The New Town, Edinburgh

By the middle of the eighteenth century overcrowding inside the walls of the Old Town had reached breaking point. Lord Provost George Drummond got the boundary of the royal burgh extended north over the fields beyond the Nor Loch, the polluted lake that filled the valley, and a scheme to drain it was put in motion — a job not fully finished until 1817. The crossings followed: North Bridge in 1772, and the Earthen Mound, which began as a tip for spoil dug out of the New Town foundations and reached its present size in the 1830s.

A design competition was held in January 1766 and won by James Craig, then 26 years old. His answer was a simple axial grid following the contours: one principal street along the ridge of the new ground linking two garden squares, a main road downhill to the north and another to the south, two minor streets between them, mews lanes for the stables and three cross streets to complete the figure. That is the plan you are walking, and once you see it the grid stops being a maze of identical terraces.

Why the streets are called what they are

The names were a political statement about the Union, and one of them was vetoed by a king. George Street, the intended principal thoroughfare, was named for George III; Queen Street to the north for his wife; and the southern street was to be St Giles Street, after the city's patron saint. The king refused it — St Giles was the patron saint of lepers and the name of a London slum — so it became Princes Street, after his eldest son. St George's Square became Charlotte Square, after the queen, to avoid confusion with the existing George Square. Between the main streets went Thistle Street for Scotland's emblem and Rose Street for England's, and the three cross streets were named Castle, for the view; Frederick, for the king's second son; and Hanover, for the dynasty.

The first building went up in 1767, and it was not a terrace. The exposed new site was unpopular enough that a £20 premium was offered to the first builder on it; John Young took the money and built Thistle Court, a small courtyard at the east end of Thistle Street, which is still the oldest surviving building in the New Town.

Seven new towns, 443 hectares and one number to ignore

UNESCO inscribed the Old and New Towns of Edinburgh together in 1995 as site 728, under criteria (ii) and (iv), and describes the northern half as a collection of seven new towns built between 1767 and 1890. The citation credits the successive planned extensions and the quality of their architecture with setting standards for Scotland and beyond and influencing urban planning across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The property area is 443 hectares — that is the figure in the listing's own data block, and it covers both towns together. The same page's descriptive text says the New Town covers a very large area of 3,288 ha, which is a description of the sprawl of Georgian building, not the boundary of the inscribed property. When a page quotes 3,288 ha as the size of the World Heritage Site, it has mistaken the prose for the data. Around 75% of buildings within the property are category A, B or C listed, and the Council's Skyline Policy protects the views between the two towns.

Craig meant George Street to be closed at each end by a church on the outer edge of its square, on axis. He got one. At Charlotte Square the western church was built; at St Andrew Square the land behind the church site belonged to Sir Lawrence Dundas, who built himself a Palladian town mansion instead, designed by Sir William Chambers and finished in 1774. Dundas House was bought by the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1825 and is still its registered office, and the equestrian monument in front of it stands where the church should have been. St Andrew's Church had to be squeezed onto a site on George Street itself, and the missing eastern focus was patched in 1823 with William Burn's monument to Henry Dundas.

Charlotte Square is the payoff. Designed by Robert Adam and mainly complete by 1820, it is the only architecturally unified section of the whole New Town — one façade composition running round a square rather than a row of individual houses agreeing to look similar. Its north side holds Bute House, the official residence of the First Minister of Scotland.

The Second New Town and the estates that followed

The success of the first grid produced grander schemes after 1800. The Northern or Second New Town ran from Queen Street Gardens down towards the Water of Leith, mostly between 1800 and 1830, on William Sibbald's designs following Craig's orientation, with entire streets built as single constructions. Great King Street is its central avenue, terminated by Drummond Place to the east and Royal Circus to the west; Heriot Row and Abercromby Place are the one-sided streets on the southern edge, which is why their front rooms look over gardens.

West of Charlotte Square, the Earl of Moray had plans drawn up in 1822 by James Gillespie Graham for the Drumsheugh estate. The bulk of the Moray Estate was finished by 1835 and it remains one of the most exclusive sets of addresses in the city; walk Moray Place and Ainslie Place and you are inside it. To the east, the commissioners appointed William Henry Playfair in February 1818 and his 1819 plan produced the third New Town under Calton Hill. Stockbridge, north-west along the river, was gradually absorbed from about 1813 — the Stockbridge page picks up where the grid stops.

What was lost, and the plan that nearly took Princes Street

The New Town was designed as a residential suburb with a few professional offices, and the commercial pressure on Princes Street began almost immediately: shops opened, and through the nineteenth century most of the townhouses on that street were replaced by larger commercial buildings. Queen Street, Thistle Street and large stretches of George, Hanover, Frederick and Castle Streets still stand as their original late eighteenth-century buildings, which is why one street feels Georgian and the one parallel to it does not.

The near-miss is worth knowing. A 1960s scheme proposed an elevated walkway along the whole length of Princes Street, which required demolishing the street. It was abandoned in 1982, but not before seven buildings had gone, including the old Boots building at 102 Princes Street with its statues of Wallace, Burns, Scott and the Bruce, demolished in 1965. The gaps in the street's rhythm are that plan's remains.

Two free national galleries, both open daily

The Scottish National Gallery sits on the Mound, at the point where the New Town meets the valley, at EH2 2EL: free, daily 10:00 to 17:00, with charges only on some temporary exhibitions. It is the single best wet-afternoon room on this side of the city, and the Scottish Cafe takes last orders at 16:00, an hour before the building shuts.

The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is at 1 Queen Street, EH2 1JD, also free and also daily 10:00 to 17:00, with Cafe Portrait closing at 16:30. Both were confirmed in a browser session on 30 August 2026 because nationalgalleries.org answers automated requests with a Cloudflare 403 — a negative finding worth recording, since it means most price aggregators quoting these galleries have not read the page either.

The Scott Monument, and the two hours it is shut

The Scott Monument stands in East Princes Street Gardens and costs £9 (about $12) for an adult, with the concession, child and family rates in the table above. It runs 10:00 to 17:00 with guided tours every half hour from 10:30. Two things catch people. It cannot be booked in advance at all — the venue states plainly that tickets are sold at the kiosk on arrival — and it closes daily from 12:30 to 13:45 for lunch, which is exactly when most people walk past it. Payment is by card only and children under 5 are not admitted.

A combined ticket with the Nelson Monument on Calton Hill saves £2.50 over two separate tower tickets; the hill itself is free and open at any hour.

The gardens, and the hours nobody publishes

Princes Street Gardens are free and are the valley floor between the two towns, which makes them the best view of the Old Town you can get without climbing anything. The Council does publish gate times — inside an image-only PDF with no extractable text, unreadable to a screen reader or a search engine, which is why no page on the internet gives you a reliable closing hour. The West Gardens also close early for events, which the Council quantifies as under 2% of normal opening time; that 2% covers the Ross Bandstand programme and the winter build.

The whisky venue at 145 Princes Street sells its Signature Experience at £30 (about $41) for 90 minutes, and its own website gives two contradictory sets of shop hours on two different pages. Booking is required and it takes children over 8 on that experience only. The whisky page sets it beside the tastings and distillery tours elsewhere in the city.

The grid holds the density. George Street, which was the financial centre, is now a run of bars and restaurants many of them in former banking halls, which is why the rooms are so large and so ornate. Thistle Street and Rose Street, the two minor streets Craig put between the main ones, are narrow, largely intact and where the smaller kitchens are. Broughton Street, on the Picardy Place extension finished around 1809, and the streets around Stockbridge at the northern edge carry the neighbourhood restaurants rather than the visitor ones. Multrees Walk and the St James Quarter at the eastern end hold the newest openings.

Our rule on this site is that naming a restaurant requires a citable published list — a Michelin entry, a Slow Food or Gambero Rosso listing, or the venue's own site for hard facts — and no such list for Edinburgh was read for this page. So the honest form is streets, not names. If you want names with a person attached to them, take the walk: the food and drink walk across both towns at £94 (about $128) and the Scotch, haggis and secret dish tour at £95.50 (about $130) are both three hours and both feed you properly, and the where to eat page collects what we can source.

Shopping in the New Town: four different places, one grid

Princes Street is the chain street, and has been since the nineteenth century, when the townhouses were replaced with commercial buildings; the Jenners department store that defined it for generations has closed. George Street is the higher-end run of bars, restaurants and shops in the old banking halls. Multrees Walk, off St Andrew Square, is the designer strip and holds Harvey Nichols. And the St James Quarter at the east end is the newest of them: the 1970 St James Centre closed on Sunday 16 October 2016, was demolished and reopened as the Quarter in 2021. Waverley Market, above the station, carries the everyday high-street names.

The practical note is that all four are within about ten minutes of each other on foot, so the New Town is one shopping trip and not four.

Two hours walks the first New Town properly; half a day adds a gallery and the Second New Town down the hill. Start at one square and finish at the other, and the plan explains itself as you go. Walking minutes below are our estimates from the distances.

• St Andrew Square — start at Dundas House and the monument standing where Craig's church should have been. Five minutes from Waverley.
• George Street, west along the spine — about ten minutes end to end, past the Assembly Rooms and the former banking halls, with the castle appearing down each cross street on your left.
• Charlotte Square — Adam's unified square, Bute House on the north side. About 12 minutes from St Andrew Square at a walking pace.
• Queen Street and the Portrait Gallery — five minutes north and east; free, and it is the one interior in the grid that is about the people who built it.
• Down into the Second New Town — Heriot Row, Great King Street and Drummond Place, another 15 minutes, and the point at which the streets empty of visitors entirely.

Or have it explained

The three-hour guided walk of the Georgian city at £35 (about $48) is the version with the Enlightenment attached — the argument about why a city rebuilt itself on a grid at the moment it was producing Hume and Smith. If you want the two towns compared on foot in one go, the walk that includes castle entry starts on the ridge and the Old Town history walk covers the medieval half at £18 (about $24); the Old Town page sets out that side in the same detail as this one.

For a first orientation with no walking at all, the hop-on hop-off city bus at £20 (about $27) runs a 70-minute loop that crosses both towns.

Where this district fits in a first trip — how many nights the city needs, and which tickets to hold before you arrive — is set out on the front page of this Edinburgh guide.

The trade is simple. The New Town is flatter, quieter and about fifteen minutes on foot from anything in the Old Town, with the crossing over North Bridge or the Mound. It has the restaurants, the shops and Waverley and the tram on its doorstep. What it does not have is the sights: everything a first-time visitor books is on the other side of the valley, so a short trip spent here pays fifteen minutes each way, twice a day.

In August that arithmetic flips. The festivals are concentrated on the ridge and the Cowgate, and a room on Heriot Row or in the Second New Town is a different night's sleep from a room on the High Street. The one thing choosing this side does not save you is the levy.

The 5% visitor levy and the short-term let rules

Edinburgh's visitor levy — the UK's first city-wide scheme — has applied to paid overnight stays since Friday 24 July 2026. It is 5% of the accommodation cost, charged at the same rate every day of the year and capped at five consecutive nights, and it has applied to advance bookings made since 1 October 2025 for stays on or after that date. It covers the entire City of Edinburgh Council area, so no address in the New Town, the Old Town, Leith or Stockbridge avoids it, and it applies to UK and Scottish residents and to people travelling for work.

The whole council area has also been a short-term let control area since 5 September 2022, and every host has needed a licence since 1 January 2025, with a fine of up to £2,500 (about $3,400) for operating without one. The fee ladder that reshaped the whole-flat market is set out on the Old Town page, and it applies identically here: it is why a Georgian flat is more likely to be offered as a room in someone's home than as an empty apartment.

Waverley sits in the valley below Princes Street and the tram line runs along the New Town side, so a bag arriving from the airport reaches a New Town hotel without a climb. The fares below, and the one comparison that saves real money:

That climb is the thing that catches people staying on the ridge. Trams were running the full route from every 7 minutes on the operator's own service banner, read on 30 August 2026.

Two things the fare pages do not say loudly enough

First, capping only happens through Tap Tap Cap: paying on board with plain contactless buys a single and caps nothing, while the Tap Tap Cap daily cap is £5.70 (about $7.75) and the weekly £26.50 (about $36). Second, trams to the airport run from 05:20 in that direction and the last is 23:56, while the first tram from the airport is 06:30 and the last 22:52 — a late flight lands after the tram has stopped and the Airlink bus has not.

The airport transfer page sets the three options against each other with times, and getting around carries the live tram status link.