Edinburgh is Britain’s second most visited city and regularly wins awards as a tourist destination and for the quality of its life – ten major Best City awards in the last six years, most recently by Telegraph readers as their favourite British city. It is a one of the most beautiful cities in the world with its famous ‘crag and tail’ skyline and also one of the most intimate; one can walk across it within an hour and within minutes of the centre one is in Holyrood Park and climbing the extinct volcano, Arthur’s Seat.
It is also one which is contradictory, complex and full of surprises; the Old Town with its steep wynds and jumbled tenements glaring across Princes Street Gardens to the elegant, symmetrical squares of the New Town; the sprawling outer estates of Pilton and Silverknowes with their crime and drug problems adjacent to genteel Edinburgh suburbs; a city of unexpected vistas and of eerie alleys, a capital city which has the feel of a town, a bustling metropolis made up of a succession of individual villages.
Visitors are drawn by its beauty, magnificent architecture, its plethora of historical sites, its various festivals, its sixty galleries and five major theatres, its vibrant nightlife and high quality accommodation, restaurants and shopping. Increasingly, especially since its designation as UNESCO’s First City of Literature in 2004 and the publication of the novel The Da Vinci Code with its scenes near Edinburgh, they are also being drawn by its literary associations. Several literary guides to the city have recently been published, there are plans for various literary tours, the Writers’ Museum is due to expand and organisations such as Edinburgh City of Literature, with the aim of making more of Edinburgh’s literary past, have been set up.
Outside of London, Edinburgh has more literary associations than any other part of Britain. Almost every well-known literary figure has visited it whilst three of Britain’s most successful writers – JK Rowling, Alexander McCall-Smith and Ian Rankin – presently live within a mile of each other. The city has inspired over five hundred novels ranging from RL Stevenson’s Dr Jekyl and Mr Hyde to Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting and it is now the fictional crime capital of the world.
Kenneth Graham, author of The Wind in the Willows, and Arthur Conan Doyle were born there but sought fame and fortune in the south, while Compton Mackenzie and Thomas de Quincey spent their last years there though they had no prior connection with the city. Percy Bysshe Shelley came there to be married, William Hazlitt to be divorced, John Buchan worked for the Edinburgh publishers Thomas Nelson while Walter Scott was for many years an Edinburgh lawyer.
RM Ballantyne, who wrote the children’s classic Coral Island, was at Edinburgh Academy just before R.L. Stevenson, Rebecca West was educated at George Watsons Ladies College while Ian Fleming’s character James Bond was sent to the public school Fettes after an indiscretion with a ladies maid at Eton. ‘St Trinians’, immortalised in Ronald Searle’s cartoons, was based on an Edinburgh school of the same name while, perhaps, the best known Edinburgh novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, was inspired by Muriel Spark’s time at James Gillespie’s School for Girls.
Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were sent to convalesce in Edinburgh during the First World War – the inspiration for Pat Barker’s novel Regeneration – where they were visited by Robert Graves. Other literary visitors to Edinburgh have included W.H. Auden, John Betjeman, Robert Burns, Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Washington Irving, Henry James, Tobias Smollett, William Thackeray, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh and William Wordsworth.
Two writers, perhaps surprisingly associated with the city, are Hans Christian Andersen and Jules Verne. Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) visited the city in 1847 where he was entertained widely by, amongst others, James Simpson who discovered chloroform. A plaque marks his stay at 73 East Trinity Road. Verne (1828-1905) is best remembered for Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days but he knew Edinburgh well and both Backwards to Britain and The Underground City have numerous Edinburgh scenes.
A sense of the literary past is always present as the city has changed comparatively little during the last two hundred years and the buildings lived in or frequented by writers are therefore still much as they were. It is also immediately apparent. Many visitors’ first experience of the city is of arriving by rail at Waverley Station (named after Sir Walter Scott’s novel) and emerging in Princes Street with the Scott Monument ahead of them and beyond the Castle.
Edinburgh Castle figures in numerous novels including Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather, RL Stevenson’s St Ives, George Borrow’s Lavengro as well as several recent novels which often have at their centre plots to blow up the Military Tattoo. Almost opposite the Scott Monument in Rose Street stands Milne’s Bar which throughout the 1950s and 1960s was the meeting place of a whole generation of poets dedicated to writing in the Scots tongue.
Behind the Scott Monument is Princes Street Gardens, a grassy oasis of sheltered walkways, rows of inscribed benches, statues – many of them to literary figures – and neatly laid-out flowerbeds. It was in an air-raid shelter in the gardens during the Second World War that the Labour politician and journalist Tom Driberg was arrested for picking up a Norwegian sailor, an episode Compton Mackenzie used in his novel Thin Ice about the precarious life of a homosexual politician.
Almost every street off The Royal Mile which stretches from the Castle to Holyrood Palace at the bottom has some sort of literary association. A few yards down on the north side is James Court where the philosopher David Hume lived, later renting his flat to James Boswell who in turn entertained Dr Johnson there. James Court leads into Lady Stair’s Close, where Burns lodged on his first visit to Edinburgh in 1786, and which is now the site of the Writers’ Museum.
Part of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers is set further down the Royal Mile. Dickens’ wife’s family came from Edinburgh (his father-in-law was a friend of Walter Scott) and the writer knew the city well. He was a frequent visitor, his genius recognised early with the granting of the City’s Freedom while he was still in his twenties, and he was asked to represent the city in Parliament.
And yet Edinburgh is not trapped by its history or literary past. It is a living breathing city, an important financial centre, home of Scotland’s first devolved parliament since 1707, a place where stylish smoky-glass buildings stand easily besides architectural gems of the fifteenth century onwards, where new hotels and restaurants are opening every day and a new international fashion show is due to be staged in April. The port of Leith has been regenerated attracting restaurateurs, housing and office development and plans are afoot to do much the same at Portobello; the airport has been revamped and is now Britain’s fastest growing with regular flights all over Europe whilst the rail journey between Edinburgh and Glasgow could be cut to under twenty minutes if plans for a ‘bullet’ train are approved.
It is no wonder then that it remains a popular choice for business travellers – since 1996 the Edinburgh Ambassadors Programme has attracted over two hundred major conferences to the city generating over £55m in revenue.
