Urban history has become fashionable, flourishing in the hands of Jan Morris and Alistair Horne, of Peter Ackroyd and AN Wilson. And readers buy the results. Yet the story of Edinburgh remains oddly neglected.
Edinburgh is worth a book (indeed, I am in the early stages of writing one) for being among the first of modern cities. It was rebuilt in the 18th century as a machine for rational living, like, more recently, Brasilia and Chandigarh. But it did better than these imitations by then becoming the setting for something of global significance: the Scottish Enlightenment of David Hume and Adam Smith.
This was the finest example of its capacity for renewal, but not the only one. As I organise my material, what strikes me is how many other renewals there have been. And when I glance up from my desk, on the fourth floor of a typical tenement, to look across the rooftops where the saltires flutter over Edinburgh Castle, perhaps I see another transformation in the making.
Edinburgh could have died once James VI, King of Scots, took the royal court away to become James I, King of England, in 1603. The same might have happened after the Scots parliament followed him at the Act of Union of 1707. But instead the city became, rather than a mere national capital, a republic of letters, a universal realm of progress free from the constraints of borders.
In the 19th century, Walter Scott wrote so lovingly about Edinburgh, "mine own romantic town," because he feared it was doomed in its old self. His contemporary, Henry Cockburn, called theirs "the last purely Scotch age," as British and imperial modernity impinged. Instead came decades of high Victorian prosperity. In fact, the bulk of the city as it now stands dates from this period. It may have a stately air of greater antiquity, but that is because Edinburgh is built better than Manchester or Birmingham, let alone London.
The wheel turned, with depression and decay, after 1918. Edwin Muir wrote of "this blank, this Edinburgh" at the heart of Scotland; Hugh MacDiarmid, of its sabbath mornings, "stagnant and foul with the rigid peace of a frigid soul!"
Yet the story was far from over. In culture, the city found fresh ways to flourish. Citizens may once have read poetry or played the fiddle while a fire burned in the grate and rain beat at the windows, but now culture turned public in plethoras of plays, masses of music and flocks of festivals. Grim Calvinism gave way to liberation, today pushed to frenetic heights by the oodles of money to be made in a booming financial centre.
In broad outline, this may be little more than what has happened to other cities: one of the functions, the fascinations of cities to modern man is how they never cease reinventing themselves. But in Edinburgh, after so many reinventions, the process is less straightforward.
Beneath the hedonism it remains a stolid, bourgeois place. Money built and rules it, but respectable money, from banking, insurance and gilt-edged investments. There have always been dodgy landlords and today there are drug barons, yet still the easiest way to assure yourself of money in Edinburgh is to go to one of the big private schools, on to the university, then in the footsteps of father and company of classmates into a lucrative profession. Fear God, honour the Queen, live in Morningside.
Even now, let alone in a future where megalopolises will arise on every continent, not many cities are like this. Boston a bit, Melbourne maybe, Turin to a degree, Lyon more likely: provincial cities, no doubt, yet successful and wealthy, able to remain themselves regardless of the outside world. Such cities can arouse envy, indeed hatred. Glaswegians detest Edinburgh. Other Scots think it is too English. The English think it is too Scottish in its cold weather, cold stone and cold heart.
Yet Edinburgh has the best pubs in Britain. And where I live, in the west end, I know everybody from the peers to the plumbers (I can meet both in the pubs). Walking the 500 yards to Princes Street sometimes takes me an hour through having to stop and talk to all the people I know. But then I have lived in the same flat for 31 years: the kind of continuity Edinburgh rewards.
Continuity yet heady change? How does the life of such a place add up? Themes of paradox, of dualism, were built in with its stones, most clearly in the contrast of the squalid Old Town and the noble New Town. This is the city where Robert Louis Stevenson, one of its sons, wrote Jekyll and Hyde. The themes continue into the writing of our time, into Muriel Spark and Sandy McCall Smith on the one hand, Irvine Welsh and Ian Rankin on the other, genteel set against savage, tea and scones against blood and vomit, intellect against physicality.
On 3rd May, Edinburgh, along with the rest of Scotland, goes to the polls. Judging from the numbers of foreign journalists jetting in, the eyes of the world will be on us. Are we destined to become the beautiful capital of a fine new nation? After such a history, do not be surprised.
