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.
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