A short field note from a March 2026 morning in Edinburgh's New Town, looking at fanlights, paint colours and the discipline of the eighteenth-century terrace.
Edinburgh on the morning of the eleventh of March 2026: clear, cold, the wind from the firth. I walked from York Place down Dundas Street as far as Royal Circus and then up through Great King Street to Drummond Place. The light was good — the low, almost horizontal light that the city in early spring is famous for — and the sandstone fronts of the New Town were doing what they do, which is hold their proportion.
The discipline of the terrace, which is the central architectural achievement of the New Town, is the discipline of repetition with very small variations. Each house on Great King Street is, at one level, identical to the next. Three bays wide, three storeys plus a half-floor at street level, a fanlight over the door, a railed area below. At another level, no two are the same: the paint of the door, the polish of the lead, the curtain or the shutter or the open glance into a hall.
I stopped at a black door with a brass plate so worn the name was no longer legible, and stood for a long moment looking at the fanlight. The fanlight is the most generous gesture of the Georgian house: a half-circle of glazed light above the door, framed in lead, often with delicate radial bars or a small central motif. This one was plain — a simple radial — but the glass was original, slightly green, full of small bubbles, and the morning was passing through it onto the stone floor of the hall inside.
A woman came out with a dog. She did not say good morning. I did not expect her to.
What the terrace teaches
There is something a row of houses like this knows that contemporary residential architecture has, with very few exceptions, forgotten. It is that variety is a function of small things, not of large ones. The Georgian street is not interesting because each house is different; it is interesting because each house is the same, and the small differences — the colour, the door furniture, the half-open shutter — read as variations on a held theme.
Contemporary developments tend to invert this. They make each house architecturally distinct and then paint them all the same. The result is busy at the level of form and tedious at the level of life.
The New Town was speculatively built. The proportions were set by a Dean of Guild who is now mostly forgotten. The result is one of the great urban interiors in Europe.
Detail
Walking back along Dundas Street I noticed three things and wrote them down. The lead on the fanlights had recently been polished on two houses in a row, which I imagined was the work of a single proud neighbour. The basement railings on Great King Street are spaced two inches further apart than on Heriot Row, possibly to do with regulation in the year they were laid. The pavement slabs along Drummond Place are an unusual pinkish sandstone I have not seen elsewhere in the city and which I will, when I am next there, ask someone about.
A field note is not an essay. It is a record of what was noticed. These are the things I noticed.
