A competition announced 14 years later to find an architect was won by the unknown James Craig, still only 27. His plan was for a classic grid pattern, with provision for gardens – still a new idea in the 18th century.

Two magnificent squares would be focal points: Charlotte Square and St Andrew Square, with the linking George Street adding the patron saint of Scotland to that of England. Other street names would further symbolise the Union and glorify the House of Hanover. Parallel to George Street, Princes Street (then known as the Lang Gait) would look out on the Castle; while Queen Street, also with houses on one side, was to have a clear view north.  Between, designed for trades and craftsmen, ran the more modest Rose and Thistle Streets, named after the floral emblems of England and Scotland. The intersecting streets, due north and south, created what Stevenson later called 'draughty parallelograms'.

The best architects of the day designed a mix of large-scale public buildings and private dwellings, ranging from tenements (flats with a common stair) to multi-storey town houses. In George Street the fashionable Assembly Rooms became a focus of social life. Here Walter Scott revealed that he was 'the anonymous author of Waverley'. Charles Dickens also read here, lionised on his Edinburgh visits. Briefly resident at No. 60 were Percy Bysshe Shelley and 16-year old Harriet Westbrook with whom he had eloped. The narrator of Frankenstein, by Shelley's second wife Mary was struck by 'the beauty and regularity of the New Town'.

In Queen Street's Philosophical Institution, John Ruskin delivered his famous 1853 lectures, urging constant vigilance in order to preserve the architectural standards of the city. A few years later Kenneth Grahame, author of Wind in the Willows was born in Castle Street. Nearer our own day novelist Eric Linklater had his hero Magnus Merriman lived in one of Queen Street's 'row of tall, flat-fronted houses whose residential dignity had been somewhat impaired by the invasion of offices and a few shops of a superior kind'.

The classic symmetry of the New Town was part of a desire to emulate the Ancients... to render Edinburgh a 'heavenly city of philosophers'. The shining lights of the time were not just literati but notable in the sciences, philosophy, law and the other arts. Yet something of a social chill came to overhang this universal vision, preventing the inter-mingling of people as the Enlightenment had hoped. Apart from the stark contrast between the New Town and the Old which persists to this day, snobberies came to permeate the New Town. An internal hierarchy, of 'east-windy, west-endy' emerged, and. from it stemmed Edinburgh's reputation as either a prim spinster, or a dowdy dowager, head-in air and steeped in the past.

Division and sometimes conflict also persisted down the centuries, between those who spoke and wrote in English, and those who advocated Scots as Scotland's literary tongue.  In the 1950s and 60s Rose Street acquired a bohemian reputation, as the haunt of writers and ne'er-do-weels (often one and the same) of both camps. Milnes Bar, at the junction with Hanover Street, was the locus of poets central to the self-styled 'Scottish Renaissance': Norman MacCaig, Sydney Goodsir Smith, Robert Garioch and the influential Hugh MacDiarmid; with forays from Tom Scott, and folklorist Hamish Henderson. This was only fitting, in a city where a couple of centuries before, Scott's son-in-law Lockhart had declared poets 'as plentiful as blackberries'.

Other favoured watering-holes were the Abbotsford and the Café Royal off the West End of Princes Street, with their more ornate interiors, island bars and mirror-work, still preserved. Today the Oxford Bar - towards the east end of the town in Young Street is frequented by the hugely popular detective writer Ian Rankin and his ubiquitous Inspector Rebus.

This material was commissioned and produced by Edinburgh World Heritage and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust, with support from the Scottish Arts Council.  The scripts were written by Edinburgh poet and author, Stewart Conn, and performed by Shonagh Price and Donald Smith, with additional editorial material by Donald Smith.

All material is copyright Edinburgh World Heritage and Edinburgh UNESCO City of Literature Trust unless otherwise stated.

© Alexander (Sandy) Moffat’s ‘Poets' Pub’, Scottish National Portrait Gallery