Edinburgh

Scotland

In March 1828, a seventeen-year-old medical student named Robert Knox paid seven pounds and ten shillings for a corpse. It was brought to his private anatomy school on Surgeons’ Square by two Irish immigrants, William Burke and William Hare. Knox received the body without asking questions. Over the next ten months, he would receive fifteen more from the same suppliers, the demand for cadavers far outstripping the legal supply provided by executed criminals. Burke and Hare had found a more efficient method: they murdered people, mostly by suffocation, in a lodging house in the city’s West Port district and sold them to the anatomist. When their crimes were discovered, the subsequent trial and execution exposed a city cleaved between Enlightenment rationality and brutal poverty, a duality etched into its very topography.

This city is built upon the hardened core of a 350-million-year-old volcanic plug, a crag of basalt that resisted the glaciers which carved the softer sedimentary rock around it. To the east, this plug forms a steep, rocky hill descending 80 meters to the flat plain below. To the west, the land slopes more gently, creating a long tail of ridge. This geological formation is the reason Edinburgh exists in its current form; it is called Castle Rock. The fortress at its summit, Edinburgh Castle, commands the only natural land bridge connecting the hill to the ridge to the north, making it defensible from three sides by cliffs. To the south, a steep slope called the Lawnmarket descends to a narrow valley containing a small, now-buried lake called the Nor Loch. Beyond that valley rises another, gentler ridge. The physical city is a story of expansion from the volcanic core onto the surrounding tail and across the valley.

The first known settlers were the Votadini, a Brittonic tribe, who by the 1st century CE had established a hillfort on Castle Rock they called Din Eidyn, the “fort on the sloping ridge.” In 638 CE, the Angles of Northumbria captured it and the name evolved to Edinburgh. The rock offered security and a commanding view over the Firth of Forth to the north and the Pentland Hills to the south, controlling movement along the coastal plain. For centuries, the settlement clung to the spine of the rock, a single street of timber buildings protected by the castle at its head. The land proposed a fortress, and the people responded with a fortified town. In the 12th century, King David I established the royal burgh of Edinburgh, with its legal and commercial privileges, at the foot of Castle Rock. A new town, now known as the Old Town, began to grow along the ridge extending east from the castle, constrained by the valley to the south and swampy ground to the north.

By the 16th century, this confinement led to a singular architectural phenomenon. With the city walls preventing lateral expansion, the only direction to build was up. Tenements rose to ten, twelve, even fifteen stories, among the tallest domestic buildings in the world at the time. These structures were divided vertically into “lands,” with different families occupying each floor. The poorest lived at the top, climbing hundreds of steps daily. The need for sanitation in this densely packed environment created another landmark: in 1749, the city began constructing a bridge to span the Nor Loch valley, not for a road, but to carry a sewer pipe to the new North Field. The bridge was enclosed with buildings, creating a multi-level arcade of apartments and shops. This structure, The Vennel, known as Edinburgh’s “secret street,” still stands hidden within later construction. The valley that was a barrier became a site of engineering ingenuity.

The 18th century brought a fundamental shift. In 1767, a design competition was held for a “New Town” to be built on the empty, drained fields north of the Nor Loch valley. The winning plan by architect James Craig was a geometric grid of wide, straight streets and grand squares, a deliberate Enlightenment contrast to the cramped, medieval Old Town. The construction of the North Bridge in 1772 physically connected the two, allowing the city’s professional and wealthy classes to escape the overcrowded ridge. The New Town was built from the local sandstone, giving it a uniform, golden-gray hue. Its construction was a direct rejection of the land’s earlier dictates; where geography had forced vertical density, economic prosperity and new engineering allowed for horizontal, ordered expansion.

While the New Town embodied reason and order, the Old Town descended into notorious squalor. The exodus of wealth left behind the poor in decaying tenements. Closes, the narrow alleyways branching off the main street of the Royal Mile, became warrens of overcrowded lodging houses. The lack of clean water and sanitation made diseases like cholera endemic. It was in this environment that the body-snatchers, or “resurrectionists,” like Burke and Hare, thrived. The city’s prestigious medical schools, including the University of Edinburgh Medical School founded in 1726, required cadavers for dissection to advance scientific knowledge. The law, however, only permitted the bodies of executed criminals for this purpose. The desperate poverty and social anonymity of the Old Town’s closes provided the perfect hunting ground for murderers who could sell a corpse for the equivalent of months of wages. The 1828 Burke and Hare case was merely the most infamous episode in a decades-long crisis where the city’s pursuit of knowledge collided with its profound social neglect.

The city’s literary culture also mirrored this duality. In the late 18th century, in a quiet square in the New Town, the publisher William Smellie printed the first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, a monument to systematic knowledge. A century later, a few hundred yards away in the shadow of the Old Town, a struggling author named Robert Louis Stevenson walked the same streets, drawing inspiration from the city’s split personality for his 1886 novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson later said the idea sprang from the “strong sense of man’s double being” that Edinburgh’s contrasting façades impressed upon him. The Enlightenment city of philosophy and the Gothic city of shadow were not metaphors but adjacent physical realities.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, the city expanded further across its surrounding hills and into former villages like Portobello and Leith, the latter a major port on the Firth of Forth that was formally incorporated into Edinburgh in 1920. The volcanic geography, however, continued to assert itself. The main railway line from London, arriving in 1846, had to tunnel directly beneath the Castle Rock to reach the city’s first station, a engineering feat that left the historic skyline untouched. Later, the construction of the Scott Monument in Princes Street Gardens in the 1840s, a 61-meter Gothic spire, and the National Monument on Calton Hill in the 1820s, an unfinished replica of the Parthenon, demonstrated a civic desire to ornament the natural landscape with cultural ambition.

The city’s most striking modern intervention continues this dialogue. In 1999, the new Scottish Parliament building was commissioned, with construction completed in 2004 on the site of a former brewery at the foot of the Royal Mile, opposite the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Designed by the Catalan architect Enric Miralles, its form is an abstraction of the land itself: the roof structures resemble upturned boats, a nod to the traditional “scott” fishing vessels, but also evoke the surrounding hills. The complex, fragmented windows mirror the fractured stone of Salisbury Crags, the dramatic cliff face of Arthur’s Seat, the extinct volcano that dominates Holyrood Park. The building does not imitate the castle’s imperious dominance but instead emerges from the ground, a modern response to an ancient landscape.

Today, standing on the esplanade of Edinburgh Castle, the ongoing conversation is visible in every direction. To the north, the ordered Georgian grids of the New Town stretch toward the Firth. To the east, the chaotic spire-strewn skyline of the Old Town runs down the ridge to the modernist Parliament. The land provided a defensive rock, a restrictive ridge, and a fertile plain. The responses were a fortress, a vertical medieval city, an Enlightenment grid, and a devolved legislature. The city’s identity remains tied to this physical tension, a place where the memory of a body snatched from a dark close is never far from the memory of a philosophical treatise written in a sunlit New Town drawing room, both stories rooted in the same unforgiving stone.