New Town

250 years ago, Edinburgh was in crisis.

Nicknamed Auld Reekie for its foul stench,

the Scottish capital was overcrowded,

filthy and falling apart.

After Scotland joined the Union,

the King and the Parliament had left for London,

and Scotland itself was losing its way.

Scotland is trying to find what its place is in a world

that has changed from a medieval world to a modern world.

So, in 1766, Edinburgh had a brilliant idea.

It decided to start again and launched a competition to design

a completely new town from scratch.

There was almost a revolutionary atmosphere in the air.

The New Town was an attempt to bounce back.

The winning plan became an icon of the Scottish Enlightenment

and transformed Edinburgh into what is now a Unesco World Heritage Site,

the most perfect Georgian city on earth.

So how did Auld Reekie do it?

This reclaimed Edinburgh's authority,

this whole project was about a new start.

Who benefitted?

It was social cleansing, wasn't it?

If we build a place that only "nice people" can afford

to go into, then we remove all the problems.

How did these streets change Scotland?

This is the story of how Edinburgh was reborn

thanks to a visionary plan of a city of the future -

a New Town for a new age.

Welcome to the Camera Obscura.

My name is Elise and I'm going to be giving you a quick tour of Edinburgh

using our amazing optical device.

This is Edinburgh Castle.

If we go down the steep edge of Castle Hill,

you'll notice some of Edinburgh's Old Town.

Edinburgh's Old Town is higgledy-piggledy -

it was built as they needed new streets as more people moved into

the town, and at one point every resident in Edinburgh

lived squeezed into this tiny walled city.

They built right on top of each other,

making Edinburgh one of the first places with high-rise buildings.

No proper sewage treatment,

which meant that it was literally thrown out the window

and running down the streets,

meant people were ill. And the city planners decided

that we needed a new Edinburgh, so they created the New Town.

If you take a look at a map,

you'll see that it's all in grids and nice squares,

and we also have parks and gardens

perfectly spaced throughout the city.

Today, Edinburgh's New Town, including Princes Street,

George Street and St Andrew's Square,

is the heart of the capital.

But until the middle of the 18th century,

there was nothing here but fields.

The whole city was on the other side of what is now

Princes Street Gardens, walled in and protected by the castle.

A very different kind of capital for a very different kind of country.

For the vast bulk of Scotland's history,

Edinburgh is the only town of any size

right up until the middle of the 18th century.

And it's the legal centre of the country,

it's the religious centre of the country.

If you want to get on in Scotland,

you're probably going to go to Edinburgh at some point.

But Edinburgh is absolutely crammed into this tiny space.

There's a celebrated view of Edinburgh

drawn in the mid-17th century. The population then was about 20,000 -

it had doubled in the previous century.

By the middle of the 18th century, the population was 40,000,

still confined on the same narrow ridge.

But let's imagine all of those people living together

in nine-storey tenements with no plumbing,

with no electric light and in a city which was essentially kind of

a quarter of a mile across.

Confined within the city walls, Edinburgh was forced to build up,

rather than out.

On the Royal Mile,

one 17th-century survivor gives a vivid sense of what this

high-rise lifestyle was like.

It's a building called Gladstone's Land,

"land" being the old term for tenement.

Moving up this tight turnpike stair,

you get the sense that every little bit of space has to be used

to its best effect, cos there's not much to go round.

It's got at least six storeys to it.

Up is really the main way to go in Old Town Edinburgh,

and Gladstone's Land can be considered one of the world's

first skyscrapers in that sense.

We heard that term referred to in Edinburgh

in the 16th and 17th centuries.

This narrow building would have been split into flats,

most no bigger than a single room.

The whole idea of having a private space for different activities,

for cooking, for sleeping, for going to the bathroom -

that's entirely new. It's really a 19th-, 20th-century idea.

Before that, it all happened here.

So, what we have to imagine is a lot of people moving around through

their daily activities. Everything that we imagine - going to work,

taking care of children - happening within and outside our modern homes

would've happened in this very small space.

A lot of people wouldn't be terribly happy if this was

their room at university, but this was actually a whole family

living in this space at one point. It gives you the sense of just how

cramped in people in Edinburgh's Old Town were.

Overcrowding wasn't the only reason why Edinburgh was in decline.

Its political power and prestige was draining away.

Once the capital of an independent Scotland,

with its own royal court and parliament,

Edinburgh had suffered in the wake of the Acts of Union that joined

Scotland to England.

With the 1606 Union of Crowns, the King had left for London.

Then, in 1707, the Parliament moved south as well.

Many rich and influential Scots had followed.

Edinburgh was in danger of becoming a backwater.

That was obviously completely devastating for Edinburgh

and for Scotland, because it did kind of take away the last source

of control over the city and the country.

Scotland in general, and Edinburgh in particular, is beginning to go,

"What is our role going to be in the modern world?"

As it turned out, Edinburgh's role was more significant than anyone

could have guessed. This was the age of the Scottish Enlightenment.

In the mid-18th century, Edinburgh's writers,

scientists and philosophers were making the city

the intellectual capital of Europe.

There's a lovely quote, a visitor to Edinburgh who said that

he could stand at the cross of Edinburgh and in a few minutes

take 50 men of genius and learning by the hand.

And they were creating the future.

James Hutton transformed our understanding of geology

and revealed the true age of the earth.

Joseph Black's discoveries in chemistry laid the foundations

of modern science.

Adam Smith developed modern economics.

And David Hume's philosophy put forward the most radical

and modern idea of all - a world without God.

But how did this explosion of creativity emerge

from crumbling old Edinburgh?

If you are living in Edinburgh,

you can't do anything but talk to your neighbours all the time.

You go to the pub and you discourse there,

and that seems to me to be a very stimulating place to create

the kind of atmosphere that then leads on to the kind of

revolutionary ideas that people like David Hume and Adam Smith

and others are coming up with.

The fact that you have all of these people

in such close tenancy together -

physicists speaking to artists...

You'd have scientists who would be speaking to people from the church,

you would have this meeting together of minds and of ideas.

The history of Gladstone's Land shows how this social mixing worked,

with different classes living on different floors

of the same building.

Right now we're actually on the first floor, just above street level,

and that was considered to be absolutely ideal,

because that way you weren't down,

mired in the filth of the streets itself,

but you also didn't have to climb up too high with big jugs of water

or anything like that.

Below us you would have had things like a tavern

or a shop, so that's where the mercantile activity goes on -

that's really the hustle and bustle of the streets coming right up

to the walls of Gladstone's Land.

And then above that you would've had additional tenants as well.

We know, for instance, that there was a joiner, a clergyman,

a lieutenant and a tavern owner all operating within these walls.

That's a remarkable mix-up of classes who,

in many other cities throughout the European world,

wouldn't have rubbed shoulders very much at all.

So that means ideas are being exchanged,

people are seeing how the other side lives,

and that would've gone a long way to sort of fermenting the conditions

that would lead to the Enlightenment and these things that Edinburgh

is now so world-famous for.

Another key figure of the Scottish Enlightenment

was its greatest architect, Robert Adam.

Adam had absorbed fashionable neoclassical ideas about

architecture and urban planning during trips to Europe

and brought them back to Scotland.

These ideas were starting to inspire the architects and town planners

of Edinburgh, and during the 1750s a visionary idea began to take shape

in the city - a proposal to extend Edinburgh itself,

create a spacious new quarter to appeal to the great and the good,

and bring prosperity and pride back to the Scottish capital.

The prime mover in this wasn't a philosopher or an architect,

but a politician - Provost George Drummond.

I think people like Drummond began to see a brave new world.

They began to see the future in a kind of settled state of society,

a settled economy.

Drummond and his allies argued that the condition of Edinburgh

was dragging the whole country down.

The defeat of the Jacobite uprising in 1746

had settled Scotland's position as a partner in the Union.

Now it needed a capital city fit for the future.

And he, dare I say, unlike some modern politicians,

because the system was perhaps slightly less democratic, and people

weren't thinking purely about the next election,

was able to be a man of vision and to look a long way forward.

Inspired, Edinburgh City Council started thinking big.

They bought a large piece of farmland north of the Old Town

with the idea of building a whole new city from scratch.

And in 1766,

they launched a competition to find the best design for this New Town.

What happened next is still something of a mystery.

In the spring of '66, they hold a competition,

and it's really frustrating that we don't really know what happened

in that competition.

Extraordinarily, the winning plan wasn't published.

The city did name the winner - 26-year-old architect James Craig -

but to this day no-one knows what his original plan looked like.

Instead, it has become one of the New Town's most enduring myths.

There is a fascinating map produced by a man called John Lawrie

in late 1776, which showed a plan of the New Town

in the form of a Union Jack.

He was well connected with the council and there is speculation

that he had seen this plan that they were trying to keep secret.

There is a view that that Union Jack plan is the James Craig plan,

not a view that I hold at all.

I simply do not see how such a grossly impractical plan

could possibly have won the competition.

Over the next few months,

Craig's plan was revised behind closed doors by a committee,

including Robert Adam's brother John,

with whom Craig had apprenticed.

But when the official design was unveiled to the public in July 1767,

it became clear that this was one of the most ambitious

city planning projects Europe had ever seen.

Today, a unique copy of this valuable document is stored

in a slightly less elegant address at the National Records Of Scotland.

"The plan of the new streets and squares intended for

"the City Of Edinburgh.

"This plan was begun to be carried into execution anno 1767 by

"the Right Honourable Gilbert Laurie Esq, Lord Provost."

So this would have been engraved from an original drawing

that Craig had made, and then it would have been mass-produced

and distributed - published so that the masses could see what was going

to be done with their New Town.

It's been through Craig's hands at some point.

He's given it a dedication in the corner,

"To Alexander Alison Esq, from the Author."

So, although he didn't hand-draw it,

he's hand-gifted it to somebody and signed it.

Having trained in Enlightenment Edinburgh,

Craig had absorbed its neoclassical ideas.

His bold design reflected this with wide, straight streets

that represented a complete break from the Old Town's past.

It says here at the side that George Street,

which was to be the principal street, was going to be

100 feet wide, and that's obviously a vast difference

to the Old Town, which is more or less built up on top of itself,

streets very narrow, tight closes.

So this is a real structured, enlightened space for the elite

of Edinburgh to move into. It represents a break with the past,

so the Old Town and old Edinburgh is perhaps not part of the vision of

the future, and the town council were wanting to keep all of these

enlightened people who might otherwise have gone to live

in more salubrious environments in other cities across Britain

and the Empire. But with this New Town you've got a new vision

of how these people, who are

going to build the future of Britain and Scotland,

can do it from Edinburgh and can do it from

this wonderful planned environment.

But, above all, the plan was a political statement.

It was designed to cement Scotland's loyalty to the Union and the King.

The plan was discussed at the very highest level.

The King and Queen were looking at this plan.

So, in fact, what they do is they then really go for it -

the whole city becomes this kind of symbol

of Hanoverian loyalty and union.

It really shows this idea that you could make the Union take

physical form and that the New Town was going to be emblematic of

the new Scotland or the new North Britain that was being built,

literally street by street.

At one end, the west end, you've got St George's Square -

it would become Charlotte Square.

At the other end you've got St Andrew's Square.

So that's the two patron saints of Scotland and England

coming together in this New Town environment.

The patriotism, obviously, in the street names -

George Street, Frederick Street, Hanover Street.

Nothing like this had ever been attempted in Scotland before.

If it worked, Edinburgh would be completely transformed, and so,

it was hoped, would Scotland's status within the United Kingdom

and the wider world.

I mean, it's revolutionary. If you just look at a map

and you look at the scale of the Old Town and you put

the New Town on it, you'd probably think it's on a different scale

till you realise it's the same place. Completely revolutionary.

The plan was officially accepted.

The starting gun had been fired for construction to begin.

Building was to start at the east end of the site,

around St Andrew's Square, and progress towards its climax

in the west, Charlotte Square.

There was just one problem -

Craig's plan showed streets but not individual buildings.

Local builders could buy plots and put up what they liked.

This piecemeal approach didn't always live up

to Craig's idealised vision.

More than five decades later, in 1819,

the New Town as it was actually built was painstakingly drawn,

house by house, by engraver Robert Kirkwood.

Today, we can bring this extraordinary map to life,

creating a vivid sense of the original Georgian cityscape.

It begins here in Thistle Court,

where the New Town's first houses still stand.

This building here in Thistle Court is an example of

amongst the first buildings, that marvellous year in 1767

when people bought into the idea and were buying plots.

It gives us an opportunity to look at the people who were actually

responsible for building the New Town plan up -

the painters, the slaters, the glaziers, the masons.

Looking at this building here might not knock you over,

but it does give you a chance to assess and think,

"How do you build up a magic, marvellous plan of great scale

"and ambition and make it into a reality?"

That meant letting it loose to a variety of architects and tradesmen

to build what they wanted to their own budgets.

So, right from the off, the New Town diverted from Craig's plan.

This little courtyard was never on the original design,

but the builder who bought the plot added it anyway.

His name was John Young.

John Young was a wright, or a carpenter,

within the Incorporation of Wrights and Masons of Edinburgh.

That was, like, the trade union, the guild, as they would say,

in England that ran Edinburgh's construction business.

It's one of the biggest, if not THE biggest,

urban planning projects in the country. And here's John Young -

sees his moment as so many of the other people in the incorporation did -

"I can make money here. There's business here for me."

Thistle Court represents his first go at running in the business.

Young's background was humble,

but over the next 50 years he would become one of the key drivers

of this massive construction project.

He doesn't come with a baggage of fame like Robert Adam and James Adam.

He doesn't come from a substantively successful architectural family.

So he's a newbie, he's a new start.

He's a guy who wants to get ahead in business and he sees the New Town

as being his opportunity to do that.

Thistle Court was a modest start for the New Town,

but around the corner,

work was beginning on a building that did showcase Georgian grandeur

on a massive scale.

Like Thistle Court, it also played fast and loose with Craig's design.

Today, this building is the headquarters

of the Royal Bank Of Scotland.

Ruth Reid is the bank's official archivist.

When the plans were originally drawn up for the New Town,

the spot where we're standing now should have been a church standing

at the end of George Street, facing another church at the other end.

It was a key spot, very important,

so you'd put a special building like a church on it.

But Sir Lawrence Dundas, who was a very wealthy

self-made man - he was an MP for Edinburgh, very influential -

saw the plans and saw that this would be a very good place

for him to put a nice house for himself.

He already owned the land behind the spot,

so he bought the plot that should've been for the church so that he could

make a forecourt for a building so that he could put a house here.

In a lot of ways it's a bit like a country house plonked right

in the middle of the city.

This house represented a decisive break with Edinburgh's past.

Its fashionable elegance told the world that its owner was

a modern man of taste and refinement.

A Georgian.

This room is one of the few ones in the house that actually remains

as Sir Lawrence Dundas would have recognised it in his own house.

It was his dining room, one of the most smart,

important rooms in a house like that, because that's where

you'd be entertaining your important guests.

It's got this beautiful ceiling, which is original,

but one of the key features, actually,

is the view that you would've had out of the windows,

because although it's Harvey Nichols now,

in Sir Lawrence's day he had bought the land next door to make sure that

nobody could build there so that he could preserve that view out across

the Firth of Forth and out to Fife.

At the moment the building is being refurbished.

A lot of the decorative features had got quite tired and needed

a bit of attention, so they're just being repainted, smartened up,

made to be what they should be.

Sir Lawrence Dundas's house became the centrepiece of the New Town's

first great Georgian feature - St Andrew's Square.

As more houses sprang up around it,

this was becoming Edinburgh's most desirable address.

But with Sir Lawrence sitting pretty,

a new site for a church had to be found.

In the end, it was built a few hundred yards down the road

on George Street.

In keeping with the New Town's Unionist symbolism,

it was dedicated to both St Andrew and St George.

For the New Town's early residents, it symbolised something else

as well - community.

What we have in this building is a key survivor of time,

a key survivor of what the New Town was about to the people who lived

in the first New Town. This represented, in so many ways,

not a place of faith but also a place of hope,

a place of hope for a new beginning for the entire project to live on,

a public building, a church, a place for everybody.

Churches were a central part of what people did with their day -

they went to church three times a day if they could.

It meant so much to the residents of the New Town to have a church.

Instead of trotting over the bridge to the New Church

or St Giles Cathedral,

they could have a place to worship here in the New Town,

and for that it was really important.

You raise your eyes to the ceiling as the sermon went on,

what did you see? You see roses and thistles,

the combination of St Andrew and St George,

what the building actually stood for.

Moving to George Street turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

The smaller plot forced the builders to rethink.

The result was Britain's very first elliptical church,

modelled on a concert hall.

It's still one of Edinburgh's finest musical spaces.

Music-making is actually made very easy here because the shape

of the building brings the sound together - it merges it beautifully.

I've only been here for a year and I absolutely love it here.

It's a great building, I think, to have my voice carry in,

and that's exciting.

We sing repertoire from well before this church was built,

music from the time it was built,

and music right up to the present day that's just been written.

It's nice to be able to think that you're kind of contributing to that

kind of tradition of music,

but also kind of looking forward and trying to see what

the next 250 years of this building are maybe going to hold.

With the church established and the community growing,

Edinburgh's social centre of gravity was moving from the Old Town

to the New, just as the council had hoped.

Celebrity neighbours added to the appeal.

In 1775, philosopher David Hume,

now one of Edinburgh's most famous citizens,

moved from the Old Town to St Andrew's Square, partly because,

as a keen cook, he wanted a bigger kitchen.

Hume's move was another sign that the New Town was becoming

the place to live. But it did have one downside -

for years it was also Britain's biggest building site,

and like any big construction project,

materials were in high demand.

Wood was imported from Scandinavia.

Slate for the roofs was brought in from the Highlands.

But the material that would really define the look of the city

was found closer to home.

Stone.

The place it came from has gone through some changes over the years.

But if you know where to look,

traces of Edinburgh's greatest sandstone quarry can still

be found here, behind this supermarket.

Graeme Hadden is in the stonemasonry business and has studied the history

of this lost piece of the city.

The Craigleith Quarry was the quarry that built so much of Edinburgh.

It produced stone of such good quality,

it became the stone of choice for the old city masters.

It was our local building material and we were really blessed by having

this quarry to help establish the city.

Craigleith Quarry can be traced back to the early 17th century,

when stone from here was used in Edinburgh Castle.

It became one of Scotland's biggest and deepest.

The quarry would be 100 metres below this.

The quality of this stone was just so good,

and you can see how somebody who wanted to say,

"Look at me, I'm wealthy. Look at me, I'm successful,"

would want to build in a stone such as Craigleith.

You start to find bits like this where you really see

what the natural stone would have been like.

It's very, very fine grains,

and it's that fineness which gives it its uniqueness.

That let the masons work it and be able to work it really well,

and because it's very, very hard,

when you actually cut that stone and work that stone,

you can start to apply really, really good quality detail.

So, as that detail gets applied to the stone,

it's not going to weather off,

and you see the evidence of that all through the city.

With no electricity,

stonemasons used their bare hands to cut rocks from the face

and shape them into blocks. Horses would drag the blocks

up into the New Town building site.

These blocks could be huge.

The pillars of Edinburgh University's Old College

are nine metres of solid Craigleith stone.

There are stones there that are nine metres high.

You probably couldn't get your arms round them, and these stones

had to be taken from here to there and turned upright.

The man who inspired this building boom, James Craig himself,

was less involved in the dirty work of construction.

He only designed one building for his model city - Physicians Hall,

which was later demolished.

The New Town he had envisioned was taking on a life of its own...

..and the community itself was taking a hand in building it.

Throughout the 1770s and into the 1780s,

Edinburgh was starting to look and feel like a modern city,

one where fashionable upper-class Scots wouldn't be ashamed to live.

But the plan had omitted one thing central to Georgian social life -

somewhere to have a party.

Dances and social gatherings, known as assemblies,

kept the wheels of upper-class Georgian society turning,

so assembly rooms were a must.

The assembly rooms in the Old Town were cramped,

old-fashioned and too far away,

so the New Town's residents raised ?6,000 -

around ?5.5 million today -

to build some new assembly rooms on George Street.

More than 200 years on, they still serve their original purpose -

fun.

Russell Clegg is a heritage consultant and an expert

in the history of this building and the people who used it.

The assemblies at the Assembly Rooms on George Street

were very grand occasions. The Assembly Rooms exist so that people

can socialise and dance and get together,

and with the New Town coming into being,

lots of people that moved from the Old Town to the New Town

wanted a venue where they could do those kinds of things.

All the great and the good,

the affluent middle classes who lived in the New Town

just over here, would have been coming to a ball

to dance, to meet folk, to show off.

During this period,

the New Town's great and good were captured in pen and ink

by caricaturist John Kay.

His images of local characters poked gentle fun

at Edinburgh high society.

People would have been wearing their most fine, fine dresses.

People would want to see people dressed up in their finery,

they would want to see how the rich dressed and what they looked like,

and certainly women arriving at that ball,

the fashion at that time was to wear white dresses,

so you imagine these kind of empire-line white dresses with a flowing trail...

Turbans with ostrich feathers would have been worn,

and these turbans would have been

bejewelled with pearls and other jewels.

Women would have carried a fan for modesty.

So, very much, it's like the kind of VIP red carpet occasions of today.

Just up here is a windowed gallery.

Now, we think this is where people might have viewed

those ball attendees back in 1787, so there may have been some kind of

structure there, a kind of a scaffold or a ladder or something,

where people could scurry up and have a look through and see

these grand people processing up the staircase in all their finery.

So we're now in the ballroom and this is one of the original rooms

in the 1787 build of the Assembly Rooms here in Edinburgh.

You can see that it's huge - it's 92 foot long,

and that's what made it pretty unique at that time.

A building like this didn't come cheap,

but it certainly made an impact.

Scottish high society, which for decades had been leaving for London,

could finally hold its head up.

Even if pockets were feeling the pinch.

For that inaugural ball in 1787,

this room was kitted out with second-hand settees and divans,

old, worn, threadbare carpets.

They just didn't have the money to create the beautiful fabric

that you see here, because they'd run out of the money.

However, look at the space that they got to dance in.

If you were a Georgian, you had all this room to perform your dances in,

you didn't really care about how it looked.

Cash was eventually raised to put the finishing touches

to the ballroom, which became a showpiece for some of

the finest craftsmanship ever to come out of Scotland.

Most dazzling of all were the crystal chandeliers.

The chandeliers, we believe, do have an Edinburgh provenance.

We think that they were made at an Edinburgh glass-maker's.

Each chandelier contains 12,000 crystals,

so in these three chandeliers alone, there are 36,000 cut-glass crystals.

You can tell they're proper cut-glass crystals because

they refract the light and you get this beautiful rainbow effect

of colours. Originally, the chandeliers would have held candles,

and the candle wax would have dripped down onto the people below.

So, there were many stories of the time,

anecdotal stories, of women having their dresses ruined

by hot candle wax dripping down onto their bodies.

The Assembly Rooms announced that a new Edinburgh had arrived.

It was a capital city fit for the modern world

and a proud partner with London in the Union.

But not every house in the New Town was aimed at high society.

Many streets also contained tenements where

the slightly less well-off could afford to live.

Today, many of the original buildings on Princes Street

and George Street have been swept away...

..but Queen Street still retains much of its original appearance.

It shows just how well built the houses of the New Town were.

This flat on Queen street has recently been bought by

Belinda and Stephen Carswell.

Its appearance is deceptive.

From the outside, it looks like a tall Georgian house,

but in fact this stair leads directly to a pair

of double upper flats right at the top of the building.

Belinda and Stephen are turning them into luxury holiday apartments.

The renovation has brought them close to 200-plus years of history.

Here in Queen Street is one of the original New Town streets,

so it's lovely when you come inside to think, "Gosh, the history."

Even walking up the stairs... When you come in you've got grooves

in the stonework that obviously have been worn down on the steps

from hundreds of people coming up and down over the years,

and then when you come into the property it's just quite lovely

seeing the high ceilings and just imagining how it would have been

when they first opened the doors to the first new owners.

The flat has been altered over time,

but more than 200 years after it was built,

the quality of the craftsmanship still shines through.

A lot of the original features still in here, which is nice,

and we're going to preserve all of those

whilst bringing it up to date, really.

Don't want to knock anyone off the ladder.

So I think this would probably have been another...

..another sitting room.

So...

this is quite a fancy fireplace.

In between painting and decorating,

Belinda's husband Stephen has started to look through the flat's

original deeds.

Our solicitor, when we purchased this,

asked if we were just going to throw these things out, and I thought,

"No, no, please give them to us."

I've not really had much time to look though them yet,

but I have come across this one that goes back to...

1793.

In favour of someone called George Tate.

"Nor all men by this present..."

Oh, jings.

Handwriting like my mother's - it's a little bit tricky to read.

I'm sure it mentions in here at some point that

we're solely responsible for the roof,

which is a little bit unfortunate.

It shows you how...

how short a period we're really here, doesn't it?

You know, you think, "Oh, got a house,

"going to be lovely, live here."

And then you look back and you see someone was here for five years,

eight years, ten years, and it all just seems to fly by.

1st October 1793.

Helping with the renovation is local joiner Stewart Saville.

A New Town native himself, Stewart has long experience working with

these kinds of historic properties.

Yeah, you can get a sense of, like, what they had to do.

In their day, when these places were getting fitted out,

most of your stuff was all done by hand, all the fitting

was done by hand, and they probably had

better hand tools, better steel.

Really? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah, some of the older tools, they've got far better steel

for your chisels and saws.

When it comes to the saws now, they're all throwaway -

you can't get a saw doctor to do a saw properly.

You're doing the rip-out and you're taking off...

lifting up boards, taking the skirting, panelling off,

ceiling's coming down, different things.

But when you find things...

Like, you'll find a newspaper...

Blah, blah, blah, and it'll give you an idea of when things were done,

and you'll also find old bottles, like,

I've found them twice in two different buildings - is at the top

there's been a bottle

that's been built into the brickwork.

And it's obviously been...

The stories go like, basically, the guy's got to the top

of the building, had a drink and built the bottle into the wall.

Flats like this and houses in the New Town's more modest backstreets

stopped it from becoming completely exclusive.

Tony Lewis's study of the New Town builders has thrown light

on the more humble folk who were making it home.

This is home of the tradesmen as opposed to home

of the great lords and ladies.

Smaller in scale but also a good place to be based at.

There were many forms of New Town housing -

this was housing that Edinburgh people knew and could afford.

Also hidden in these minor streets of the New Town

was where the brothels, the dark side of Edinburgh New Town

society resided, and if you go through Edinburgh Tolbooth records

as well for people thrown into the local jail for misdemeanours,

you find bouts of drinking and fighting.

One of these streets was even named after someone

not in the royal family - the builder who had started the project

back in Thistle Court, John Young.

Here we are in Young Street.

John Young had survived the process of building the New Town -

he'd begun in Thistle Court,

he'd ended up in a street named after himself.

His name, his fame were secure.

Builders weren't the only Edinburgh tradesmen getting rich

from the New Town.

All these houses needed to be furnished.

Rich Scots used to buy furniture from London or Europe...

..but now Edinburgh's own cabinet-makers were stepping up

and ushering in a golden age of Scottish furniture.

John Dixon has been dealing in Georgian furniture

for over 30 years.

Many of the thousands of pieces that were made for the New Town

have ended up here in his warehouse in Leith.

The cabinet-makers do everything themselves by hand.

Some of them learned their skills at Whytock and Reid,

a legendary Edinburgh cabinet-maker's.

We are repairing he furniture that was made 200 years ago,

and most of it - it was so well made at the time -

we're basically just restoring it.

We've thousands of knobs.

Sort of the earliest knobs you get on Scottish furniture

is probably late George III.

So this would've been a typical New Town piece of furniture.

This is a tea table and the New Town would have been full of that stuff.

This one here is probably 1790.

This is a table just for having tea.

This is not your dining table.

You'd need to have a space in your house with room for this table,

so it probably meant you had a drawing room or a separate room

other than living in a two- or three-bedroom tenement.

Wonder how may villains sat at that table.

Among John's passions is the work of one of Edinburgh's finest

Georgian cabinet-makers, William Trotter.

Like the builder John Young,

Trotter came from a relatively humble background.

He didn't even sign his furniture.

But he rose to become the most sought-after craftsman in the country.

This is by William Trotter of Edinburgh,

And even though William Trotter didn't stamp any furniture,

there's the age of the piece and there's characteristics on it

that are by William Trotter and no-one else.

If you see this panel section, which recurs three times,

this sunk beading, which is quite tricky and quite expensive to make,

and it dates from about 1815 to 1820.

He was the best known and most productive cabinet-maker in Scotland.

When he got control of the Edinburgh or the Scottish market,

I mean, he was around for 50 years.

I'd say when the New Town started developing, his business, I mean,

he must have loved it.

You've got maybe a mile and a half of streets packed

with these large houses

and these people must have been crying out for the fashionable

Edinburgh furniture of the day.

Young William Trotter also had an unexpected stroke of luck

when one of his rival cabinet-makers was unmasked as Edinburgh's

most notorious villain.

His business took off when Deacon Brodie was executed because,

previous to that, Deacon Brodie was the top gun of the cabinet-makers

in Scotland, and I think when his demise occurred on the Royal Mile,

Trotter's business accelerated.

Actually, I've got a lovely Trotter tea caddy here.

Have a look at this.

This is a cracker.

This is very unusual and rare.

Regency, rosewood and brass-inlaid teapoy,

or basically a tea caddy on legs, but whoever had this

had pretty sophisticated taste.

Inside they had three different types of tea,

and that's why they have separate canisters.

In here there would have been two glass mixing bowls -

they're now missing. So you would've got some green tea, black tea,

and you would have blended your own tea.

And here...

they must have had something where they were mixing the teas,

but this is to gather the leaves that were too big.

But this is removable...

..and this is what I've never seen - there's a small pin here and,

when you remove the pin,

this drawer comes out,

and this was for gathering the tea that had fallen through this filter.

And that's how expensive tea was.

By the 1790s, the New Town had plenty of households

who could afford a cup of tea,

and as the project neared completion,

the scene was set for its grand climax.

The City Council wanted a real show-stopper,

so they stepped in and commissioned Scotland's greatest architect,

Robert Adam himself, to design one.

The result was a masterpiece that really did embody

the Scottish Enlightenment in stone -

Charlotte Square.

Today, number 6 is home to Scotland's First Minister.

Next-door, number 7 has been restored

by the National Trust for Scotland

to show how the original residents would have lived.

The lobbies were where hats and coats were left, as today,

so there was always a hatstand,

and then you're led straight through onto the staircase,

which is part of this processional route to the drawing room.

The final piece of the New Town jigsaw was Charlotte Square,

and they asked Robert Adam to design it all of a piece as something

the city could be really proud of,

and I regard it as one of the finest pieces of urban planning in Europe.

It was a very, very desirable address.

This house was originally built not for a judge or a wealthy merchant,

but for a highland chief -

John Lamont of the Clan Lamont from Argyll.

Like many wealthy Scots,

he was drawn to the new-look capital and its glittering high society.

I think you can assume that these were the grandest houses

that the town had to offer. Social standards were being set by

these houses and people very much came into Edinburgh in the winter

when the courts were sitting, when the children could go to schools,

and when the Assembly Rooms were meeting in George Street.

To entertain his neighbours in style,

Lamont had to fit out his new house with the best of everything.

At its heart was the showpiece interior - the drawing room.

We know from the bills of fitting houses up

that half the total expenditure on furniture

would go in a drawing room.

As you can see, the room is extremely grand, it's very classical

with the symmetrical arrangement around the fireplace.

It's very well lit with three very large windows, by Old Town standards,

looking down onto the private public gardens of the square.

It's designed to cope with a large number of people, and small dances

might have been held in these rooms after evening parties.

All this luxury points to a social change that was sweeping Edinburgh

and the rest of Scotland...

Class.

Unlike the Old Town, New Town folk didn't mix much

with the lower orders.

The houses themselves reflect this.

In order to get into a Georgian house, what you first have to do

is negotiate a row of railings with spiked tops,

and on the other side there is a large pit or moat.

How do you get across this moat and through these railings?

And there's two ways - are you a tradesman?

In which case you carry your heavy load down the very small

winding staircase. Or are you a social visitor?

In which case you're allowed in the front door.

And the ladies looked down from the drawing room on the first floor,

properly defended from the oiks milling around

on the pavement below.

It was social cleansing, wasn't it?

If we build a place that only "nice people" can afford to go into,

then we remove all the problems.

But actually the problem of poverty, the problem of disease,

the problem of unemployment just stay

but you just don't have it on your front doorstep.

For folk who could remember the Old Town,

this New Town lifestyle meant progress, but as Edinburgh changed,

one of the city's unique qualities was in danger of being lost.

There's a kind of curious sense, perhaps,

that the formalisation of Enlightenment culture,

or the turning of it literally into form in the New Town,

is what kills it off,

and that actually it's the inconvenient bumping against

each other of the Old Town that makes it happen.

But for Clan Chief Lamont and his friends,

New Town living represented civilisation,

sophistication and modernity.

His parties would have been run along appropriately formal lines

in keeping with the fashion in any other European capital.

If you were a guest at an evening party,

you'd have been taken up by the servants to the drawing room

where you'd have met your hostess,

then once all the guests were arrived they would have come down

in rather a formal procession to this dining room.

Dinner would've been brought up by the staff from the kitchen below,

but all sorts of efforts were made to keep things hot,

and here we've got a plate-warmer.

This would have kept the plates hot whilst the family came down

with their guests and the dinner was ready to be served.

And like the formal manners and hierarchy of the house,

the dinner was laid in a very formal arrangement.

The husband and wife would sit at the end of the tables

and help in serving their guests.

The husband or the host would normally carve the joint for dinner

in front of the guests and it was a great kind of social skill

to be able to do that very elegantly without making a mess.

With the completion of Charlotte Square in 1820,

the New Town was finished.

Edinburgh had been transformed,

and the plan had worked -

Scotland's commitment to the Union was stronger than ever,

and Edinburgh was prosperous and proud.

The city's prestige was confirmed when, in 1822,

King George IV came to see

the loyal capital of North Britain for himself.

James Craig didn't live to see this happen.

After a patchy career as an architect, he died,

in debt, in 1795.

But if Craig didn't get to share in much of the New Town's glory,

his legacy lived on spectacularly.

His first New Town was joined by a second,

then a third as Edinburgh continued to expand.

And, as in Charlotte Square,

planning restrictions were enforced to create an elegant, uniform style.

Together, these streets now form the largest concentration

of Georgian architecture anywhere in the world.

Their beauty continues to inspire visitors from all corners

of the globe, as well as the people who live there today.

Lucy Jones is an artist who lives and works in the New Town.

When I was originally painting a few years ago,

I didn't paint buildings at all and they didn't interest me at all,

but since moving here, I just had to paint it.

I don't know. And when you're out there on a sunny day

and the blue sky is behind all those grey, grey buildings

and you'll have a beautiful curve and the windows

with the curved tops with the glass,

cos it might be kind of old glass and it's slightly wonky,

and then the steps will be worn in the centre,

so they'll be slightly curved

in the middle of the steps, the stone...

there's just something beautiful about it. Yes, there is.

And the majesticness of it all.

Lucy is working on a picture of one of the later New Town's

grandest crescents - Royal Circus.

There's a lovely gate just here in these gardens that...

I've got some photographs, but the detail isn't good enough,

I don't think, to do the picture from,

so I'd like to go back there today

to get the detail for this gateway here.

There's three different styles just going up the hill there,

and that's what I love as well,

that the more you look, the more different things you see.

This spot that I've drawn is just round the other side of the crescent,

but the view from here...

I've drawn this street before and it's a beautiful curve

with this sort of crazy big building in the front sort of curving away,

around and away from you, which is really, really nice.

I took the photos back in, I think, February

when there wasn't any greenery around,

so I could see through these bushes here.

I'm not so sure now what I'll put in the foreground,

but I would like to get the detail of that lovely gateway,

the arch over the gateway there.

Brilliant.

I've left the foreground nice and simple.

I'm quite abstract but I think it's really worked.

I've got sort of the sweep of the fence as it comes round

and the curve of the crescents,

I've put that in because I love the curve of the crescents.

Recently I have been much more inspired,

as opposed to January when it was grey and horrible,

and the sun's come out the last month or so,

and I have felt like, "Yes, this is what I love doing."

As Edinburgh and Scotland look to the future,

the New Town is a reminder of a visionary moment in Scottish history

when the country was shaking off its troubled past and making itself new.

But does it have anything to teach us today?

What it shows is what a city government

with a certain measure

of will and the capability of doing so can create.

As the world becomes more urbanised,

it's an absolutely viable model for high-density, low-rise,

high-amenity great places to live.

The New Town and the Scottish Enlightenment

was an explosion of creativity

the likes of which Scotland had never seen.

And it lives on.

Today, Edinburgh is home to the world's biggest arts festival,

and a new wave of hi-tech innovation is again making the city buzz.

Perhaps it's time for the next Scottish Enlightenment.

I think the future for Edinburgh is bright,

but it's also going to be a busy and possibly, again,

overcrowded place to live in.

There's a new Enlightenment of these tech companies that are growing fast

in Edinburgh, incredible start-ups and, you know,

little companies that are almost invisible one year are then

everywhere the next. They're happening because there are

lots of creative people in the city able to do these things.

SHE SIGHS DEEPLY

The shooting was fully justified.

So he's the Belfast strangler?

DOCTOR SHOUTS INSTRUCTIONS

'I want him to live,

'so that he can spend the rest of his life in prison.'