The Edinburgh printAn Edinburgh print in a dark frame, on a grey-blue wall, in cold northern light.0.707

Maps · Collection 01

Edinburgh print, drawn from the real map

55.9500°N / 3.1833°W · United Kingdom

Edinburgh reads as two towns sewn either side of a hollow: one grew, the other was ruled out in a single go. And a dead volcano keeps a park of bare hills in the middle.

You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.

Compose my Edinburgh print

What the map shows

A herringbone, a grid, and a hollow between them

The relief here is not scenery, it is the plan. The old town is built along a tail of ground left behind a volcanic plug: the ice scoured everything except what sheltered east of the rock, and the spine you see descending is that tail. The closes run off it on both sides because there was nowhere else to go, and the fishbone is the shape of a town with a slope on either hand. The new town, north of the hollow, has the opposite problem and the opposite answer: flat glacial ground, and a grid laid across it.

Read on

The hollow between them is worth looking at properly, because it is the reason the two towns read as separate rather than merged. It was a loch, and it is now gardens with a railway cut along them. One detail follows from the Georgian plan and shows on the map: Princes Street is built on one side only. The garden side has no houses, and that was deliberate, so the new town looks across at the old one instead of turning its back.

Compose your own

What suits Edinburgh

The palette

This is a city of stone and relief rather than water, so keep the ground quiet: the sandstone shifts from cold grey to honey depending on the light, which suits a greige field and a fine line. The one mass to commit to is Holyrood Park, and it wants a moorland green rather than a garden green, left rough so it argues with the two geometries in the centre. Treat the hollow between the towns as a pale band, almost a void: it is doing structural work, and filling it in would sew the two plans back together.

The framing

Vertical, although the castle to palace axis runs east to west and suggests otherwise, because the whole set is nearly square and the portrait holds it. The trade is sharp here. Come in and the herringbone of the closes reads beautifully, but Holyrood Park leaves the sheet, and a volcano inside a city is the thing no other map has. Pull back and the park is safe but the closes blur into grey. This framing keeps both, and if you must lose something at the edge, lose Calton Hill rather than the park.

The caption

The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. The name of a close, a square, a date: that line is what turns a plan of Edinburgh into your plan of Edinburgh.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

340 million yearsA plug of lava decided the street plan

Castle Rock is the plug of a volcano formed in the Carboniferous, around 340 million years ago. When the ice came through it scraped the softer sediments away everywhere except immediately east of the rock, where the hard plug sheltered them, leaving a long tail of gently sloping ground. That tail is what the Royal Mile descends, from the castle to the palace, and it is why the oldest part of the city is a single line with ribs rather than a network. The geology is not background here: it is the drawing.

1460A king flooded a marsh, and the hollow stayed

In 1460 James III had the marsh below the ridge flooded to strengthen the northern defence, creating the Nor Loch. It was drained between 1813 and 1820 to become Princes Street Gardens, and the Mound that now crosses the hollow was built up from the earth dug out for the new town, tipped there between 1781 and 1880. So the gap on this map is a lake that was made, then unmade, and the causeway across it is the spoil from the streets on the other side.

1766The grid was won in a competition

The city held a competition in 1766 for the plan of its new town, and it was won by a young and then unknown architect, James Craig. His scheme was a symmetrical grid on the axis of George Street, bounded by Queen Street to the north and Princes Street to the south, and closed at each end by St Andrew Square and Charlotte Square. What you see is only the first of seven successive plans, built out across the glacial plain between 1767 and 1890, which is why the regularity spreads north and then loosens.

Before ordering

The four questions people ask

Can I choose any place, any date?

Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.

What sizes do you offer?

From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.

What materials do you offer?

Four, from the barest to the most dressed.

Matte fine art paperA 200 gsm art paper with a deep matte finish: the bare print, to frame as you please.
Wooden hangersThe print suspended between two wooden hangers, ready to hang, in the spirit of studio posters.
The classic frameThe print mounted under acrylic glass in a slim frame, assembled by hand, delivered ready to hang.
Framed canvasThe piece printed on canvas, stretched over a wooden stretcher bar and set in a frame: a gallery presence.

How long does it take?

Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.

Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.

All the questions

Your Edinburgh

The close you cut through, the side of the hollow you lived on, the hill you climbed when you wanted to see the whole thing at once. The rock is the same for everyone. Which town you belonged to is not.

Compose my Edinburgh print