Edinburgh New Town


Book Description

A beautifuly illustrated celebration of one of Europe’s finest neoclassical neighbourhoods: a triumph of town planning and the heart of a vibrant, thriving capital city.




The Geographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh


Book Description

Edinburgh was an Enlightenment city of regional, national and global influence. But how did the people of Enlightenment Edinburgh understand and order their world? How did they encounter, compare and produce different kinds of spaces, from the urban to the world scale? And how did this city set the universal standards by which other places should be judged and transformed? The Geographies of Enlightenment Edinburgh answers these questions by exploring the thousands of urban plans, county surveys, travel accounts and encyclopaedias that passed through a busy Edinburgh bookshop over four decades. It reveals how these geographical publications were produced and shared, and sheds light on the people who bought and used them - including moral philosophers, silk merchants, school teachers, ship's surgeons and slave owners. This is the story of how specific methods of mapping space came ultimately to predict and organize it, creating a new world in Edinburgh's image. By connecting global processes of knowledge production to intimate accounts of its reception in the city, this book deepens our understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment and the world it made.




Building reputations


Book Description

Taking a cue from revisionist scholarship on early modern vernacular architectures and their relationship to the classical canon, this book rehabilitates the reputations of a representative if misunderstood building typology – the eighteenth-century brick terraced house – and the artisan communities of bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers responsible for its design and construction. Opening with a cultural history of the building tradesman in terms of his reception within contemporary architectural discourse, chapters consider the design, decoration and marketing of the town house in the principal cities of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British Atlantic world. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of the history of architectural design and interior decoration specifically, and of eighteenth-century society and culture generally.




The Story of Edinburgh


Book Description

This richly illustrated history explores every aspect of life in Edinburgh. This book covers the history of the city of Edinburgh from the first Mesolithic explorers who camped on the shores of the Forth some 10,000 years ago to the controversies of modern times. Taking a wider perspective it explores the ever-changing world resulting from industrialisation, which brought immigrants, wealth and poverty. Following that, new methods of transport opened up Edinburgh to the wider world. Now, with its historic architecture the city can become a battleground between developers and motorists who want more space in the central areas and conservationists who wish to protect the city's landscape.




Edinburgh: A Traveller's Reader


Book Description

Edinburgh is a city whose history is written on its face. The Old Town on its crowded rock, sloping down from the Castle to Holyroodhouse, has not significantly changed its atmosphere since the turbulent fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when riots, processions, or public executions jammed the High Street. And the very different era that followed the bloody religious wars of the seventeenth century is epitomized by the elegant streets and squares of the New Town - the eighteenth-century Enlightenment whose writers, philosophers and lawyers made Edinburgh famous. This anthology of extracts from letters, memoirs, diaries, novels and biographies of interesting visitors and inhabitants, including the writings of Scott, Boswell, Cockburn, John Knox and many others, recreates for today's visitors the drama, the history, and the life of the city in buildings and places that can still be visited. The daring Scottish recapture of the Castle from the English in 1313; the confrontation between Calvinist John Knox and Catholic Mary Queen of Scots in Holyroodhouse; an eye-witness account of the execution of Montrose at the Mercat Cross in 1650; reeking slop-pails in the wynds and polite manners in the ballrooms. . .




Pocket Rough Guide Edinburgh (Travel Guide eBook)


Book Description

Discover this exciting city with the most incisive and entertaining travel guide on the market. Whether you plan to catch a performance at the Fringe, summit Arthur's Seat or explore Edinburgh Castle, Pocket Rough Guide Edinburgh will show you the ideal places to sleep, eat, drink, shop and visit along the way. - Perfect for short trips - compact and concise, with all the practical info you'll need for a few days' stay. - Full-colour maps throughout - navigate the cobbled street of the Old Town or wander along the Water of Leith Walkway without needing to get online. - Things not to miss - our rundown of Edinburgh's unmissable sights and experiences. - Itineraries - carefully planned days/routes to help you organize your visit. - Independent, trusted reviews written with Rough Guides' trademark blend of humour, honesty and insight, with options to suit every budget. - Stunning images - a rich collection of inspiring colour photography. - Day-trips - venture further afield to Rosslyn Chapel; South Queensferry; Pentland Hills; Melrose; North Berwick; Tantallon Castle; Dunbar - Accommodation - our unbiased selection of the top places to stay, to suit every budget. - Essentials - crucial pre-departure practical information including getting there, local transport, tourist information, festivals, events and more. - Background information - an easy-to-use chronology, plus a handy glossary. Make the Most of Your Time on Earth with Pocket Rough Guide Edinburgh About Rough Guides: Escape the everyday with Rough Guides. We are a leading travel publisher known for our "tell it like it is" attitude, up-to-date content and great writing. Since 1982, we've published books covering more than 120 destinations around the globe, with an ever-growing series of ebooks, a range of beautiful, inspirational reference titles, and an award-winning website. We pride ourselves on our accurate, honest and informed travel guides.




The New Town of Edinburgh


Book Description

This collection of innovative essays celebrates the New Town of Edinburgh over the 250 years since its original creation. The contributing authors discuss the intellectual, economic and political contexts which provided the impetus for the city of Edinburgh to expand north of the Old Town, and analyse the New Town's unique architectural status in terms of its size, monumentality and degree of preservation. For centuries, Scotland has pursued innovation, improvement, commerce and contact with England and the Continent; and since medieval times it has been an urbanising land of planned towns. This book reflects on the constantly changing dialogue between Edinburgh's Old and New Towns, from the eighteenth century to the present time, as the city became increasingly commercialised. It also compares Edinburgh's New Town with more recent new towns elsewhere, notably nineteenth-century Dunedin in New Zealand and Scotland's planned new-town movement of the twentieth century. The age of conservation is another of the central themes. By drawing on different approaches to the new town phenomenon in Scotland, this volume pays tribute to Scotland's vibrant capital, and offers insights into new research on Scotland's urban development.




The Blue Badge Guide's Edinburgh Quiz Book


Book Description

Celebrating Edinburgh's diverse riches, this quiz book invites you to come on a wide-ranging exploration of Scotland's hilly capital. Peel away its many layers in the company of one of Edinburgh's top Blue Badge tourist guides. These 22 tours will inspire you, your family, colleagues and friends to leap from page to pavement in the entertaining company of a local expert. Have fun!




A History of the British Isles


Book Description

CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2017 A History of the British Isles is a balanced and integrated political, social, cultural and religious history of the British Isles in all its complexity, exploring the constantly evolving dialogue and relationship between the past and the present. A wide range of topics and questions are addressed for each period and territory discussed, including England's Wars of the Roses of the 15th century and their influence on court politics during the 16th century; Ireland's Rebellion of 1798, the Potato Famine of the 1840s and the Easter Rising of 1916; the two World Wars and the Great Depression; British cultural and social change during the 1960s; and the history and future of the British Isles in the present day. Kenneth Campbell integrates the histories of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales by exploring common themes and drawing on comparative examples, while also demonstrating how those histories are different, making this a genuinely integrated text. Campbell's approach allows readers to appreciate the history of the British Isles not just for its own sake, but for the purposes of understanding our current political divisions, our world and ourselves.




What the Victorians Made of Romanticism


Book Description

This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.