Since the plan was first conceived to extend theAncient Royalty of Edinburgh over the fields to thenorth of the city, the New Town has been a conduitfor debates and ideas about progress. Its name –which it quickly earned instead of the original‘Extended Royalty’ – is a clue, especially inrelation to its geographical and semantic opposite:the Old Town. Edinburgh's New Town has recently beendescribed as ‘a sparkle of order and modernity inthe extended metropolis’. The period ofEnlightenment improvement that New Town planning istaken to represent features prominently in Edinburghand Scotland's place marketing. James Craig's 1767New Town plan is reproduced on postcards and teatowels. Together, the Old and New Towns comprise anofficial UNESCO World Heritage site that iscelebrated on Scottish bank notes, along with RobertBurns, Walter Scott and Glenfinnan Viaduct. The NewTown is an important tourist attraction for the cityof Edinburgh, and has even had to ‘resist’ what oneinfluential historian of the New Town has called‘the march of progress’. A. J. Young-son celebratedthe Edinburgh New Town Conservation Committee'spartial success in thwarting a planned modernistvision of twentieth-century retail luxury on PrincesStreet. For Youngson, ‘in the visual conjunction ofOld Town and New Town anyone walking along PrincesStreet today is presented with one of the mosteye-catching views in Europe, and must experience atthe same time a wonderful sense of space and, if heor she has any imagination at all, of the passage oftime’. A more recent publication, Edinburgh New Town: A ModelCity (2015), describes the New Town as‘one of Europe's finest neoclassical neighbourhoods,a triumph of town planning’ that has been ‘carefullyconserved’. Further, the New Town's ‘harmoniousneoclassical format’ is purportedly ‘timeless in itsappeal to human sensibility’ and ‘should be anaspiration to citizens, politicians, planners andarchitects everywhere’.

This was always intended. The New Town's plannerssought to construct something that would stand as auniversal symbol of rational public policy and as anexample of enlightened urban design. But as theforegoing chapters have demonstrated, the ultimateshape, size and tone of the New Town cannot be seenas a straightforward and rational solution to theneeds of a modern city, nor as a natural consequenceof an overcrowded and outdated Old Town.