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Edinburgh, capital city of Scotland, located in southeastern Scotland with its centre near the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, an arm of the North Sea that thrusts westward into the Scottish Lowlands. The city and its immediate surroundings constitute an independent council area. The city and most of the council area, including the busy port of Leith on the Firth of Forth, lie within the historic county of Midlothian, but the council area also includes an area in the northwest, around South Queensferry, in the historic county of West Lothian.

Physically, Edinburgh is a city of sombre theatricality, with much of this quality deriving from its setting among crags and hills and from its tall buildings and spires of dark stone. Edinburgh has been a military stronghold, the capital of an independent country, and a centre of intellectual activity. Although it has repeatedly experienced the vicissitudes of fortune, the city has always renewed itself. Today it is the seat of the Scottish Parliament and the Scottish Executive, and it remains a major centre for finance, law, tourism, education, and cultural affairs. Area council area, 102 square miles (264 square km). Pop. (2001) city, 431,393; council area, 476,626; (2011) city, 459,366; council area, 482,640.

Character of the city

Although Edinburgh absorbed surrounding villages and the Firth of Forth ports between 1856 and 1920, its aesthetic and political heart still lies in its small historic core, comprising the Old Town and the New Town. The Old Town, built up in the Middle Ages when the fear of attack was constant, huddles high on the Castle Rock overlooking the surrounding plain. The New Town, in contrast, spreads out in a magnificent succession of streets, crescents, and terraces. The medieval Old Town and the Neoclassical New Town were designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1995.

“This profusion of eccentricities, this dream in masonry and living rock is not a drop-scene in a theatre,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, the 19th-century Scottish novelist, essayist, and poet who was born in the New Town, “but a city in the world of reality.” The contrasts that make Edinburgh unique also make it typically Scottish, for, despite its reserved exterior, it is also a city capable of great warmth and even gaiety. Historically, its citizens have also been capable of great passion, especially in matters royal or religious. In 1561, for example, a mob spurred by the fiery Protestant preacher John Knox tried to break into the private chapel in the Palace of Holyroodhouse, where Mary, Queen of Scots (1542–67), newly returned from France, was attending a Roman Catholic mass. In 1637 a riot in the cathedral of St. Giles in protest against a new service book provoked a Scottish revolt against Charles I and precipitated the War of the Three Kingdoms, which engulfed the whole of Britain in the 1640s and ended in Charles’s execution (see Bishops’ Wars; English Civil Wars). In 1736 the burgh nearly lost its royal charter following the lynching of John Porteous, captain of the city guard. The Porteous riots and lynching were a type of violent gesture common to the history of most old cities. Yet, even in this moment of deranged passion, the city manifested its complex character: needing a hanging rope, the mob descended on a shop and bought one.

A city long renowned for a somewhat inflexible respectability—when West Princes Street Gardens were turned over to the general public in 1876, smoking was forbidden—Edinburgh concurrently maintained a fascinating netherworld of ribaldry and drunkenness. A poet, jurist, or novelist of sufficient distinction might succeed in inhabiting both worlds. One who clearly did was William Brodie, a member of respectable society—deacon of the Incorporation of Wrights and Masons and a town councillor—who by night was the mastermind behind a gang of burglars. Brodie was convicted and hanged in 1788 for his crimes, and his double life is reputed to have been part of the inspiration for Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886). Brodie’s Close, a public house on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, is named after him. Such “Edinburgh characters” abounded during the flourishing Neoclassical period of the 18th and 19th centuries known as the Augustan Age, when the city’s authors, critics, publishers, teachers, physicians, and scientists formed an intellectual elite of world influence. With the subsequent relapse of the city into a more provincial role, such noted eccentrics became virtually extinct.

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Landscape

City site

Edinburgh occupies some 7 miles (11 km) of north-facing slope between the Pentland Hills and the broad Firth of Forth estuary, where it merges with the once-independent seaport of Leith. Upthrusts of lava punctuate this slope. One of them, called Arthur’s Seat, the centrepiece of the royal park, has an elevation of 823 feet (251 metres) and dominates the city’s southeastern flank. The valleys between these striking hills were scoured deep and clean by glacial action in the Pleistocene Epoch. Edinburgh has been built on top of and around these obstacles so that the nearer one comes to the city centre, the more spectacular is the juxtaposition of natural and built environment, with terraces of stone confronting soaring thrust.

At the city’s core is the Old Town’s Castle Rock, a plug of black basalt sealing the vent of an extinct volcano. It stands 250 feet (76 metres) above the valley floor and is crowned by the famous Edinburgh Castle, which, subtly floodlit every night, stirs even the habituated townsfolk. Glacial ice once flowed from the west and around the Castle Rock’s flanks, depositing the accumulated debris of a lateral moraine east of the rock to create a crag and tail formation. Along the crest of this tail, and down its steep sides, the Old Town was built from the 12th century onward.

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Some 600 feet (180 metres) north of the Castle Rock, across the valley that is now Princes Street Gardens, lies the New Town, a district that was planned and built in successive phases between 1767 and 1833. It offers a dignified tribute to the international taste of the Enlightenment and to the surveyor’s set square. Its design was overly regular to begin with, but later developments—as can be seen at the west end of Princes Street—paid more respect to natural contours and softened the regimentation of the right angle with curves and crescents. The New Town’s northwestern boundary is roughly the line of Edinburgh’s only substantial stream, the Water of Leith. The stream’s brief course from the Pentlands to the sea provided power for the mills of a series of villages—Dalry, Dean, Stockbridge, Silvermills, and Canonmills—that experienced significant growth from the early 17th century onward. These villages, which sprang up largely as industrial centres with paper and textile mills, are now embedded in the 19th-century matrix of the town, providing fashionable, bijou residences.