Old Town and New Town Edinburgh: Heritage, Streetscapes and Festival Staging

Stand in the valley gardens below Edinburgh Castle and the city’s history is laid out on either side of you. To the south rises the Old Town, a medieval burgh packed along a narrow volcanic ridge, all tall tenements and steep stepped closes; to the north lies the New Town, a planned Georgian grid of broad streets, garden squares and sandstone terraces. Together, Old Town and New Town Edinburgh form a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and every August they become the stage for the city’s festivals. Our Edinburgh Festival Fringe small group tour spends eight nights in Edinburgh, so understanding how these two townscapes were made helps explain why August in Edinburgh feels the way it does.

Old Town and New Town Edinburgh: one World Heritage Site

UNESCO inscribed the Old and New Towns of Edinburgh on the World Heritage List in 1995, and its description captures the contrast neatly. It describes the Old Town as an “inward-looking, defensive walled medieval city of royal palaces, abbeys and organically developed burgage plots”, and the New Town as a “pioneering example of formal planning” from the Enlightenment. One grew piece by piece over centuries on a cramped ridge; the other was drawn on paper and built to a plan within a few generations. Our guide to Edinburgh’s main sights covers the city’s major attractions. This article looks instead at the streets themselves, how they came to be shaped as they are, and how the festivals use them.

The Old Town: a city built on a crag and tail

The Old Town’s form begins with geology. The Castle Rock is the hard core of a volcano that erupted around 350 million years ago. Glaciers later scoured the softer rock around it but left a long tail of material sheltered behind the crag, sloping gently down to the east. That ridge, with steep valleys to north and south, became the line of the burgh’s main street. The castle sat on the crag at the top, and the street ran down the tail towards the abbey and later the royal palace at Holyrood.

What visitors now call the Royal Mile is in fact a sequence of five historic streets: Castlehill, the Lawnmarket, the High Street, the Canongate and the Abbey Strand. For centuries Edinburgh and the Canongate were separate burghs, divided at the Netherbow Port, though the combined route has been known as the Royal Mile since the sixteenth century.

Closes, tenements and a city that grew upwards

The medieval burgh was divided into long, narrow plots, known as tofts or rigs, running down the slopes on either side of the main street. As the population rose, from around 2,000 people in the early medieval period to around 10,000 by 1540, those plots were subdivided and built over, until only narrow lanes, the closes, remained between the buildings. Seen on a map, they branch off the Royal Mile in a herringbone pattern. The City of Edinburgh Council’s conservation appraisal for the Old Town estimates that there were around 400 closes in the mid-eighteenth century and about 100 today.

The town also had nowhere to spread. A defensive wall built in the early sixteenth century, known as the Flodden Wall, confined the burgh to roughly 130 acres for more than 250 years, and the only way to build was up. Tenements rose storey upon storey, and a 1752 report described the houses as built “to a height that is almost incredible”.

Later centuries cut through this dense fabric. A great fire in 1824 destroyed every building on the south side of the High Street between St Giles’ and the Tron.

Bridges were thrown across the valleys to connect the ridge with the ground around it: South Bridge over the Cowgate in the late eighteenth century, and George IV Bridge, with Victoria Street and Johnston Terrace, under an Improvement Act of 1827. Cockburn Street was cut in the mid-nineteenth century under the 1853 Edinburgh Railway Station Act, and Chambers Street and Jeffrey Street followed an Improvement Act of 1867. Down in the valleys, streets such as the Cowgate, once among the finest in the town, were left in the shadow of the new bridges. The Grassmarket, first recorded as a market in 1477, remains the largest open space in the Old Town.

How long is the Royal Mile?

About a mile, running downhill along the ridge from the castle to the Palace of Holyroodhouse. During the festivals it is crowded with performers and audiences, so allow far longer than the distance suggests.

The New Town: order and regularity

By the mid-eighteenth century the Old Town was severely overcrowded. A pamphlet of 1751, Proposals for carrying on certain public works in the city of Edinburgh, argued for a new town on the open land to the north, linked to the old one by a bridge. In 1759 work began on draining the Nor’ Loch, the marshy lake in the valley below the castle, and the council bought land across the valley.

In March 1766 the council announced a competition for an overall plan, asking for order and regularity. It was won by James Craig, then just 23, and his final plan was approved on 29 July 1767. Craig’s design was a simple, confident grid: a central spine of George Street between two squares, St Andrew Square at the east end and Charlotte Square at the west, with Princes Street and Queen Street running parallel on either side. Building began around 1770, and the council soon tightened its control, requiring from 1781 that houses be three storeys over a sunken basement. In 1791 Robert Adam was commissioned to design Charlotte Square, whose palace-fronted elevations made a whole side of the square read as a single grand building; it was completed in 1808. Our article on the Georgian style of architecture explains the classical principles behind these facades.

The first New Town was soon extended. A northern extension was laid out after 1800 by William Sibbald and Robert Reid and building began there in 1803, speeding up after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1822 the Earl of Moray commissioned James Gillespie Graham to draw up a master plan for the Moray Estate. The street elevations were built mainly of finely dressed ashlar in the durable local Craigleith sandstone. The council’s conservation appraisal describes the result as the most extensive surviving example of neo-classical town planning in the world.

How do you get between the Old Town and the New Town?

Across the valley that was once the Nor’ Loch and is now Princes Street Gardens and Waverley Station. The two main crossings are North Bridge, one of the original links between the towns, and the Mound, an artificial causeway built up between about 1780 and 1830 from spoil excavated during the New Town’s construction. There are also stepped lanes and paths through the gardens, but every route involves a climb from the New Town side up to the Old Town ridge.

Festival staging: how the townscape becomes a theatre

Each August the inherited city is pressed into service as a festival setting, and the two towns play very different roles. The Old Town carries most of the noise. The High Street becomes an open-air stage for Fringe street performers; the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo has filled the Castle Esplanade since 1950; and the International Festival runs its programme from The Hub, a former church and General Assembly hall on Castlehill. Many Fringe venues occupy spaces the Old Town’s dense building history left behind, from church halls and courtyards to rooms tucked beneath the bridges; in 2025 the Fringe used 301 venues in all.

The New Town’s broad streets and squares lend themselves to calmer events. The Edinburgh International Book Festival pitched its marquees in Charlotte Square Gardens, inside Adam’s square, until 2019; since 2024 it has been based at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, the former Royal Infirmary on Lauriston Place. St Andrew Square, at the other end of Craig’s plan, is the planned site of the Dunard Centre, a new concert hall intended as a principal venue for the International Festival. Galleries and museums in and around both towns take part in the Edinburgh Art Festival.

There is a pleasing logic in this. The Old Town’s improvised, crowded, vertical spaces suit the Fringe, a festival that grew from uninvited performers finding whatever rooms they could. The New Town’s ordered streets and squares suit more formal gatherings. Walking between them during the festivals, you move from one idea of a city to another in a few minutes.

How much walking does exploring the two towns involve?

A good deal, and much of it on slopes. The tour is graded Level 1, Introductory to Moderate, with around 3 to 5 kilometres of walking a day, some of it on uneven surfaces. In the Old Town that means cobbles, steep closes and steps. Comfortable, well-gripped shoes help, and taxis are worth using for longer journeys across the city.

Seeing the Old and New Towns on a small group tour

The tour begins with an orientation walk with the Program Leader and continues with a Fringe orientation, tickets to four Fringe performances, and visits to the National Galleries of Scotland and the National Museum of Scotland. Free days leave time to explore at your own pace: down a close you passed the day before, along the length of George Street, or out to the Moray Estate’s quiet crescents. Our guide to places to visit in Edinburgh off the beaten track suggests further corners worth finding.

Edinburgh’s two towns record two very different ideas of how a city should be built, and in August both are put to work for the festivals. To experience them at that moment, with a Program Leader to help you find your way and tickets already arranged, the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Small Group Tour travels with up to 16 travellers, and solo travellers are always welcome.