war and about 1501 began the construction of a palace beside Holyrood Abbey, which was substantially added to by his son James V (reigned 1513–42). In 1507, in the Cowgate, a royal license prompted the establishment of Scotland's first printing press. In the years of political unrest following the disastrous defeat of the Scots by the English at the Battle of Flodden (Flodden, Battle of) in Northumberland (1513), Edinburgh encircled the Old Town (as far as the Netherbow) with a defensive wall, parts of which still stand (especially in the Pleasance). It proved sadly ineffective, however, as was shown in 1544 when an English commander, the earl of Hertford (Somerset, Edward Seymour, 1st duke of, Baron Seymour of Hache), devastated part of the town, including the Canongate and Leith.

      Although much of the subsequent rebuilding was still of wood, it was from this period and after that stone became more common, both for public buildings and for the residences of the wealthy. Edinburgh's position made it the seat of not only the court but also the Privy Council, Parliament, and the law. James V established the Court of Session, the central civil-law court, in the capital in 1532. The great landed families began to keep town houses in the Canongate.

      From 1500 to 1640 Edinburgh's population surged, stimulated by an increasing monopoly that it enjoyed over foreign trade and its status as the capital of a growing royal bureaucracy. In 1579 the young King James VI ( James I of England from 1603) established a court in near-permanent residence at Holyrood. This urban court opened up Edinburgh to both European culture and aristocratic violence; a number of feuds, murders, and even gunfights between rival gangs of nobles and their retainers took place in the town's narrow closes. Learning was not forgotten, however. In 1582 James granted the town council a charter encouraging the provision of buildings to house the teaching of “humanity, philosophy, theology, medicine, and laws, or of any other liberal sciences whatsoever.” This stimulated the opening the following year of “the Town's [Toun's] College,” which later became the University of Edinburgh.

Political eclipse and continued growth
      After 1603, when James VI succeeded to the English throne and left for the south, Edinburgh suffered a decline in political and cultural importance, yet the town continued to grow (from the turn of the 16th century to the end of the 17th century, the population more than quadrupled to some 50,000 people). The first Edinburgh girls' school, the Merchant Maiden Hospital, was opened in 1605, and construction of Heriot's Hospital (now George Heriot's School), a school endowed by the bequest of the goldsmith, moneylender, and philanthropist George Heriot, began in 1628. Parliament House, on the site of St. Giles's burial ground, was completed in 1639 and was occupied by the Scottish Parliament until its abolition in 1707.

      By the mid-17th century the area around St. Giles had become the centre of the capital's bustling life. Immediately to the west of the church stood the Tolbooth, combining the roles of council chamber, jail, and place of execution. To the south was the Parliament House and embryonic Parliament Close, with the Court of Exchequer. To the north was the narrow tenement called the Luckenbooths, with its street-level shops. Around the church walls were the krames—wooden booths of goldsmiths, jewelers, stationers, and craftsmen. To the east was the Mercat Cross, where business was done from morning to evening.

Union with England
      During the later 17th century some of Scotland's traditional trading routes—in the Baltic and with France—began to decline, and by the 1690s England had, for the first time, become Scotland's principal trading partner. In the 1690s Edinburgh also became the head office of an enterprise aimed at establishing a Scottish-led colony in Darién on the Isthmus of Panama. The scheme failed, however, and, by the early 18th century, union with England—and thus freedom to trade in the English colonial markets—seemed the last hope of economic growth. In 1707 the Act of Union (Union, Act of) was signed in a cellar in Parliament Square, and Edinburgh lost all independent political life. Although it remained a centre of law and administration, it was now a capital without a parliament or government.

      The opportunities for increased trade with a British common market of seven million people offered little advantage to Edinburgh, for it had no staple manufacture. Yet in the first half of the 18th century, it doubled its population and increased its wealth. As one observer noted in 1793, “a perpetual influx of the unemployed from the north press into Edinburgh.”

      Despite the overcrowded conditions in the Old Town, a surge of rebuilding and new building within its walls followed the union. Much of Parliament Square, badly damaged by fire in 1700, was restored by 1715. New tenement courts were built in the Lawnmarket in the 1720s. The first infirmary (hospital) was opened in 1729, and then a splendid custom-built structure was erected in 1748. In the 1730s George Watson's Hospital (a great rival of Heriot's school) was endowed, and in the early 1750s the Royal Exchange (near the City Chambers) was built on the north side of the High Street at the Mercat Cross. It was only after the construction of the North Bridge (1772) that large-scale development took place beyond the confines of the Old Town.

      Several decades earlier, in the 1720s, the town had reformed and developed its university (Edinburgh, University of) on the faculty system (the medical faculty was instituted in 1726). This change made possible Edinburgh's contribution to the extraordinary intellectual and cultural flowering known as the Scottish Enlightenment. Although the New Town was the dream of some of the visionaries of the Scottish Enlightenment, the “hotbed of genius,” as it was called at the time, was firmly located within the crowded locale of the Old Town. Characteristic of Old Town life, each multistoried tenement housed a cross section of Edinburgh society: the very poor at street level, the wealthy on the main floor above street level, and others in between, according to a system whereby the lower the income, the less desirable the floor occupied. All shared a common stair and ate and drank in common at the same taverns. Something of this commonness—plainness as well as coarseness—characterized Edinburgh's intellectual heyday: a strong, broad, confident ability to grasp the first principles of things and to explain them in the common language, preferably through conversation and debate. So David Hume (Hume, David) grasped that there were no uncaused events, Adam Smith (Smith, Adam) recognized the implications of division of labour, Adam Ferguson (Ferguson, Adam) the danger of “alienation” inherent in labour, William Robertson (Robertson, William) (who wrote a major work on the history of Scotland and the first full-scale history of America) the degree to which environmental factors shaped economic history, Joseph Black (Black, Joseph) the principle of latent heat, and James Hutton (Hutton, James) the enormous antiquity of the Earth. Moreover, Edinburgh was the university of the poet James Thomson (Thomson, James); James Boswell (Boswell, James), the biographer of Dr. Johnson; the novelist, poet, and playwright Oliver Goldsmith (Goldsmith, Oliver); the jurist and writer Lord Henry Kames (Kames, Henry Home, Lord); the Franco-Swiss novelist Benjamin Constant (Constant, Benjamin); and Benjamin Rush (Rush, Benjamin), an American signatory of the Declaration of Independence. Edinburgh was also the birthplace of Encyclopædia Britannica (1768), conceived by Andrew Bell (Bell, Andrew) and Colin Macfarquhar (Macfarquhar, Colin); its first edition was edited chiefly by William Smellie (Smellie, William). The encyclopaedia's first nine editions were published in Edinburgh and were produced by some of the foremost scholars, editors, and printers of the day.

      Toward the end of the 18th century, those who could afford a house in the New Town deserted the Old Town. For the first time in five centuries, Edinburgh became socially segregated, and, in the political climate of the French Revolution, the city's intellectual elite became authoritarian and deeply suspicious of radicalism. For the first three decades of the 19th century, Edinburgh continued to dominate the literary world in Britain, with Sir Walter Scott (Scott, Sir Walter, 1st Baronet), creator of the historical novel, its greatest figure, but, by the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria in 1837, Edinburgh's intellectual fervour had subsided. The pace of social segregation slowed as well in 1833, when the town council, which had sponsored the building of the New Town, went bankrupt.

The modern city
      From about 1830 until World War I, Edinburgh developed as an industrial centre. A huge growth in the labouring population resulted in severe problems of overcrowding, malnutrition, and epidemics. The city's industries included baking, brewing, distilling, book printing, wiredrawing, coachbuilding, and the manufacture of machinery for paper mills along arteries of the Water of Leith and the North Esk. The chemical, pharmaceutical, and rubber industries flourished later. By the 1850s parts of the Old Town had become notorious for both overcrowding and a lack of sanitation.

      The first attempt to revive the Old Town came in the 1890s, when Sir Patrick Geddes (Geddes, Sir Patrick), a polymath and pioneer of urban planning, attempted to attract back the professional and middle classes. Ramsay Gardens, an extraordinary mixture of English cottage and Scottish baronial styles at the top of the High Street just below the Castle Esplanade, was designed for the professoriat of the university. It is one of the few tangible symbols of what came to be called a new Scottish Renaissance.

      The term renaissance was also used to describe the city in the 1920s and '30s, when Edinburgh was at the centre of the Scottish political and literary renaissance led by the nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid (MacDiarmid, Hugh) (pseudonym of Christopher Grieve). Many writers joined in his attempt to revitalize the Lowland Scottish dialect as a literary language. Edinburghers have, since 1930 and particularly since the 1960s, grown more conscious of their Scottish individuality and outlook, which they see not as parochial and inward-turned but as much more European than the relative isolationism of English culture.

      Four aspects of post-World War II Edinburgh are noteworthy. First is the great expansion of higher education. From the late 1920s onward the University of Edinburgh grew to establish itself as a world leader in areas of advanced research such as medicine and surgery, electronics, and artificial intelligence. Second, the cultural life of the city has expanded, and, although it found major expression in the Edinburgh International Festival, initiated in 1947, firm roots also have been put down in more local enterprises such as the Traverse Theatre, the Demarco art gallery, the restoration by the University of Edinburgh of St. Cecilia's Hall in Cowgate as a small concert hall, the creation of the Scottish Baroque Ensemble, the opening of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the conversion of Hope Park Chapel of Ease (now Queen's Hall) into a home for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Literature also has flourished. Small individual publishing firms with an international outlook and a commitment to Scottish writing have reemerged. Third, the city has become acutely conscious of its own heritage in stone and has mounted a strong conservation movement. Local bodies such as the Cockburn Association and the Georgian Society have combined with bodies such as the National Trust for Scotland, Architecture and Design Scotland, and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland to ensure that the best of the old is preserved and restored and that the worst of the new—including both traffic flow and office blocks—is prevented from intruding into the heart of the city. Finally, Edinburgh has resumed its place as an autonomous political centre, a considerable source of pride for Edinburghers. With the establishment of a new Scottish Parliament and government in Edinburgh in 1999, the city regained its role as not only the cultural centre but also the capital and political centre of Scotland. Redevelopment followed as the city erected the infrastructure necessary to house the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive and its bureaucratic institutions. Although tragedy struck the city in December 2002, when a fire in the Cowgate area of the Old Town destroyed more than 10 historic but generally lesser buildings, Edinburgh endured, with a new opportunity to link up different parts of its historic centre—the mostly 15th–16th-century Cowgate with the late 18th-century South Bridge (the first urban viaduct of its kind in Europe) spanning it from above. It is yet another example of how Edinburgh is a city built on the past and building for the future.

Archie Rule Turnbull Michael Lynch

Additional Reading

General
Edinburgh is discussed at length in John Keay and Julia Keay (eds.), The Collins Encyclopaedia of Scotland, rev. ed. (2000). Ian Nimmo, Portrait of Edinburgh, 2nd ed. (1975), describes the city, its inhabitants, and their way of life and culture. A personal, essayistic treatment of the city is Eric Linklater, Edinburgh (1960).

History
David Daiches, Edinburgh (1978, reissued 1980), traces the development of the city as a political capital and later a cultural centre; A.J. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh: 1750–1840 (1966, reissued 2002), details the growth of Edinburgh New Town; a more vivid but less scholarly account is James Buchan, Crowded with Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment: Edinburgh's Moment of the Mind (also published as Capital of the Mind: How Edinburgh Changed the World, 2003); Charles McKean, Edinburgh: Portrait of a City (1991), offers an affectionate survey of both town and society by an architectural historian; and E. Patricia Dennison, Holyrood and Canongate: A Thousand Years of History (2005), offers the first full-scale study of what was once the separate burgh of Canongate, where the new Scottish Parliament building is now located.

Chiefly photographic
A photographic work characterizing the principal districts of the city is Edinburgh, ed. by Brian Bell, 3rd ed. (2001); and A.F. Kersting, Portrait of Edinburgh (1961), presents mainly architectural features, with text by George Scott-Moncrieff.

Special topics
Special topics related to Edinburgh are covered in Trevor Royle, Precipitous City: The Story of Literary Edinburgh (1980), a history of the city's five centuries as a literary centre; John Gifford, Colin McWilliam, and David Walker, Edinburgh (1984, reissued 2003), a comprehensive catalog of the many important buildings in the city; Brian Edwards and Paul Jenkins (eds.), Edinburgh: The Making of a Capital City (2005), a well-illustrated architectural study by different hands; David Lindsay Keir (ed.), The City of Edinburgh, vol. 15 of The Third Statistical Account of Scotland (1966), a close examination of 20th-century life in the city; Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments and Constructions of Scotland, An Inventory of the Ancient and Historical Monuments of the City of Edinburgh, with the Thirteenth Report of the Commission (1951, reissued 1977), a detailed, illustrated catalog for each district of the city, including a list of monuments the commissioners deemed most worthy of preservation; and Robert Chambers, Traditions of Edinburgh, 5th ed. (1824, reissued 1980), written to preserve the stories of some of the characters who lived in Edinburgh at the beginning of the 19th century. Also helpful is Eileen Dunlop and Antony Kamm (comps.), A Book of Old Edinburgh (1983).Blake Ehrlich Archie Rule Turnbull Michael Lynch

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