THE NEW TOWN

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George Street

As you walk you will be keeping pace more or less with the order of the first New Town's development: the first cross-street, Hanover Street, was begun in 1784; the second, Frederick Street, in 1786; and the third, Castle Street, six Years later.

One of the joys of George Street is the changing panorama. Like a beacon at the far end of the street you can see the green dome of West Register House in Charlotte Square, which you will see up close near the end of this walk (see p. 146). Looking south, Hanover Street presents the extraordinary picture of the Royal Scottish Academy backed up by the Assembly Hall's twin towers and the spire of the Highland Tolbooth Kirk. To the north, the New Town slopes down to the Firth of Forth and the hills of Fife beyond, a view enhanced at Frederick Street by Playfair's church of St Stephen.

Once the city's financial centre, George Street is now steadily being turned into its most lively upmarket street. All along the street, expensive new bars and restaurants jostle for position with some of the city's most illustrious shops, and some of its grand bank buildings have become spectacular, echoing drinking halls, the largest and most extraordinary of which is the Dome, standing on the site of the old Physician's Hall, its magnificent interior hidden behind a grand columned portico.

As you walk, look up above the shopfronts, where, unlike Princes Street, the street's Georgian origins are intact. Over the first building on the right hand side, the Standard Life Assurance building, the original pediment (1839) includes Steell's sculpture of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Next door is another more modern interpretation of the parable in bronze relief.

A little way along George Street, on the right, is the elegant oval of St Andrew's and St George's Church.

The church was forced to make do with this constricted site after being displaced from St Andrew Square (see above). The New Town's first parish church, its shape is reminiscent of Bernini's St Andrew's in Rome's Quirinale. The elliptical sweep of the interior is certainly beautifully proportioned, and contains modern stained glass and the original boxed pews.

The church is most famous for being the scene of the Disruption in 1843, when Thomas Chalmers (whose statue stands at the crossroads of Castle and George Streets) led 407 ministers out of the Church of Scotland's annual assembly to set up the Free Church-free from the interference of patronage and the Civil Courts. When the two churches reunited again in 1929, they met here for the first time. In 1964 St Andrew's amalgamated with St George's in Charlotte Square, when the latter was converted into West Register House.

Pause by the statue of King George IV and look left up Hanover Street.

You are roughly on a level with Steell's enormous 25-ton statue of Queen Victoria dressed up as Britannia, sitting on top of the Royal Scottish Academy on Princes Street. It's rather grubby now, and is almost camouflaged against the equally blackened stone of the Assembly Hall on the hill behind. The National Gallery of Scotland is tucked away between the two.

Continue along George Street, westwards.

The fine wine merchant Justerini and Brooks, on the right at No.45, stands on the former premises of Blackwood's Magazine, which counted George Eliot among its contributors. The English essayist Sydney Smith, one of the editors of the first number of the Edinburgh Review, stayed next door at No.46. He described Edinburgh as a place of 'odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts and most enlightened and cultivated understandings'.

Opposite are the Assembly Rooms, opened for magnificent society gatherings at the end of the 18th century, and still serving much the same purpose today, albeit with considerably less formality. Its pompous portico by William Burn was a later addition to John Henderson's austere essay in continental classicism.

The last two hundred years have witnessed a procession of the famous and wannabe famous through its doors. Sir Walter Scott announced himself to be the author of the Waverley novels here, which everyone already knew, and William Makepeace Thackeray was nearly Iynched here when he disparaged Mary, Queen of Scots. Dickens gave enormously popular public readings in the Music Hall behind the Assembly Rooms-so popular that in 1861 the organisers oversold tickets several times over and several people were almost suffocated in the crush. He gave the reading anyway and commented later on the remarkable attentiveness of the audience in such discomfort.

No such mishap could occur today. The Assembly Rooms are efficiently run as a year-round venue for a wide range of events, from club nights to poetry readings. They really come into their own, however, at the Festival, when the splendid rooms are converted into a theatrical Fringe megavenue. Further along George Street, just before Frederick Street and the statue of William Pitt, No.60 is marked with a plaque commemorating the visit in 1811 of the radical romantic poet Shelley, on honeymoon with his first wife Harriet Westbrook who committed suicide shortly after. Continuing along the right hand side of the street, you pass two venerable Edinburgh institutions: Aitken and Niven, outfitters to the gentry, and Hamilton and Inches, the city's finest jewellers.

Turn right down North Castle Street {virtually unaltered since the late 18th century), past No.39, once the home of Sir Walter Scott-with a miniature of the statue on the Scott Monument over the door. Turn right into Queen Street.

Queen Street

Queen Street still looks much as Princes Street would have done when it was first built. Most of this long terrace of grand townhouses is now occupied by the offices of insurance companies, accountants, land agents, surveyors and civil engineers, which have left it little altered externally. For a few years after it first went up, rough gorse would have sloped down from here to the mills on the Water of Leith; today the tops of these slopes are more formally landscaped and are known as the Queen Street Gardens, once the private gardens of the Earls of Wemyss, whose townhouse was at No.64, and unfortunately still reserved for the occasional use of local key-holders.

A great scientific discovery was made at No.52, the home of Sir James Young Simpson, pioneer of anaesthesia and the first Scottish doctor to be knighted. One dark afternoon in November 1847, he and his two assistants, Dr Keith and Dr Duncan, were discovered sprawled unconscious beneath his dining room table. Upon recovery, he described his first experiment with chloroform:

Before sitting down to supper we all inhaled the fluid, and were all under the mahogany in a trice, to my wife's consternation and alarm.

The drug became positively fashionable as a clinical tool after Queen Victoria gave birth under its influence. The full story can be explored for free in the Discovery Room (open Easter-Oct Thurs 10-12; or by appointment, (0131) 225 6028). Apart from providing details on Simpson himself, the room also gives a rare glimpse inside a New Town property of the period.

Walk eastwards, past Frederick and Hanover Streets, your progress no doubt slightly hampered by the increase in traffic diverted from Princes Street. At the far end, pause outside No. 9.

This was one of the first houses on the street, designed in 1771 by Robert Adam for the English judge Baron Orde and his society daughters (one of whom was known to have teased David Hume; another readily agreed to be the second wife of the fearsome hanging judge, Lord Braxfield). Their house is now part of the Royal College of Physicians, designed in neoclassical style by Thomas Hamilton on its move down from George Street in 1844. The grand portico at Nos.9 and 10, with its three health-related statues of Hygeia flanked by Aesculapius and Hippocrates, stands out solidly from the rest of the street. Anyone with an interest in matters medical is welcome to visit the library, but more general tours of the quite spectacular interior are only provided for groups by arrangement (call (0131)2257324).

Beyond the college at No.4 are the headquarters of BBC Scotland, on the site of the Philosophical Institution which was founded in 1848 with Thomas Carlyle as its first president.

Pause at the end of Queen Street to admire the extraordinary edifice that is the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.