Michael Fry: It's a simple concept: keep Edinburgh beautiful

SOME cities are formed by their setting and some by what they make of it.

San Francisco and Hong Kong are instances of the first sort of city, places of rather nondescript architecture raised amid a spectacular landscape of mountain and sea.

Amsterdam and Venice are examples of the second sort of city, noble cultural monuments with foundations sunk in smelly marshes and treacherous swamps.

Rare indeed is the city that starts with a fine setting and builds it up into something still better. Prague is one example, Rome another, though there are not many more. But Edinburgh is without doubt to be counted among them.

To visitors, I always recommend taking the trouble to seek out a distant vista of the capital, from one of the surrounding summits or from across the Firth of Forth in Fife.

Then they will better appreciate that the natural scene is one of volcanic detritus, of lava long cooled, of craters collapsed and of cones no longer smoking, a terrain varied and curious if in itself hardly beautiful, at least compared with the Highlands not far away.

But the Highlands can also be depressing, a landscape with which nothing better will ever be done, while Edinburgh tells us there is seldom a bit of nature in the raw that cannot be usefully adorned.

Here is a craggy rock: put a castle on it. Here is a precarious ridge: run a High Street down it. Here are ravines: throw bridges over them. Here is a spare hill: top it with a Parthenon (and do not complete the Parthenon).

Much of such progress went on while technology remained primitive by the standards of today. Now the human race can build whatever it likes wherever it likes, but then it had to work with what it had to hand.

Luckily for Edinburgh, the local building material was abundant and attractive: a creamy sandstone that weathers to silvery grey. Improvement could proceed by hacking it out of the earth and arranging it more artistically on top.

The result is harmony: between the bedrock and the buildings, between the city and its setting. There are many beautiful places in the world, achieving their beauty in all sorts of different ways, but few do it in this particular way. It is what makes Edinburgh worth preserving.

Yet, will this Edinburgh of harmony in fact be preserved? Some beautiful cities are preserved because they have become museums, places frozen in the time of their greatness, Venice being the prime example.

But Edinburgh is a prosperous working city, in the last couple of decades getting richer than ever before. It cannot stand still architecturally, any more than it can stand still in other ways. And, having got rich, it is in a better position to make choices. The real question is whether it is making the right ones.

The recent riches have not yet been matched by anything like the cultural self-confidence of the past. Up to about 1900, Edinburgh built what it wanted to build: medieval jumble in the Old Town, classical splendour in the New Town, each half of the city moving with the times but preserving its character.

In fact, during the 19th century the Old Town had been largely reconstructed – which, as a nest of squalor and disease, it needed to be.

But this was done in the Scottish Baronial style, keeping up a continuity with history. It may have been pastiche, but it still works today. A tourist wandering down the Royal Mile could hardly tell from the mere look of the houses which were ancient and which modern.

By the 20th century this self-confidence was lost. Edinburgh, no longer a city of Enlightenment, allowed inferior cultural fads from elsewhere to dictate its choices, chiefly the fads of town planners, and with disastrous results.

The north side of Princes Street was ruined. The appalling St James Centre got plonked down on a key site, which it trashed. Almost the whole university quarter was destroyed by the university itself, to be turned into a concrete jungle.

But the main culprit was the city council, then manned by thick-skulled, penny-pinching philistines, who would never have appreciated they had a choice (and a responsibility to choose aright) even if it punched them in the jaw.

Not least through fierce popular resistance by the citizens of Edinburgh, this wrecking phase at length ended, and for a while we got some good buildings.

I may be in a minority, but I like the Scottish Parliament, its interior more than its exterior admittedly. I like the Museum of Scotland. I like Saltire Court in Castle Terrace. And I like the new Hotel Missoni on the corner of the High Street and George IV Bridge. These are all in a modern idiom, but they are on the same scale as the streets they stand in and they allude in their detail to all the history round them; and they do it best where constructed in sandstone.

Despite these encouraging developments, I remain to be convinced that the vandalism of the mid-20th century is behind us. I suspect that, if it had not been for the credit crunch, the vandalism would still have been in full swing (every cloud has a silver lining). After all, the university still shows no desire to be a guardian of our culture, but continues to disfigure the university quarter.

Not far away, the plans for the Cowgate look ghastly. But at least Caltongate has vanished into the great town plan in the sky. So also, as the most welcome news of all, has the redevelopment of Haymarket with its 17 storeys of glass hotel and shopping centre, right in the middle of a quarter of the city variegated and vivacious, if not in the least degree elegant, let alone monumental.

Edinburgh should not build in glass. The winter days are too short and the summer skies are too cloudy. Why did the Edinburgh of old build in stone? Because it was there, just under the ground, and because it best suited the conditions the houses had to stand.

And Edinburgh should not build buildings higher than existing buildings. We ought to know because we ought to be able to see as much, but it seems we still need to learn that this is no random collection of detached structures but a landscape, a place where the hand of man completes the work of nature.

Is it too much to hope that we, and the people who rule the city, can grasp such simple concepts, bring the age of vandalism to an end – and maintain the harmony?

• Michael Fry is the author of Edinburgh, a history of the city, published by Macmillan.