This morning I gave a short talk on the history of Edinburgh, at the request
of a friend. For various domestic reasons (nobody’s fault) there was little
preparation time. I discovered, on arrival, that my audience would be a small
number of highly educated and interested Chinese visitors. I did my best.
This is more or less what I said. The talk was not written
beforehand, though I had worked out the structure. It occurs to me that it
might be of more general interest.
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* *
Good morning and welcome. I am a history teacher, born and
brought up in London,
who moved here forty years ago. My family and I like it so much that we have
settled here. I have been asked to introduce the history of the city in twenty
minutes. This means that I shall leave out far more than I include. So there is
no point bothering about that. Also, I should make it clear that there is
nothing official about this presentation. It is a personal view.
I reckon that it is useful for the visitor to think of four Edinburghs.
One is the Old
Town. You will know from
the map of Scotland that Edinburgh on the east coast and Glasgow on the west are very close together.
Between the two is a trench of flattish land, with big hills to north and
south. The geological collapse of this trench, millions of years ago, was
accompanied by some volcanic activity, so that round here we have a lot of
small but steep-sided hills. There is the Castle Rock, of course. Also Arthur’s
Seat, Calton Hill, the Bass Rock and so on. These rocky hills were ideal for
defence, and it says something about life all those centuries ago that defence
was more important than water. People settled on the Castle Rock because they
felt safer. From the Rock the glaciers of the Ice Age left a slope running away
east, down to where Holyrood Palace is now, and this became the Old Town,
with its wall.
The second Edinburgh
is the eighteenth century expansion. At last, in the 1750s, there was no
likelihood of invasion from England
and no likelihood of civil war and so people of vision began to think of
building outside the city wall. Because of all those steep little hills this
was quite an engineering challenge, and you will see lots of signs of
earth-moving and levelling and the building of bridges. There used to be a
lake, the Nor’ Loch, where Princes
Street Gardens
are now; that had to go. They built on the South Side, where George Square is now. They built the
First New Town, and then the Second New Town. These two are often run together
and called The New Town. I think this is a mistake. The First New Town, Princes
Street, George Street
and Queen Street,
was built to be as different as possible from the Old Town.
As a result the streets had to be straight and wide, the houses had to be low, and
there was to be no decoration. One famous citizen of the time, Henry Cockburn,
said of the New Town “What a site nature gave us for our New Town. What
meanness in its execution!” But then the Second New Town, below Queen Street
Gardens, was built with a
different sort of plan. Great architects were encouraged to build streets and
buildings of grandeur and beauty. Today the First New Town has been rebuilt and
rebuilt, with modern shops and hotels. The Second New Town is strictly
protected by planning regulations and is preserved as a great architectural
site.
The third Edinburgh
is the great modern expansion that started in about 1850 and is still going on.
Tourists don’t come to see it, but it is where most of us live. It involved
hundreds of thousands of people, and a great deal of fresh water and sewage and
new parks, and shopping centres and housing schemes. However, thanks to
geography Edinburgh
cannot have a huge urban sprawl. The hills to the south and the sea to the north
are never far away. Also, you will notice as you look around that sometimes the
nineteenth and twentieth century development has been allowed to change the Old
and New Towns.
The fourth Edinburgh
is too often forgotten. This is Edinburgh
by the sea. Most great cities in Scotland developed partly as ports,
built on the sea for trade. Edinburgh
was built for defence, on a rock. But a port developed, at Leith, and when
Robert I – that’s Robert the Bruce – gave Edinburgh
a new charter, he gave Leith to the city.
Leithers did not all approve of this and in the 1830s, when Britain’s cities were reshaped by burgh reform, Leith became a separate burgh. But the lawyers of
Edinburgh are a powerful lot – consider how recently they managed to get
Scotland’s parliament in this city, not in Glasgow – and in 1929 they managed
once again to have Leith brought under the government of Edinburgh. So Edinburgh is a sea-side
city, and trade, fishing and so on are part of its history. So is relaxing by
the sea, at Portobello or Cramond.
I have described four different bits that make up Edinburgh. I would now
like to use a few dates to help fix the history. There is no need to remember
them precisely
In the 1130s that great king David I decided that the people
who lived below the Castle should be a chartered burgh, with a provost and
baillies, a privileged market and so on. He was the founder of Edinburgh, if anyone is. He also set up the
abbey, Holyrood Abbey, at the other end of the hill that leads down from the
Castle.
In the 1320s Robert the Bruce had finally driven the English
invaders out of Scotland,
which included recapturing Edinburgh
Castle in 1314 when
Thomas Randolph led a small party in the dark to climb the rock. This was when
he refounded the city, and issued it with a new charter. [Question: Yes, this is the story that you can see some of in the film
“Braveheart”]
In the 1560s there was the revolution that led to Mary Queen
of Scots being driven out and Scotland
becoming Protestant. The most important person in this was John Knox. It is very
hard to know now which Scots lords were genuinely Protestant and which saw the
Reformation as a chance to get money, land and power; probably a bit of both.
As far as Edinburgh
was concerned it meant that the monks were thrown out of Holyrood Abbey and the
city council got control of the whole Royal Mile, and of the land that had
formerly been run by the Canons of Holyrood Abbey.
In 1603 there was one of those accidents of marriage, birth
and death that can happen with royal families. The King of Scotland, James VI,
became James I of England
as well. For ages the English royal family had schemed for this to happen the
other way round, and it never did. That’s by the way. The point is that with
the same person as king of both countries there was hope that the interminable
wars between the two would cease. It did not work out quite like that. There
were still too many wars and civil wars for over a hundred years. [Question: Yes. Just as in Hong Kong and
China you have one government and two systems, so it was in England and
Scotland.]
In 1707 the two countries officially joined to become one
country, the United Kingdom.
Historians have been arguing ever since whether this was a good thing or not. I
doubt if they will ever agree. But those who say it was an English take-over of
Scotland
are definitely wrong. Yes England
was and is bigger, richer and stronger than Scotland, so was always likely to
be the dominant partner. But it was a partnership. The main concern of the
English government in 1707 was to make sure that Scotland
did not become an ally in war of France. In return for that
guarantee they were quite happy for Scotland to keep its own legal
system, its own education system and its own church. Even today, when Elizabeth
II is in England she is head
of the church, as Elizabeth
I established centuries ago. In Scotland
she has no special position in the church, and when she stays in Holyrood or
Balmoral she visits the local parish church more or less as an ordinary person,
and plays no part in running the church here.
Finally, between 1794 and 1815 there were the great wars
against Napoleon’s France.
There are often forgotten. But they involved everyone and went on a long time,
at a very important period in Edinburgh’s
history. On Calton Hill you can see great monuments to Waterloo, to Admiral Nelson, to the dead in
the French wars. Henry Cockburn, whom I have mentioned, spent many nights as a
volunteer guarding the Martello Tower that was built for defence in Leith.
There was a real fear of French invasion at the very time when the Second New
Town was being planned and the city was still enjoying being called The Athens
of the North.
This is to be a short talk. But before I stop I would like
to suggest three things that have affected the character of the city.
One is its closeness to England. This has been for bad and
for good. For all those centuries of war it was far too close to be safe from
invading armies, supported by the powerful English navy. Far too often Edinburgh was a war zone,
with gunfire in the streets, and explosions, and the clash of weapons and
cobble stone slippery with blood. There are many cities in the world that are
war-zones today. Edinburgh
was too often like that. Sometimes it was English invasion; sometimes it was
civil wars. But then for the last three hundred years Edinburgh has not been some remote provincial
city beyond the sea or beyond the mountains. It was easy for people and books
and ideas to come and go to everyone’s benefit. During the Napoleonic Wars,
which I mentioned, there could be no Grand Tour of Europe for enterprising
young men; it was to Edinburgh
they came, and the University flourished.
A second is that the city has managed, for many reasons, to
become the leading place for Scotland’s
professional life. This is where the new parliament was set up. This is where
the General Assembly of the Kirk meets. Edinburgh
solicitors can call themselves “Writers to the Signet” and put WS after their
names. This can be very irritating to Glasgow,
which is certainly bigger, and probably a lot richer; but this flourishing
professional life certainly is part of Edinburgh’s
character. It has – as has Glasgow – several universities and teaching
hospitals.
A third feature that seems to me to give character to Edinburgh’s history is a
certain democratic way of thinking. I am not talking of politics. Until the
1830s reforms Edinburgh’s
two Members of Parliament were chosen by 33 people. But in the Old Town
everyone lived close, often on top of each other on the same stair in the same
building, so that the rich, the middling sort and the poor would meet every day
and know each other. There are plenty of stories of the eighteenth century,
when the Scottish Enlightenment was flourishing, of gatherings in pubs where
great men of power, learned philosophers of international reputation, ordinary
city professionals, and any local who could afford to stand a round, would drink
and talk and argue together. Some attempt was made to keep this in the New
Town, with richer streets and poorer streets side by side. Now I’m afraid much
of this has been lost and in Edinburgh
there are “good areas” and “bad areas”, as there are in most big cities. But
something of this democratic spirit remains.
I have gone on far too long. I hope you enjoy your visit to Edinburgh, and I do hope
it includes a walk down the Royal Mile. We have mentioned the Scottish Enlightenment.
You will see a statue of David Hume, the innovative philosopher. You will see a
statue of Adam Smith, who invented the science of economics. Go into St Giles
and see the memorial window to Robert Burns, a great poet. Further down, see a
statue of Robert Fergusson, who died far too young, but whom Burns so much
admired. And at the bottom of the hill go to Dynamic Earth and learn about James
Hutton, the father of modern geology. He was the first, at least in Europe, to
look at the way rock strata lay on each other – on Arthur’s Seat particularly –
and start to reconstruct how they might have been formed not thousands but
millions of years ago.
In fairness it should be noted that they were not all sons
of Edinburgh.
Burns came from Ayrshire, and Adam Smith was born in Kirkaldy and did much of
his work in Glasgow.
The great engineer and developer of steam power, James Watt, is of the west of
Scotland, and the philosopher Thomas Reid, whose “Common Sense” lies behind
those famous sentences “We hold these truths to be self-evident” and “It is a
truth universally acknowledged”, was at Aberdeen. The Scottish Enlightenment
was not just an Edinburgh
phenomenon. Nevertheless, I have been very lucky to settle here for so long,
and I am sure you will enjoy your visit.
I have been allowed to add a little advertisement. Since I
retired I have done some writing, and I’ll mention three of my pieces here, in
case you would like to know more. They are available on Amazon Kindle.
