1 - Projecting: Cadastral Mapping and the Genesis ofthe New Town

Summary

In 1787 the bookseller Charles Elliot moved into ahouse on Queen Street in Edinburgh's New Town. Helived there until he died. Queen Street, which in1787 was still under construction, was a wide avenuelooking out over pasture and corn fields to thenorth. Fifteen years earlier, in April 1772, Elliothad first sold a ‘plan of New Town’ for fiveshillings. This was likely a version of the planproduced in 1767 by the architect James Craig thatfirst projected the now-famous grid of Edinburgh'sNew Town, including Queen Street. But how, why andto what extent did the plan become an accurate andauthoritative projection of an urban future? And how– and why – was it produced in the first place? Toanswer such questions, this chapter explores thegenesis of the New Town and follows the initialstages of New Town planning. It necessarily featuresthe elites of the Scottish Enlightenment: bankers,lawyers, landed aristocracy, a philosopher and otherwealthy individuals who shaped, used and manipulatedthe plan from its very beginning to ensure that theNew Town was built according to a particularvision.

The buyer of the ‘plan of New Town’ in 1772 was aneighteen-year-old named John Stewart. He was from awealthy family, the heir to the Stewart baronetcyand Allanbank estate in Berwickshire. He would latermarry into the wealthiest banking family inScotland. But Stewart was, in March 1772, trainingto be a lawyer. He bought his copy of the New Townplan in the context of an ongoing legal dispute.According to Hugo Arnot, historian of Edinburgh andlawyer by training, the dispute centred on the factthat ‘when many gentlemen had built genteel housesin the New-town, on faith of the plan, they weresurprised to find the spot, appointed for terraces,and a canal, beginning to be covered with mean,irregular buildings, and workhouses for tradesmen’.Included among the fourteen New Town gentlemen whowere offended by the ‘mean, irregular buildings’ andwho, in October 1771, signed a bill of oppositionagainst the Town Council, were the wealthy bankerSir William Forbes and David Hume thephilosopher.