Streets ahead: Exploring the original plans for Edinburgh’s New Town

The New Town of Edinburgh

Museum of Edinburgh

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Resident: 11

Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh

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Pat Douthwaite

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Kate Downie: New Paintings

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Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh

Great oaks from little acorns grow. James Craig’s plan for Edinburgh’s New Town amply illustrates the adage. Recently restored, Craig’s original plan is on view for the first time in Huntly House, The Museum of Edinburgh, but only between noon and 2pm, to limit exposure to the light.

This is not the much reproduced later plan, but the drawing with which in 1767 he won the competition for a design for a new town on the ridge to the north of the city. His plan is very simple, three main streets with a square at either end and seven cross streets, pairs of the latter flanking the squares. In this first plan the unnamed streets are simply labelled “principal street”, “grand square” etc. A year later, a second plan, also restored, indicates the Hanoverian and firmly Unionist names for which George III gave Craig his personal approval and that most of the streets still bear. (Charlotte Square was originally St George’s Square.) In the second plan, Craig also proposed a grand circus called George’s Circus.

A Union Jack street plan was also mooted at some point, but in all of this the political ambition is clear. These were to be streets worthy of the capital of North Britain – the name for Scotland adopted in the forlorn belief that the Union was to be a partnership of equals.

The scale of building, too, would eventually match that political ambition. Craig’s second plan already indicates the cross streets continuing to the north and in fact the New Town developed outwards for almost a century. In general it followed Craig’s lead of symmetry and order, but although the houses in his streets were uniform, in Charlotte Square Robert Adam improved on that to treat each block as a Roman palace façade (Diocletian’s huge Palace at Split was his inspiration) and this palace concept was adopted in much of the subsequent development. Greater social mixture was also introduced by building north-south streets as tenements, and landscaped communal gardens became a key feature of the evolving New Town.

The City has always been ambivalent about its greatest civic achievement, however. Christopher Smout, Historiographer Royal for Scotland, echoed its prejudice by dismissing the New Town as “gracious living for the aspiring middle classes”. But think of it – this is no clone of London, nor of any capital city anywhere. Here there are no symbols of power. Wealth enjoys no distinction. (Except Dundas’s house, now the Royal Bank, a ruthless intrusion by Scotland’s political master.) From outside, everyone lives in a palace and all appear equal. Apart from churches, the only monumental building was the Assembly Rooms, in effect a community hall.

With communal gardens and views to the world beyond the city’s limits, the geometry of the human order takes its place within the wider natural order, a perfect expression of Enlightenment philosophy.

The City provided the infrastructure, private developers the buildings.

The key was the Dean of Guild Court, a planning authority far ahead of its time that controlled not only exterior design, but interior space, light and proportions, even fire hazards: stairs are stone, and so are kitchen floors.

Piquantly, a model 1920s Edinburgh tram stands at the door where Craig’s plans are displayed. As our collective blushes at the fiasco of the modern trams might raise a rosy glow in the night sky to rival the Northern Lights, it is good to be reminded that the City Council was not always so incompetent and that under the leadership of provost William Drummond it embarked on a civic project unrivalled in 18th-century Europe.

Craig’s plan was some acorn. Building the New Town compares in scale with building the pyramids, for the stone dug from Craigleith Quarry, now filled in, left a huge hole that could have swallowed the Great Pyramid of Giza with room to spare. Instead of a stupendous monument to one individual, however, the apex of a hierarchy of power, we built a fitting home for a community of equals (more or less), for the democratic intellect, in fact. Yet while this unique monument to Scotland’s finest hour, the Enlightenment, languishes unloved, just a rat-run for commuter traffic, tourists are herded through sham history in the Castle and are bombarded with the tartan tat of the Royal Mile.

After the Assembly Rooms, the second major public building in the New Town was the RSA, previously the Royal Institution, built on the “earthen mound” thrown up with the spoils of construction. A temple of culture, it originally housed several societies, but its principal spaces were the exhibition rooms of the Royal Institution for the Promotion of the Fine Arts. The National Gallery was later built behind it and by the influence of some kind of mysterious artistic ley-line the city’s main concentration of private galleries evolved in Dundas Street, on the same axis, a century later.

The current exhibition in the lower galleries of the RSA is Resident: 11, an RSA show by ten artists who have enjoyed Academy residencies over the past year and it offers a certain counterpoint to this discussion of the New Town. There human diversity was made coherent by encompassing order. In contrast, contemporary art as presented here reminds me of suburban America, where each house is in its own little patch of ground, each differs from its neighbour, yet the sum of all their differences is a slack and dreary sameness. There’s no tension between individuality and order. So it is with an art whose main premise is that every artist must differ from their neighbour, but with no greater order against which to measure the difference.

The artists in this show are all serious, certainly, a little too earnest some of them perhaps. Katharina Kiebacher’s photos of horizons, for instance, would have been better had they not had label-burble attached that suggesting higher meaning. The same is true of Cheryl Field’s images of breasts hidden in a pattern of dots, or surreally floating among seaweed. Alternatively, art merely becomes self-endorsing. Erica Eyres, for instance, recreates a sequence from Dallas, with Glasgow children as actors. They are charming and it must have been fun to do, but I can see no point beyond that. Victoria Skoksberg offers a reprise in video of Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoj’s strangely fraught interiors, but without their underlying tension. Bobby Niven and Iain MacLeod’s Bothy Project certainly has a point, but not as art. It is a record of an interesting project developing an infrastructure for art – bothies around Scotland that artists can use as climbers do for ad hoc residencies. Jan Pottinger-Glass’s photo-collages do have a genuinely surreal quality, but are not improved by being told that they encompass “psychological transformative processes, while referencing popular culture”. Why can’t images like this be left to speak for themselves?

Norman Shaw is always intriguing, however, and looking at his strange haunted drawings it is actually helpful to know that they are inspired by what he calls the hauntology of the Highlands, by the weird, in fact. That is information, not ever redundant self-interpretation.

Meanwhile along that artistic ley line, in Dundas Street the Scottish Gallery is showing Pat Douthwiate, a genuinely strange, if not actually weird Scottish artist. I can’t warm to her images of neurotic, tortured humanity. They are unrelentingly repetitive, but do sometimes undoubtedly have power. Downstairs, Kate Downie offers a refreshing antidote to such unrelieved neurosis with a body of fresh new work done at Achiltibuie. She often seems to be an artist committed to working on a large scale, but these are smaller works, indeed some are tiny, and show her to be mistress not just of the grand vistas of the west coast, but also of the intricate charm of its foreground.

• The New Town of Edinburgh is on permanent display at the Museum of Edinburgh, Resident:11 runs until 27 October, Pat Douthwaite and Kate Downie until 2 November