Edinburgh’s Map, Explained

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00:00 Intro
01:19 The Geology
03:54 The Old Town
06:23 Ad Break
08:14 A Unique Town
11:24 How to Expand
14:31 The New Town
16:15 The Scottish Enlightenment
17:02 Becoming a Modern City

Get Christopher’s book: https://www.amazon.com/Edinburgh-Mapping-City-Chris-Fleet/dp/1780272456

Maps from The National Library of Scotland: https://maps.nls.uk/

Resources: https://danielsimssteiner.notion.site/Edinburgh-Resources-9c1c85f515124c9db7a815b103393878?pvs=4

Some tunes from Milne: https://linktr.ee/Georgeliam64

[Music] if you take a moment to look closely at the map of Edinburgh it won’t take long to see it split into there’s a very clear division between the old town and the new town between the two is this Garden but if we’re just looking top down at a map like this we’re missing more than half the story they’re divided by this big depression in the ground over 20,000 years ago glaciers carved the Scottish landscape in a way that would make the shape of this city almost inevitable [Music] [Music] after filming my last video about the map of London I took the most beautiful train from London up to a place with more words for me to mess up what’s up Tik Tok I’m in Edinburg right now wank what Edinburough to kind of make two syllables out of the bur at the end because the word bur in Scotland is usually pronounced as burra I found Christopher Fleet because I wandered into a bookstore and saw this book which obviously caught my eye and Chris is one of the authors my main job is working as a murator in the National Library of Scotland Edinburgh exists where it is because it lies within the field of an extinct volcano this big open spot on the map is Holy Roode Park which has never been developed and this is home to Arthur’s seat which is the eroded remains of this ancient volcano it’s the highest point in the whole area so I start off my trip by hiking to the top to get a view of the entire city at breakfast this morning I told my waiter that I was going to hike up to Arthur’s seat and he said don’t die the heat it’s 67° out here right now I think I’m probably here during the perfect perfect weather it’s amazing it was for centuries used as a royal hunting Forest now the term Forest is not intended to imply anything with uh dense Woodland but would have been used for hunting game particularly dear by the 18th century uh the Royal youth had uh certainly declined and it became actually unusually a deta sanctuary so people who had fallen into that were effectively imprisoned in holywood park this volcano Left Behind deposits of hard rock that differed from the soft sediment that surrounded them then 20,000 years ago during the Ice Age massive glaciers scraped across the top of the land and took a lot of the soft sediment with them but Left Behind These hard rocks or Crags as they’re known but if you look at an elevation map of Edinburgh you can actually see the the direction that these glaciers were moving these volcanic plugs form significant barriers to the ice and created this crack an tail landscape structure these cags acted as a shield for the soft sediment behind them creating a safe pocket for some of it to remain in Edinburgh one of these specifically stands out and this dense Rock standing above most of the landscape with just one way to the top was the perfect spot for a castle edma castle owes its status and owes this fantastic defensive position because of the fact that it’s on this hard B saltic plug its position in the greater landscape also plays a role in the significance of Edinburgh Edinburgh has no natural Harbor it’s Harbor has always been Lee which is over a mile away and has its own very separate history Edinburgh Castle is the heart of Edinburgh this hill or crack has been inhabited since the Iron Age but the oldest surviving structure in all of Edinburgh is a small 13x 30t Chapel at the top of this rock St Margaret’s Chapel has watched the construction of this castle in the 12th century and the birth of Edinburgh on this Ridge the early position of Edinburgh was a great site defensively but it also created problems for expanding over time and for many centuries Edinburg was really a one street town okay we’re in it now now you can tell where you are this street is now known as the Royal Mile and is kind of literally the spine of Edinburgh on one end you have the castle at the top and at the other end you have the Palace of holy Roode now the Palace of holywood house is the Royal Palace in Scotland that was founded in the 16th centur Cy but it’s on the site of an earlier Abbey holy rude Abbey technically dates back 2 years before St Margaret’s Chapel but isn’t surviving since centuries later it was destroyed and burned but the castle on one end and the Abbey on the other marks these two distinct areas of Edinburgh there were two separate buroughs originally Edinburgh focused on the castle and St Gil Church which were at the top end of what is now the Royal M the other was the burrow of Canon gate and this is the burrow that has the Palace of holywood house in it and it’s very much the lower half of the royal mile even though the Royal mile is referred to as just one road it’s technically made up of four different roads the main two of them being High Street which comes down from the castle and the other being Cannon gate which leads to the Hollywood Palace and they met at a major port which was effectively a large defensive structure there was more of a ceremonial structure by the 18th century called the nethero port but it was a very important dividing line between these two barrows at this intersection today there are brass markers in the ground that show where this gate once stood so although you can walk today as one continuous route they only connect because these two separate burough came together I do my very best to make these videos as accurate as I possibly can but even then I still get things wrong River Tams along the river Tams this was known as the tames tunnel and you guys love to let me know which is totally chill because I think it’s awesome to have an environment where we can all be contributing and sharing unfortunately not all environments are like that especially today’s news landscape and that’s why I’m incredibly grateful for today’s sponsor ground news ground news is the tool I use to help me understand the news they pull from over 50,000 sources and then help you understand the bias the factuality and the ownership of these different sources 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strategic position between the two made it not only a Target but is also why it developed into the capital in addition to the castle a Royal Palace was built there there were courts of Justice there were increasing elements of the state that allowed Edinburgh to claim its status as a capital city but no one actually decided at some point okay it’s going to be Edinburgh the red lines on this 1930s map show where these walls once stood the existing roads in central Edinburgh were often built up to those walls and so those roads that survive today as you can see from the map uh are very much following the lines of the original Walls by way the 17th certainly the 18th centuries there was no need for them any longer and they were great source of building material so generally I think a lot of them were systematically pulled [Music] down I’m quickly learning that there’s two terms we’re going to come across a lot one is a close and one is a wind or wind wind or wind these are Scottish terms to describe a specific kind of alley and the reason these aren’t your average Alleyways is because the buildings aren’t your average buildings this one here this is St Giles and just in front of it that’s called the Parliament House now that’s 14 stories high no matter how much the city grew the population kind of had to stay on this Ridge so this led to some intense population density both sides of the royal mile had really small buildings these buildings along the Royal mile were some of the first high-rise buildings in the world the way the land was feed encouraged financially this building upwards so if a building was one story on the Royal mile it had to be built up several stories on the back just to match that same level this led to a lot of underground or deep cellers that had just been built on top of over and over and you can actually take a tour of one of these I went to Mary King’s clothes which is the big tourist attraction and I was nervous that it was going to be kind of a tourist trap but it was actually really cool and they take you down into these closes that have been built on top of since the medieval times so by the mid 18th century it was so dense and overcrowded there were big health problems and overcrowding problems and this created this desire to create this new [Music] town but the geology that made Edinburgh possible is also what made it so difficult to expand south of the city there was a big Marshland west of the city were the remains of this volcano Arthur’s seat and to the north was another volcanic plug which is Calton Hill and just west of it was the best Prospect for where to build this new town even though it’s distant from the original old town it’s on the crest of a hill but there was a major problem these two areas were split by the norlock nlock is really just the Inland freshwater so you could call in a lake norlock or north lake is now just a beautiful garden this is Prince Street Garden and is actually where I took a surprise nap after eating my ice cream but it took a few major things to make this beautiful Park happen there were a long series of attempts to properly drain the norock Not only was this Tech Al difficult but there’s also this map that shows all the land disputes of who would own this land that was now created from the draining of the lake there’s almost a sheer Cliff drop that goes down to where the norlo so isn’t somewhere where you could easily perambulate down into this ditch and go back up again you have to Traverse it by going further down away from the castle and then find a a route that that go across an elevated area that took about 30 years to build up called the mound which is uh this area that bridged the uh depression of the noar this is now where the Scottish National Gallery is and out front there’s this model of the city that I found way sick it also required investments in the right kind of bridges to uh run over into the new town and these were quite significant undertakings as well of these three things the creation of Northbridge probably had the largest impact for to connect to High Street space was made by opening up some of the buildings on the north side of the old town this also led to the creation of the complimentary South Bridge which together now create the main cross axis for the Royal mile it became necessary to bridge the cowgate it wasn’t quite like the norlock because it wasn’t standing water but it was a very deep ravine this kind of has a weird side effect because Northbridge and Southbridge are both crossing the ridge that Edinburgh was created along so the roads curved down and cowgate lies at a much lower elevation now because the buildings were all built up on either side you suddenly find you walk along stare over the edge of the bridge itself and deep down is the real ground level these two roads together literally Bridge the gap for an extending Edinburgh but there was one more major motivation behind the design of this new Georgian Town Eden needed to demonstrate it was loyal honestly this history is pretty long and confusing but from what I understand here’s what happened in 1707 Great Britain was formed between England and Scotland and then like 40 years later some people who were both Scottish and Irish joined together and there was something called the Jacobite uprisings where they invaded England and they tried to take the British crown and Edinburgh had to be like hey we’re not with them we love being a part of Great Britain and so they built this new town and designed it to show their loyalty to England and Great Britain and the new town was very much planned to glorify the Monarch the original plan for it was actually a Union Jack but it wasn’t practical on the ground so it was exchanged for a simple grid with street names to nod to the union of Scotland and England like Rose Street which is the symbol of England and thistle Street which is the symbol of Scotland and then straight down the middle was George Street for King George III this clean rectilinear grid stands in stark contrast of The Irregular crooked streets of the Old Town creating these two very visibly distinct sections of the city a few decades later this new town continued building but broke this grid pattern and eventually bumped into the water of leth which I have to say I walked along and is one of the most beautiful walks I’ve maybe gone on [Music] ever but beyond all of this design the most interesting thing of Edinburgh is what came out of it Edinburgh was very much an important sensor for the Scottish enlight and beds and this had a number of different facets it was a philosophic iCal ideological and cultural movements in the 18th century the features of Edinburgh that we’ve been talking about actually played a role in the Scottish Enlightenment the first of them being holy Roode park by studying the strata of the rocks in this park James Hutton developed a theory that would become foundational for modern geology for me the most interesting part of the Scottish Enlightenment was the advancements in medicine a ton of discoveries were made in Edinburgh that have literally changed the world like the discovery of Chlor form and advancements in germ Theory as the city moved through the 19th century the need for a train station grew and there was really only one place to put it Waverly station is nestled in Prince Street Garden between the old town and the new town a lot of other things had stly may we for that as well as new routs in terms of roadways constructed to meet with the station one of those being of course Coburn streets this street that cursed down from the Royal Mile right down to wavely that feels a very natural Street to walk along but a completely artificial street that are only put in to uh connect with the new station from the mid 19th century this is also where I got my ice cream that I ate before my nap at Prince Street Garden and if you’ve ever waited in a line alone for ice cream it’s a humbling experience it’s impossible to go to Edinburgh and it’s impossible possible to make a video about Edinburgh without mentioning Sir Walter Scott he had a very long influence not just on Edinburgh but on white of Scotland a beautiful Monument to this Scottish author stands on Prince Street and you can actually climb to the top of it the Scot Monument Edinburgh is really quite an awesome thing to look at incredible in its size and scope in fact this train station in the old norlock is named Waverly station for one of his books actually about the jacobites uprising that I talked about earlier even though the new town had been built and the city was expanding the old town was still very overcrowded and very unsanitary and in the 19th century it became one of the worst slums in Europe really quite shocking levels of deprivation with people stacked inside these very tall tenaments Not only was it unsanitary but it was just all around unsafe in the 19th century there was both a massive fire and one of the buildings just collapsed in on itself and they brought in this medical officer of Health a very intelligent enlightened man called Little John Henry Little John was a Pioneer in the field of Public Health after extensively studying the illness and death rates in the old town he and his research inspired an act for the Improvement of the City of Edinburgh the main goal was to decrease the density of housing in the old town to dramatically improve this problem a very very high levels of mortality in the central area of Edinburgh this map shows the proposal for several streets to be constructed through these dense houses but really only this one came to fruition which became Jeffree Street they would literally bulldo through some of these tenaments but allow remaining areas to be pierced by light and by better air the Edinburgh that I experienced that exists today did not come easily but all of these little factors with a million more have created a beautiful city to wander around huge thank you to Christopher for helping me with this video I want to plug his book again which is linked in the description his work that he does at the National Library of Scotland is available online I’m going to put the link in the description and you can go look at over 500 maps of Edinburgh and zoom in and see all the interesting things that I wasn’t able to cover in this video thank you so much for watching this it means the world please give this video a like subscribe to the channel share this with your friends and family it helps me a lot if you’re interested in helping even further I have my patreon Linked In the description below where I post these videos ad free and you can be a part of that Community I just did a little giveaway and they got one of the backpacks and uh even if you don’t check out the patreon I’ll see you here in another video super soon peace I’m not going to lie this place is so serene I’ve kind of forgotten my mission I’m not really trying to work right now I’m just trying to be so this is a Vibe big fan big big big fan of this place