How the Scots Invented the Modern World

by Arthur Herman

  Economic growth proved to be the engine of change in other ways, as well. When the Glasgow Town Council decided to demolish the city’s old West Port in 1749, it opened up croft land west of Glasgow to development and purchase. Many leading tobacco lords bought parcels for their mansions, with gardens opening onto the new streets laid out north to south: Virginia Street, Havannah Street, Jamaica Street, Queen Street, Dunlop Street (named after the merchant family), Buchanan Street (ditto). The Buchanans themselves had built their residence, Virginia House, slightly east of these later residential developments, with an arrow-straight drive leading to the front door. The tide of urbanization soon swept on past them, however, dotting the vicinity with houses and shops, and their long drive became Virginia Street instead.

  In 1740, 17,000 people lived in Glasgow. In 1780 the population had swelled to over 42,000. Developers had laid out thirteen new streets and squares in the new western district of Glasgow, in hopes of attracting merchants and other homebuilders to an affluent urban lifestyle very different from that of the crowded old inner city. Streets were wide (twenty-three meters across in the case of Jamaica Street), with flagstone sidewalks on either side, and urban planners banned unpleasant or noisome businesses, such as skinning or tanning factories, and tallow and soap works. Surveyor James Barrie laid out an entire residential suburb on the Ramshorn and Meadowflat Crofts, by extending Miller, Queen, and Buchanan Streets northward. Back Cow Loan, the rural dirt track Prince Charlie had used to enter Glasgow in December of 1745, became Ingram Street, in honor of tobacco merchant and financier Alexander Ingram.

  As with Foulis’s academy of the arts, not everything went according to plan. Construction took time, lots sat empty for long periods, and conditions in the crowded old city remained a nuisance. But a new middle-class urban community was taking physical, as well as economic, shape. Its institutional emblem was Glasgow’s Chamber of Commerce, the first in Britain, formed on New Year’s Day, 1783, with a hefty round of rum toasts. Its more obvious and visible emblem was Barrie’s George Square, laid out in his Meadowflats development between Queen and Frederick Streets. Unfortunately, by the time building actually began at Meadowflats in 1787, Glasgow had been upstaged by another, even more successful design for the new urban lifestyle: Edinburgh’s New Town.

  II

  “Look at those fields,” George Drummond said to a young friend who was standing beside him at a window looking north of Edinburgh Castle. It was 1763. Drummond, the belated hero of the city’s failed resistance against the Jacobites, was approaching the end of his fourth consecutive, and last, term as Lord Provost. He was seventy-five and the most revered figure in Edinburgh. Certainly no one laughed at the commander of the Lawnmarket volunteers now.

  Drummond was staring out across the North Loch, at the empty area beyond that residents knew by the charming name of Barefoot’s Park. He pointed and turned to his guest.

  “You, Mr. Somerville,” he said, “are a young man and may probably live, though I will not, to see all these fields covered with houses, forming a splendid and magnificent city.” Drummond explained how this could be done, by draining the North Loch and building a causeway linking it to the old town. “I have never lost sight of this object since the year 1725,” he confessed, “when I was first elected provost.” Now Drummond’s dream was about to come true.

  Everyone recognized that as modern cities went, Edinburgh left much to be desired. It was “that most picturesque (at a distance) and nastiest (when near) of all capital cities,” according to the poet Thomas Gray. Clustered at the foot of Edinburgh Castle, the city earned its nickname “Auld Reekie” from the forest of chimneys belching smoke from fires that burned coal at the rate of five hundred tons a day, choking residents and visitors alike. Its central avenue, the so-called Royal Mile, was a dark, narrow canyon of rickety buildings, some stacked ten or even twelve stories high, thronging with people, vehicles, animals, and refuse.

  To visualize what Edinburgh was like in 1763, one has to imagine a network of shadowy, twisting streets, each branching out into a bewildering labyrinth of wynds (or through alleys) and dead-end courts and closes, all lined with blackened, narrow-faced houses and tenements. The typical tenement saw several families jammed together on each floor, all sharing a common stairway—the servants and lower classes occupying the lowest and highest stories, and the upper and middle class—including nobles and supreme court justices like Kames and Auchinleck—ensconced in the middle. Daniel Defoe said, “I believe that in no city in the world so many people have so little room.” Sanitation was nonexistent. Pigs, sheep, and the occasional cow wandered the pavement. A familiar figure in the neighborhood was the “Wha’ wants me?” man, who carried a portable toilet (with small, discreet black curtain) for the use of passersby. For residents, a cry of “Gardy loo!” (from the French: “Prenez garde à l’eau!”) from an overhead window was the only warning before a chamber pot was emptied on the heads of anyone in the street or courtyard.

  When Defoe visited, Edinburgh still had a population of less than thirty thousand. By 1755 it had grown to almost sixty thousand, all crowded into the same tight, medieval urban space. To relieve the congestion, citizens had constructed some new buildings and carried out renovations of others. After a disastrous fire, Parliament House had been extensively rebuilt. The Royal Infirmary had gone up in 1727, and the Edinburgh Exchange in 1753 (both involved architects from the Adam family). There was even an attempt to create a couple of model residential developments, one at James’s Court in the late 1720s and the other at George Court. One of the first homeowners there was Sir Walter Scott’s father. But the truth was that there was simply no room for any extensive building in the confines of the old city, which was also, thanks to overcrowding, a natural breeding ground for disease and epidemics.

  Now, in the flush of confidence following the defeat of the Forty-five, the Edinburgh Town Council, under Drummond’s prodding, decided to do something about the congestion. It proposed buying up enough land north of the city to permit the construction of what would eventually be an entirely new city, to be called the New Town. Its goal was “to enlarge and improve this city, to adorn it with public buildings,” to celebrate Edinburgh’s growth of “husbandry, manufacturers, general commerce, and the increase of useful people.” The proposal concluded with this stirring exhortation to loyal Scotsmen:

  What greater object can be presented to their view, that of enlarging, beautifying, and improving the capital of their native country? What can redound more to their honour? What prove more beneficial to SCOTLAND and by consequence to UNITED BRITAIN?

  With this in view, in March 1766 the city fathers sponsored a competition for developing the one hundred or so acres of land above the North Loch as a single residential area. Architects and builders could submit whatever kinds of plans they wished. The only requirements were that there had to be room for two churches, and that each house had to be a maximum height of three stories totaling forty-eight feet from basement to wall-head, to give the New Town an even skyline.

  Three months later the award went to a twenty-one-year-old mason named James Craig. The choice seems odd. He was certainly no rising star as an architect; his only other claim to fame, then or later, was that he was the nephew of poet James Thomson. Yet personal connections—the standard “it’s not what you do, but whom you know”—seem to have played no part in the decision.

  Craig’s plan was simple, almost mechanically so. It consisted of a gridiron of three principal longitudinal avenues intersected by a series of north-south streets, with two large open squares at either end. Its real virtue, however, was that Craig had grasped at once the political agenda behind the New Town proposal. It showed in his choice of street names—George Street, Hanover Street, Princes Street (after the Prince of Wales and his brother the Duke of York) and Queen Street—and the names he gave to the two open squares: St. Georges Square, after the patron saint of England, and St. Andrews Square, after the patron saint
of his native Scotland. Two east-west streets were named after the national flower of each kingdom, Rose Street and Thistle Street. Craig capped it all by laying out the streets and avenues in the shape of a Union Jack (the town council finally decided that was going too far and modified the design into its present shape).

  Nevertheless, the point was made. The New Town would commemorate the new Whig Scotland, a modern commercial society that was to be the equal partner of its neighbor to the south, with Edinburgh its modern capital.

  When Craig learned he had won the competition, he printed up a copy of the plan for the public to see, and put at the top a passage from his uncle’s poem “Liberty”:

  August, around, what Public Works I see!

  Lo! Stately Street, lo! Squares that court the breeze!

  See long Canals and deepened Rivers join

  Each part with each, with the circling Main

  The whole enlivened Isle.

  When Thomson had composed the poem in 1736, the only place in “the whole enlivened Isle” of Britain to find “stately Streets” and elegant squares had been in England. Now, Craig and the Edinburgh Town Council were saying, it was Scotland’s turn.

  Development got under way almost at once. The first building, the Theatre Royal, went up in 1768—a monument to refined taste and polite culture, and a rebuke to the old Presbyterian culture that had condemned and banned “the lies of the theatre.” In 1772 the North Bridge connecting the New Town with the Old Town was finished, launching another spurt of development that did not let up until the American Revolution. Once peace returned in 1783, the rest of the development filled in fast, until only the far western quadrant remained.

  Who moved in? Most of the buyers of building lots, or feus as they were called, were members of Edinburgh’s commercial class. Only one great aristocrat, Sir Laurence Dundas, built himself a mansion in the New Town facing St. Andrews Square (today it houses the Royal Bank of Scotland). Otherwise, unlike similar residential developments in London or in France, the New Town left no room for large, aristocratic residences or private parks. Its residents were by and large representatives of the new Scotland: merchants (including many members of the Town Council itself), bankers, well-to-do master craftsmen, professional men, clerics, and professors from the university.

  Purchasing the grounds and building a house of the acceptable height and in the New Town’s standard yellow-gray sandstone was expensive—around two thousand pounds—but not prohibitively so in the affluent Edinburgh of the 1770s and 1780s. Coach builder John Home (no relation to the writer) bought his lot on the south side of Princes Street; wright John Young, who was also a member of the Town Council, initially bought on George Street, although the city had to buy the lot back from him in order to build St. Andrews Church. The church’s architect, William Pirnie, liked the neighborhood so much that he, too, bought and built in the New Town. Upholsterer John Brough was another resident; so was the philosopher David Hume.

  Hume decided to move out of his home in James Court because it had become too small. He bought a lot on the northwest corner of St. Andrews Square, one block north of Princes Street. He liked the spot because of the view: like Queen Street to the north, Princes Street had houses on only one side of the street, so that residents looked onto gardens and the picturesque (at least at a distance) view of Edinburgh proper, now dubbed the Old Town. Hume planned for himself a house, coach-shed, and stables, and set to work finding a builder. “I am engaged in building a house,” he wrote to a friend, “which is the second great operation of human life.” The first, he explained, was marriage (Hume was a bachelor). What finally arose was a tidy and confortable urban town house—“a small house,” he used to say, although “a large house for an author.” Hume let his old place to James Boswell, and happily settled into life in his fashionable new neighborhood. “Our New Town,” he wrote enthusiastically to a correspondent, “exceeds anything you have in any part of the world.”

  Edinburgh’s New Town was, and still is, a model of successful urban planning (although, interestingly, it took almost twenty years before it began to break even). It is the model, one might almost say the ideal, of all middle-class residential suburbs and “planned communities,” from Milton Keynes and Hampstead in England to Scarsdale (New York) and Reston (Virginia). It combined elegant urban living with beautiful natural views, charming, flower-lined parks, and discreetly convenient shops, taverns, and oyster houses clustered around Shakespeare Square. It formed a coherent, visually harmonious community, yet was open to all.

  Two groups, and two only, were left out. The first were aristocrats, since there was no space allotted for their usual mansions and parks. Although some did eventually buy and build, particularly in later stages of the development, the New Town’s rule required that their houses could look no different from, or any larger than, those of their middle-class “tradesmen” neighbors.

  The second group was the laboring masses and working poor. Increasingly, the Old Town became their preserve, as more and more wealthy people left its narrow, teeming streets to find a place in the wide-open spaces north of the city. Class division in Edinburgh was no longer vertical (servants and laborers in the attic, well-to-do in the middle, artisans and shopkeepers at street level) but horizontal. A distance, physical as well as cultural, had opened up between those who were affluent enough to escape the dirty and unpleasant “inner city” and escape to the suburbs, and those who were not. To us, it is a familiar story, even depressingly so. Without knowing it, Edinburgh’s New Town had opened a new chapter in modern urban history, the social and cultural costs of which we are still struggling to overcome.

  In the 1780s, however, this class segregation was one of the things that made moving to the New Town so appealing. Demand for lots was running high when the city fathers prepared to develop the last and westernmost section of Craig’s original plan, Charlotte Square. That development would make the New Town even more famous, by linking it to the single most important architect in Britain: Robert Adam.

  III

  Robert Adam transformed the art of building in the modern world, and it is worth taking time to understand how and why.

  His father, William Adam, born and bred in Kirkcaldy in Fife, “had established himself the universal architect of his county.” He was Master Mason of North Britain for the Board of Ordnance, and had executed famous commissions across the country, including the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh and the Glasgow University Library. But William Adam’s interests extended beyond just architecture. He invested his money in the Pinkie coalfields, the manufacturing of Dutch pantiles, and a brewery, as well as a large landed estate, which he named Blair Adam, near Fife. He belonged to that first generation of Scottish “improving” landlords who were remaking the face of the rural Lowlands. From their father, Robert Adam and his brothers learned a very important lesson. It was not enough for an architect to make beautiful or visionary buildings; he must also make a lot of money.

  William Adam’s own reputation rested on his connection to the new, sophisticated architectural style coming up from London, the style called Palladian after the Renaissance Italian architect Andrea Palladio. Although its best-known exponents were aristocratic English amateurs such as Lord Burlington, many of the finest examples of the style came from the brains and drawing tables of Scotsmen working in England, such as James Gibbs (a former student of Christopher Wren, and builder of London’s St. Martin-in-the-Field) and Colen Campbell.17 Campbell had even put together a popular and influential book of plates highlighting the trend, called Vitruvius Britannicus. It showed how British builders of large houses and public buildings were moving away from French and Italian models to create a new classical architecture that was also distinctly “British”—hence the book’s title. The book’s success was yet another example of how Scottish intellectual discipline and energy could take an English idea or insight and turn it into a powerful instrument for remaking the intellectual, social, political, or in th
is case visual, landscape.

  The hallmarks of this British Palladian style were clean lines (lots of smooth stone walls and friezes shorn of excess frills or decoration) and monumentality: massive porticos with large classical pillars or pilasters, topped by gleaming white round domes in the manner of Rome’s Pantheon, and flanked by row upon row of marble steps. Everything was designed to impress the onlooker with the grandeur of the building as well as the importance of its wealthy owner. Scotsmen Campbell and Gibbs used it to great effect in England, but it was William Adam who made it the fashionable style in Scotland as well, beginning with his renovations in the late 1720s of Hopetoun House, the country residence of the well-connected Hope family.

  William remained loyal to the Palladian canon all his life. Porticos and domes, deeply cut lines and decorative motifs, heavy window surrounds with double flanked giant pilasters on either side—whether public building or private residence, it did not matter. Everything had to impress, and everything had to conform to the classical order as defined by Palladio in his books on architecture. Yet it was precisely this fashionable and successful style that his sons would rebel against, beginning with Robert.