New Town
Builders in New Town
Builders in Edinburgh New Town, the Georgian streets north of Princes Street, from St Andrew Square and George Street out to the West End terraces.
Neighbourhoods
The New Town is the planned extension north of the Old Town, inside the UNESCO Old and New Towns of Edinburgh World Heritage Site. James Craig’s First New Town is the grid of Princes Street, George Street and Queen Street between St Andrew Square and Charlotte Square. Beyond Queen Street the streets continue as Heriot Row, Great King Street, Northumberland Street and Cumberland Street, then Royal Circus, Moray Place and Ainslie Place. Palmerston Place, Chester Street, Drumsheugh Gardens, Rothesay Place and Melville Street are the western terraces, the part of town often called the West End, and they are covered on this page.
Building stock
The houses are ashlar sandstone terraces with basement areas, railings and Scots slate. Plots are narrow and deep. A main door often serves a stair of flats as well as a former townhouse. Mews such as Circus Lane and Gloucester Lane sit behind the principal streets, originally for stables and now mostly small houses. Private gardens are usually to the rear, and several of the grand squares keep a shared garden in the middle rather than a front drive.
Access and parking
This is the centre of the controlled parking zone. A large number of streets are for residents’ permits, with almost nowhere to leave a lorry. Cobbled mews are single track. Basement stairs and railings sit hard against the pavement, so materials for a lower flat often go down an external stair from the street. George Street and Queen Street are the realistic places to stop, and only where the signs allow it.
Travel from our office
These streets are north of Princes Street, in the middle of Edinburgh. Reaching them from the Gilmerton office at 102 Gilmerton Dykes Crescent means coming up from the south side, across the Old Town bridges, rather than using a suburban junction. The western terraces are the end of that grid nearest Haymarket, not a different town.
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