Eyes in the sky put city in a new light

The boat concept of the Scottish Parliament

Small details may change, a new shop front here, a sparkling office block there, but at ground level anyway, Edinburgh presents a lasting air of familiarity: unchanging, steady, ever constant.

But as a fascinating new book reveals, the Capital has two sides to her dramatic and historic landscape, and it's one most of us seldom see.

Captured from just a few hundred feet above in a series of striking photographs taken down the decades, Edinburgh reveals the intricate patterns of New Town crescents hugging lush patches of greenery, pale green copper domes of grand buildings and jewel-like brightly coloured roofs of buses.

The familiar roads we stroll along without a thought, from the eye in the sky of the aerial photographer form mesmerising patterns that swirl and curve, dramatic rings and semi-circles, snaking scores that dissect the city and the New Town's precisely placed squares, like giant building blocks.

From on high, valleys dip and roll, monuments cast lingering shadows over well-trodden ground and the rugged landscape of Arthur's Seat reveals surprising scars and bruises of medieval farming and long gone settlements.

These fascinating images are part of a stunning storage of aerial photographs held by the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland - part of one of the largest and most significant aerial photography collections of its kind in the world.

Its pictures - some recent, others captured by Luftwaffe and US aerial reconnaissance flights, some released from secret Ministry of Defence files, the RAF and Ordnance Survey photographic records - provide a historic and revealing snapshot of the nation's landscape, architecture, archaeology and infrastructure through the years.

From the vast collection of more than 1.6 million Scottish images held at the RCAHMS base at John Sinclair House in Bernard Terrace, a select few have been plucked to form a glossy new book, Above Scotland - Cities.

Some of the photographs date back to the infancy of aerial photography - when the Capital was often masked in its Auld Reekie shroud.

They highlight a city which, in spite of all those familiar landmarks, was in many ways dramatically different from today, made strikingly clear in one image taken from high above Fountainbridge of now gone factories and breweries with towering smoking chimneys, shoulder to shoulder with crammed tenement houses and the bustling Union Canal.

Others from around the same era show the Caledonian railway station, with its tracks sweeping west across land where cars and buses now travel. And there are photographs which are bang up to date revealing a quirky and modern twist to a historic city - such as Enric Miralles' visionary "upturned boats" Scottish Parliament.

Some have been specially enhanced to be viewed in 3D - bringing an enthralling perspective to the city's landscape.

According to James Crawford, one of three co-authors of the largely pictorial book, there is much more to the images than simply interesting photographs.

For they provide a vital resource for archaeologists and historians as well as a thorough record of our ever-changing architecture.

"The images in the collection date back to the 1920s, when Aerofilms, a private company, was taking aerial photographs for commercial reasons, to sell as postcards or for books.

"After the war, the RAF - whose reconnaissance pilots had all the kit and expertise for aerial photography - took photographs to help town planners," he says.

Although no-one realised it at the time, they were laying the foundations for today's massive collection. And the photographs they took revealed a new avenue of opportunity to research Scotland's history.

"These days our own photographers will go up with an archaeologist who can identify particular earth works," adds James. "For example, you can walk up Arthur's Seat and have no idea there was once medieval rig cultivation there. But the photographs clearly show man-made patterns."

Today's aerial photographers fly with pilots in small, four-seat Cessna crafts, leaning out of the plane's window with their equipment as it banks to one side to grab the best images.

The result, says James, are images that offer clearer detail and which capture the light much better than satellite "Google Earth" images.

"There's a quality and definition in photographs that helps you focus on certain buildings. Something like Google Earth can give you a vertical view, but these photographs are oblique which adds to the interpretive resources."

The RCAHMS collection includes a massive store of tens of millions of Ministry of Defence images captured worldwide between 1939 and 1990. It is so large that it will take decades to attempt to catalogue.

"Our remit is to keep this constant record of changing built environment," adds James. "But aerial photography has such a wide perspective.

"It's much more than simply nice photographs."

n Above Scotland - Cities, by Rebecca M Bailey, James Crawford and Allan Williams, is published by RCAHMS, priced 25. For information about the national collection, go to www.aerial.rcahms.gov.uk