Why Edinburgh Drained a Loch and Built an Entirely New City to Escape the Old One

There was a time when Edinburgh’s streets were so overcrowded, so foul, so thick with the smell of waste thrown from windows above, that visiting the city was considered an act of courage. Then, in the 1760s, the city made one of the boldest decisions in European urban history. It built itself an entirely new city next door.

The City That Built Upwards Instead of Outwards

Medieval Edinburgh sat on a long volcanic ridge, with Edinburgh Castle at one end and Holyrood at the other. The only direction the city could grow was up.

By the 1700s, Edinburgh’s Old Town was home to some of the tallest residential buildings in the world. These “lands” — tenement blocks — rose twelve to fourteen storeys into the Scottish sky. Nobles, lawyers, merchants, and servants all lived stacked on top of each other, floor by floor.

There was no sewage system. Every evening, residents emptied their waste from the windows above, shouting “Gardyloo!” — a corruption of the French gardez l’eau, meaning “watch out for the water.” It was anything but water. Visitors described the smell as something that could knock a person sideways.

At the base of the castle ridge sat the Nor’ Loch — the North Loch — a stagnant body of water that collected runoff from the city above. It served, in effect, as Edinburgh’s open sewer. The city was choking on itself.

The Plan That Changed Everything

In 1752, a civic document called the Proposals for Carrying on Certain Public Works in the City of Edinburgh was written by lawyer George Drummond, then Lord Provost. It argued, bluntly, that Edinburgh needed to expand or decline.

The first step was draining the Nor’ Loch. Work began in 1759. Over several years, the water was removed and the ground levelled. Where a foul marsh had sat for centuries, a wide valley opened up — and with it, the possibility of an entirely new city.

In 1766, Edinburgh’s Town Council held a competition to design the New Town. The winner was James Craig, a young Edinburgh architect. His plan was strikingly simple: a rectangular grid of three wide east-west streets — Princes Street, George Street, and Queen Street — connected by two public squares and crossed by side streets in between.

It was logical, elegant, and ambitious. The council accepted it almost immediately.

A Georgian City Built From Scratch

Construction began in 1767. The first house on the New Town was built that same year on Thistle Court, just off St Andrew’s Square. Today it still stands.

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Over the next fifty years, Edinburgh’s New Town grew block by block. The terraces, crescents, and garden squares that went up were built in the Georgian style — honey-coloured sandstone, tall sash windows, formal proportions, and a sense of deliberate civic pride in every façade.

Charlotte Square, at the western end of George Street, was designed by the architect Robert Adam in 1791. It remains one of the finest examples of Georgian domestic architecture anywhere in Britain. Bute House, the official residence of Scotland’s First Minister, sits at its north side — a Georgian townhouse used by the head of the Scottish Government to this day.

As the New Town rose, Edinburgh’s wealthy residents made the move across. Lawyers, doctors, philosophers, and poets abandoned their cramped Old Town tenements for the light, air, and elegance of the new streets. The Old Town, left behind, began a long decline into poverty that would last well into the twentieth century.

The Athens of the North

By the early 1800s, Edinburgh had earned a nickname: “the Athens of the North.” It was not an idle boast. The city was home to the Scottish Enlightenment — a flowering of intellectual life that produced David Hume, Adam Smith, James Watt, and dozens of other thinkers who reshaped the modern world.

The New Town was their stage. Its streets hosted literary salons, debating societies, and coffee houses where ideas circulated freely. The physical elegance of the city mirrored the intellectual ambition of its residents.

Writers arrived in numbers. Sir Walter Scott lived on Castle Street. Robert Louis Stevenson grew up in Heriot Row. Their stories were set in the streets they walked every day — sometimes the gaslit closes of the Old Town, sometimes the wide Georgian terraces of the new one. Edinburgh gave them both worlds at once.

Two Cities, One World Heritage Site

Today, Edinburgh’s Old Town and New Town exist side by side, separated only by Princes Street Gardens — the park that now sits where the Nor’ Loch once was. From the gardens, you can look up at the castle and the medieval skyline, then turn around and face the Georgian terraces of the New Town.

In 1995, UNESCO designated both together as a single World Heritage Site. The official citation called it “a masterpiece of human creative genius” and noted the contrast between the organic, layered medieval Old Town and the rational, planned Georgian New Town as one of the most striking examples of urban planning in the world.

No other city in Britain — and very few in Europe — can claim two such distinct historical city centres, built centuries apart, still largely intact.

If you want to walk both worlds in a single afternoon, Edinburgh lets you do it. The perfect Edinburgh itinerary takes you from the medieval closes of the Royal Mile to the Georgian squares of the New Town in less than twenty minutes on foot.

What the New Town Tells You About Scotland

The New Town is not just an architectural achievement. It is a statement. Scotland, in the mid-eighteenth century, was trying to show the rest of Britain — and the world — that it could compete on any stage.

The Enlightenment thinkers who walked these streets were asking the same questions. How should a society be organised? What is progress? What does a city owe its citizens?

Edinburgh answered with stone. With broad streets and ordered squares and buildings designed to last. The Nor’ Loch had been a symbol of a city failing itself. The New Town was the city’s reply — built in sandstone, still standing, still inhabited, still one of the most beautiful places in Europe.

You can still walk down George Street on a clear Edinburgh morning, the castle visible at the end of a side street, and feel exactly what it was meant to feel like: like a city that believed, quite seriously, that it could do something extraordinary. And did.

The Old Town is where Edinburgh’s story began. The New Town is where it decided what kind of story it wanted to tell. You need both halves of Edinburgh to understand the whole.

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