‘On Glasgow and Edinburgh’, by Robert Crawford – review

Glasgow and Edinburgh are so nearby that even in the 18th-century Adam Smith could breakfast in one city and be in the other for early-afternoon dinner. For all that, these two cities cherish a rivalry and have followed different paths.

Edinburgh, a royal capital until 1603 and a seat of parliament until 1707, and again in recent years, home to a great university and medical school and nurse to writers from Walter Scott to Joanne Rowling, has made almost as much history as Jerusalem. Edinburgh peers down from Castle Hill as if over a newspaper on its toiling rival to the west, besmirched with tobacco and slavery and laden with locomotives, boilers, ships, Vanguard-class nuclear submarines and incessant rain.

Apart from George’s Square (ruined by the university), Edinburgh has conserved much of the medieval and reformation city and also the ‘draughty parallelograms’ (Stevenson) of the 18th-century New Town across Princes Street Gardens. In contrast, Glasgow was smashed to bits by the City Corporation in the 1950s and 1960s, its tenements torn down and population cast out to windy new settlements or encased in concrete tower blocks, that have now themselves been demolished, so that it is astonishing that anything of the old convivial Glasgow surives. Those clearances, if I may use that word, are the principal event of Scotland’s placid postwar history.

In recent years, as Robert Crawford says in this book, the two cities have converged on a common ideal, centres of fashionable consumption and high-minded culture, all paid for, in the mysterious fashion of modern towns, somehow or other. Banks (Edinburgh) and football clubs (Glasgow) go bust with abandon. Both towns are now monuments to ancient mental and bodily exertion. In Edinburgh, the pedestrian can barely negotiate the pavement for new public statuary while even Glasgow, to return Hugh Mac-Diarmid’s phrase to him, seems unable to stand out of ‘her own light’.