Edinburgh lost its parliament in 1707, yet soon became home to one of history’s greatest bursts of new thinking.
This is the story of the city’s Enlightenment, its remarkable thinkers and the changes that created modern Edinburgh.
Tap a purple word for its meaning. Tap a time to play from there.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I’m Alastair Budge, and today it’s the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:00:33] In today’s episode, we are off to Edinburgh, to find out how a smoky, overcrowded city that had just lost its own parliament became the intellectual capital of the world.
[00:00:46] In part two, we head south to Manchester, the city that invented the modern factory, and then invented the ways of fighting against it.
[00:00:56] And in part three, we sail west to Bristol, the city that opened England’s door to the Atlantic, grew rich on the slave trade, and is still arguing about that history today.
[00:01:09] OK then, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:16] As I imagine you will know, Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland.
[00:01:21] It sits on the east coast, on the Firth of Forth, a wide inlet of the North Sea, about 650 kilometres north of London.
[00:01:31] Today it is a city of around half a million people, famous for its castle, its festival, and for being, for many people at least, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.
[00:01:46] It wasn’t always like that.
[00:01:49] In the eighteenth century, travellers approaching Edinburgh would often notice the city before they could properly see it.
[00:01:59] Hanging above it was a thick grey cloud of smoke, rising from thousands of chimneys crammed onto a narrow ridge of rock.
[00:02:11] The Scots had a nickname for the city: Auld Reekie. In English, Old Smoky.
[00:02:18] And if the smoke didn’t announce the city, the smell certainly did.
[00:02:25] Edinburgh in the eighteenth century was one of the most crowded places in Europe.
[00:02:31] Around fifty thousand people lived squeezed into roughly half a square mile, little more than a square kilometre, along one long street running downhill from the castle on its rock to the palace at the bottom.
[00:02:48] The city couldn’t grow outwards. There was a defensive wall, a steep-sided rock, and a foul-smelling lake blocking the way north.
[00:02:58] So instead, it grew upwards.
[00:03:02] Edinburgh’s tenement buildings, great stone towers of flats, rose ten and eleven storeys high.
[00:03:10] Some reached up to fifteen storeys. For the time, these were some of the tallest residential buildings in the world.
[00:03:20] And inside them, everyone lived stacked on top of everyone else.
[00:03:27] A judge might live on the fourth floor, a countess on the fifth, a shoemaker in the basement and a family of fishwives up in the attic, all sharing the same dark, winding staircase.
[00:03:42] The most desirable flats were in the middle. High enough to escape the stench of the street, and low enough so that you didn’t have to climb ten flights of stairs to get home.
[00:03:54] And about that stench, that horrible smell.
[00:03:58] The city had no sewers to speak of, so the custom was to empty your waste, of every kind, out of the window and into the street below, at ten o’clock at night, when the town drum had sounded.
[00:04:14] The traditional warning cry was “Gardyloo!”, which is thought to come from the French “garde à l’eau!”, or “watch out for the water”.
[00:04:24] If you were walking below, you had a second or two to react. And of course, “water” was a bit of a euphemism.
[00:04:33] This, then, was Edinburgh: dark, cramped, smoky and smelly, perched on a rock at the cold northern edge of Europe.
[00:04:44] It was also about to become the city where much of the modern world was worked out.
[00:04:52] The economics that still shape how governments think. The medicine that became the model for hospitals across the world. The discovery that the Earth is unimaginably old.
[00:05:05] Even Sherlock Holmes.
[00:05:07] All of it has roots in those crowded staircases and closes, the narrow, smelly alleyways of the Old Town.
[00:05:17] To understand how that happened, we need to go back to a national catastrophe, and remind ourselves of some Scottish, English, and ultimately British, history.
[00:05:29] At the end of the seventeenth century, Scotland shared a king with England but had its own parliament in Edinburgh. Failed harvests and famine had left it poor, and it was shut out of England’s profitable colonies.
[00:05:48] So it planned a colony of its own: Darien, in what is now Panama.
[00:05:56] From there, Scotland hoped to grow rich on trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
[00:06:03] Nobles, merchants and ordinary townspeople invested their savings. Somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of Scotland’s available investment capital went into the scheme.
[00:06:17] It was a disaster. Disease killed hundreds of colonists, the Spanish attacked, and England refused to help. Within a couple of years, the colony was abandoned.
[00:06:31] By the way, we did an entire episode on this story, episode number 564. So if you’d like to learn about this amazing story in more depth, that is the episode to listen to.
[00:06:44] But the thing to remember, as concerns Edinburgh, is that the losses from this failed endeavour helped push Scotland towards union with England, which promised money to compensate investors for their losses in the scheme.
[00:07:02] And sure enough, in 1707, the two countries became Great Britain.
[00:07:09] For Edinburgh, the deal meant losing its role as Scotland’s centre of political power.
[00:07:18] Under the Union, the Scottish Parliament ceased to exist. There would be one parliament for the whole island, and it would sit four hundred miles away, in London.
[00:07:30] The parliament that met in Edinburgh in the spring of 1707 simply closed its doors. A Scottish parliament would not meet again for almost three hundred years, until 1999.
[00:07:45] There were riots in the streets when the terms became known. Ordinary Scots felt their country had been sold.
[00:07:54] The poet Robert Burns put it in a line Scots still quote today. Scotland, he wrote, had been “bought and sold for English gold”.
[00:08:06] Edinburgh was still a capital city on paper. But it was a capital without its own parliament; the centre of power had moved south.
[00:08:16] So what do you do, if you are an ambitious, educated, energetic city, and politics has been taken away from you?
[00:08:27] Edinburgh’s answer, over the next fifty years, was ideas.
[00:08:33] The Union had taken Scotland’s parliament, but it had left three things in Edinburgh: the Scottish legal system, the Scottish church, and the universities.
[00:08:45] That meant the city remained full of lawyers, ministers, professors and doctors. Educated men with time on their hands, and, crucially, all living within a few minutes’ walk of one another.
[00:09:00] Remember, this was a city where everyone was piled on top of everyone else. There was no aristocratic quarter, no separate district for intellectuals. You could not avoid your neighbours even if you wanted to.
[00:09:15] And rather than staying at home in their cramped flats, these men met in the city’s taverns and clubs. They formed societies with names like the Select Society and the Poker Club, where judges argued with professors, and ministers of the church debated with men who doubted the existence of God.
[00:09:39] Out of this cramped, argumentative, hard-drinking little world came one of the greatest bursts of intellectual activity in human history: the Scottish Enlightenment.
[00:09:53] The novelist Tobias Smollett, writing in 1771, called Edinburgh “a hotbed of genius”, a place where brilliance seemed to grow as easily as plants in a heated greenhouse.
[00:10:08] So who were the people behind this burst of ideas?
[00:10:13] Perhaps the most famous was David Hume, a philosopher who questioned almost everything his society took for granted: miracles, religion, even the idea that we can ever truly know anything at all.
[00:10:28] Today, philosophers regularly rank him among the greatest thinkers who ever lived.
[00:10:34] He also sounded like a lot of fun to be around; he was, by every account, cheerful, kind, enormously fat, and one of the best-loved men in Edinburgh. He liked cooking, he liked card games, and he liked good company.
[00:10:51] One of his closest friends was a quiet, absent-minded professor called Adam Smith.
[00:10:59] In 1776, Smith published a book called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
[00:11:09] It asked a simple question: what actually makes a country rich?
[00:11:16] His answers, about markets, trade, and the division of labour, became the foundation of modern economics. Almost every economic argument you hear today, from any side of politics, is in some way a conversation with Adam Smith.
[00:11:34] We also have an episode on him, by the way, it’s episode 427.
[00:11:39] Then there was James Hutton, who was a farmer with an obsession with rocks.
[00:11:46] At the time, many educated Europeans believed the Earth was around six thousand years old, a figure calculated by adding up the generations in the Bible.
[00:11:58] Logical enough, I guess, if that is your main point of reference.
[00:12:03] Hutton looked at Scotland’s rocks and saw something that didn’t fit. Layers of stone that had been laid down, tilted, worn away and buried under new layers. Processes so slow that they must have taken millions upon millions of years.
[00:12:24] In June 1788, he took two friends by boat along the coast east of Edinburgh, to a rocky point called Siccar Point.
[00:12:36] There, at the water’s edge, two completely different sets of rock layers meet. One set stands almost vertical. The other lies nearly flat on top of it.
[00:12:51] For that to happen, the first rocks had to form, be pushed upright, be worn down by the sea, and then be slowly buried under new layers of sand.
[00:13:04] You cannot do all of that in six thousand years. Hutton’s companions understood, staring at that grey rock, that they were looking at evidence of a past almost too vast to imagine.
[00:13:19] One of them later wrote that “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time”.
[00:13:28] In other words, staring at that much time made his head spin.
[00:13:35] Hutton’s own conclusion about the age of the Earth became one of the most famous sentences in the history of science: “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”. In plain English: no sign of a start, and no sign of an end.
[00:13:54] He had discovered what we now call deep time, and it opened all sorts of new doors to explain the natural world. Without it, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution would have been unthinkable, because evolution needs vast stretches of time to work.
[00:14:15] And it wasn’t just philosophy and science, ideas and theory; Edinburgh’s medical school grew into the finest in the English-speaking world.
[00:14:26] Medicine at this time was still half science, half superstition: humours, blood-letting and so on.
[00:14:35] Edinburgh’s innovation was to teach it systematically: lectures, dissections, and training at the patient’s bedside in a proper teaching hospital.
[00:14:48] Students crossed the Atlantic from the American colonies to train there, then carried Edinburgh’s methods home with them and built their own medical schools on the same model.
[00:14:59] The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was written and printed in Edinburgh, starting in 1768. It was nothing less than an attempt to gather all human knowledge into a single work.
[00:15:15] Word of all this spread far beyond Scotland.
[00:15:19] Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers, visited twice, and became friends with Hume, Smith and half the professors in the city. He later wrote that his six weeks in Scotland had been “six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life”.
[00:15:40] Even Voltaire, the great French writer, admitted, in his slightly mocking way, that Europe now looked to Scotland for ideas on everything from poetry to gardening.
[00:15:53] Fifty years earlier, Edinburgh had been the humiliated capital of a country badly damaged by a failed colony.
[00:16:01] Now it was being compared to ancient Athens.
[00:16:06] There was just one problem. The city itself was still a medieval slum.
[00:16:14] The philosophers might have been discussing how human beings and society could be improved without limit, but they were doing it in taverns down muddy alleyways, dodging falling sewage on the way home.
[00:16:29] While these ideas were developing, the city itself was changing. By the 1750s, its leaders had had enough. Edinburgh, they decided, needed a home worthy of its new reputation.
[00:16:46] In 1766, the town council announced a competition to design an entirely new town, on open farmland across the valley to the north.
[00:16:58] Several designs were submitted. The winner was an unknown local architect called James Craig. He was twenty-six years old.
[00:17:09] His plan was everything the Old Town was not. Instead of a tangle of dark closes, there would be a simple, rational grid: three grand parallel streets, with an elegant square at each end, wide enough for light and air and carriages.
[00:17:30] Even the street names were a statement of loyalty to the new Britain. George Street, for the king. Hanover Street, for his royal family. Princes Street, for his sons.
[00:17:43] The stinking lake below the castle was drained, and a great bridge was thrown across the valley to connect the old city with the new.
[00:17:54] And across that bridge, over the following decades, walked the entire Edinburgh establishment.
[00:18:02] Lawyers, professors, merchants and aristocrats moved into the new terraced houses. David Hume was among the early residents, moving there in 1771.
[00:18:15] The New Town was, and still is, one of the most beautiful pieces of city planning in Europe. Together with the Old Town, it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
[00:18:27] But the move came with a cost.
[00:18:31] When the wealthy crossed the bridge, they took their money with them. The Old Town, now abandoned by the rich, slowly rotted into one of the worst slums in Britain. Those same tall tenements that had once housed countesses and judges filled up with the desperately poor.
[00:18:53] The old city had forced every class of society up the same staircases, into the same conversations. In the New Town, a gentleman could pass his entire week without ever meeting anyone below his own rank.
[00:19:10] And this golden age wouldn’t last forever; it started to fade towards the end of the eighteenth century. Hume died in 1776, Smith in 1790.
[00:19:24] By the middle of the nineteenth century, the centre of British intellectual life had moved elsewhere.
[00:19:31] But Edinburgh’s influence had already spread far beyond Scotland, through its books, its students and their ideas.
[00:19:40] And the city kept producing surprises long after its Enlightenment had ended.
[00:19:46] A century later, a young medical student at Edinburgh sat in the lectures of a surgeon called Dr Joseph Bell. Bell liked to astonish his students by diagnosing patients before they had said a word, reading their profession and their habits from their hands, their walk and their clothes.
[00:20:10] That student’s name was Arthur Conan Doyle. When he later invented a detective called Sherlock Holmes, he knew exactly who he was describing. “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes”, he later wrote to Bell.
[00:20:28] Edinburgh has kept its reputation as a city of culture, too.
[00:20:33] Since 1947, it has hosted the Edinburgh Festival and its Fringe, which has become the world’s largest arts festival.
[00:20:42] Today, more than three hundred years after the Union, Edinburgh has its parliament back. Scotland’s politicians once again argue on the Royal Mile, a few minutes’ walk from where Hume and Smith are buried.
[00:20:59] If you have been to Edinburgh, and you’ve been lucky enough to have had a dry, sunny day, you will know that it is one of the great cities of Britain, perhaps even the world.
[00:21:11] It is no longer smoky, no longer smelly, and fortunately, you need not worry about listening out for shouts of “Gardyloo!”
[00:21:21] OK, then, that is it for today’s episode, the first part of our three-part mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:21:30] Next up we’ll be moving to Manchester, the shock city of the Industrial Revolution, where the modern factory, the modern city and modern protests were all invented at more or less the same time.
[00:21:42] And in part three, we’ll head south to Bristol, from the first English voyage to North America to a trade in human beings whose legacy the city is still wrestling with today.
[00:21:54] We also have episodes on the Darién Scheme, which is episode number 564, on Adam Smith, which is episode number 427, so you can really do a binge listen on the story of Scotland. You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:13] I’m Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
Join today and get instant access to 600+ episodes, interactive transcripts, PDF study packs and more.
Become a memberAlready a member? Login
30-day money back guarantee. Cancel anytime.
Edinburgh lost its parliament in 1707, yet soon became home to one of history’s greatest bursts of new thinking.
This is the story of the city’s Enlightenment, its remarkable thinkers and the changes that created modern Edinburgh.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I’m Alastair Budge, and today it’s the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:00:33] In today’s episode, we are off to Edinburgh, to find out how a smoky, overcrowded city that had just lost its own parliament became the intellectual capital of the world.
[00:00:46] In part two, we head south to Manchester, the city that invented the modern factory, and then invented the ways of fighting against it.
[00:00:56] And in part three, we sail west to Bristol, the city that opened England’s door to the Atlantic, grew rich on the slave trade, and is still arguing about that history today.
[00:01:09] OK then, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:16] As I imagine you will know, Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland.
[00:01:21] It sits on the east coast, on the Firth of Forth, a wide inlet of the North Sea, about 650 kilometres north of London.
[00:01:31] Today it is a city of around half a million people, famous for its castle, its festival, and for being, for many people at least, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.
[00:01:46] It wasn’t always like that.
[00:01:49] In the eighteenth century, travellers approaching Edinburgh would often notice the city before they could properly see it.
[00:01:59] Hanging above it was a thick grey cloud of smoke, rising from thousands of chimneys crammed onto a narrow ridge of rock.
[00:02:11] The Scots had a nickname for the city: Auld Reekie. In English, Old Smoky.
[00:02:18] And if the smoke didn’t announce the city, the smell certainly did.
[00:02:25] Edinburgh in the eighteenth century was one of the most crowded places in Europe.
[00:02:31] Around fifty thousand people lived squeezed into roughly half a square mile, little more than a square kilometre, along one long street running downhill from the castle on its rock to the palace at the bottom.
[00:02:48] The city couldn’t grow outwards. There was a defensive wall, a steep-sided rock, and a foul-smelling lake blocking the way north.
[00:02:58] So instead, it grew upwards.
[00:03:02] Edinburgh’s tenement buildings, great stone towers of flats, rose ten and eleven storeys high.
[00:03:10] Some reached up to fifteen storeys. For the time, these were some of the tallest residential buildings in the world.
[00:03:20] And inside them, everyone lived stacked on top of everyone else.
[00:03:27] A judge might live on the fourth floor, a countess on the fifth, a shoemaker in the basement and a family of fishwives up in the attic, all sharing the same dark, winding staircase.
[00:03:42] The most desirable flats were in the middle. High enough to escape the stench of the street, and low enough so that you didn’t have to climb ten flights of stairs to get home.
[00:03:54] And about that stench, that horrible smell.
[00:03:58] The city had no sewers to speak of, so the custom was to empty your waste, of every kind, out of the window and into the street below, at ten o’clock at night, when the town drum had sounded.
[00:04:14] The traditional warning cry was “Gardyloo!”, which is thought to come from the French “garde à l’eau!”, or “watch out for the water”.
[00:04:24] If you were walking below, you had a second or two to react. And of course, “water” was a bit of a euphemism.
[00:04:33] This, then, was Edinburgh: dark, cramped, smoky and smelly, perched on a rock at the cold northern edge of Europe.
[00:04:44] It was also about to become the city where much of the modern world was worked out.
[00:04:52] The economics that still shape how governments think. The medicine that became the model for hospitals across the world. The discovery that the Earth is unimaginably old.
[00:05:05] Even Sherlock Holmes.
[00:05:07] All of it has roots in those crowded staircases and closes, the narrow, smelly alleyways of the Old Town.
[00:05:17] To understand how that happened, we need to go back to a national catastrophe, and remind ourselves of some Scottish, English, and ultimately British, history.
[00:05:29] At the end of the seventeenth century, Scotland shared a king with England but had its own parliament in Edinburgh. Failed harvests and famine had left it poor, and it was shut out of England’s profitable colonies.
[00:05:48] So it planned a colony of its own: Darien, in what is now Panama.
[00:05:56] From there, Scotland hoped to grow rich on trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
[00:06:03] Nobles, merchants and ordinary townspeople invested their savings. Somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of Scotland’s available investment capital went into the scheme.
[00:06:17] It was a disaster. Disease killed hundreds of colonists, the Spanish attacked, and England refused to help. Within a couple of years, the colony was abandoned.
[00:06:31] By the way, we did an entire episode on this story, episode number 564. So if you’d like to learn about this amazing story in more depth, that is the episode to listen to.
[00:06:44] But the thing to remember, as concerns Edinburgh, is that the losses from this failed endeavour helped push Scotland towards union with England, which promised money to compensate investors for their losses in the scheme.
[00:07:02] And sure enough, in 1707, the two countries became Great Britain.
[00:07:09] For Edinburgh, the deal meant losing its role as Scotland’s centre of political power.
[00:07:18] Under the Union, the Scottish Parliament ceased to exist. There would be one parliament for the whole island, and it would sit four hundred miles away, in London.
[00:07:30] The parliament that met in Edinburgh in the spring of 1707 simply closed its doors. A Scottish parliament would not meet again for almost three hundred years, until 1999.
[00:07:45] There were riots in the streets when the terms became known. Ordinary Scots felt their country had been sold.
[00:07:54] The poet Robert Burns put it in a line Scots still quote today. Scotland, he wrote, had been “bought and sold for English gold”.
[00:08:06] Edinburgh was still a capital city on paper. But it was a capital without its own parliament; the centre of power had moved south.
[00:08:16] So what do you do, if you are an ambitious, educated, energetic city, and politics has been taken away from you?
[00:08:27] Edinburgh’s answer, over the next fifty years, was ideas.
[00:08:33] The Union had taken Scotland’s parliament, but it had left three things in Edinburgh: the Scottish legal system, the Scottish church, and the universities.
[00:08:45] That meant the city remained full of lawyers, ministers, professors and doctors. Educated men with time on their hands, and, crucially, all living within a few minutes’ walk of one another.
[00:09:00] Remember, this was a city where everyone was piled on top of everyone else. There was no aristocratic quarter, no separate district for intellectuals. You could not avoid your neighbours even if you wanted to.
[00:09:15] And rather than staying at home in their cramped flats, these men met in the city’s taverns and clubs. They formed societies with names like the Select Society and the Poker Club, where judges argued with professors, and ministers of the church debated with men who doubted the existence of God.
[00:09:39] Out of this cramped, argumentative, hard-drinking little world came one of the greatest bursts of intellectual activity in human history: the Scottish Enlightenment.
[00:09:53] The novelist Tobias Smollett, writing in 1771, called Edinburgh “a hotbed of genius”, a place where brilliance seemed to grow as easily as plants in a heated greenhouse.
[00:10:08] So who were the people behind this burst of ideas?
[00:10:13] Perhaps the most famous was David Hume, a philosopher who questioned almost everything his society took for granted: miracles, religion, even the idea that we can ever truly know anything at all.
[00:10:28] Today, philosophers regularly rank him among the greatest thinkers who ever lived.
[00:10:34] He also sounded like a lot of fun to be around; he was, by every account, cheerful, kind, enormously fat, and one of the best-loved men in Edinburgh. He liked cooking, he liked card games, and he liked good company.
[00:10:51] One of his closest friends was a quiet, absent-minded professor called Adam Smith.
[00:10:59] In 1776, Smith published a book called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
[00:11:09] It asked a simple question: what actually makes a country rich?
[00:11:16] His answers, about markets, trade, and the division of labour, became the foundation of modern economics. Almost every economic argument you hear today, from any side of politics, is in some way a conversation with Adam Smith.
[00:11:34] We also have an episode on him, by the way, it’s episode 427.
[00:11:39] Then there was James Hutton, who was a farmer with an obsession with rocks.
[00:11:46] At the time, many educated Europeans believed the Earth was around six thousand years old, a figure calculated by adding up the generations in the Bible.
[00:11:58] Logical enough, I guess, if that is your main point of reference.
[00:12:03] Hutton looked at Scotland’s rocks and saw something that didn’t fit. Layers of stone that had been laid down, tilted, worn away and buried under new layers. Processes so slow that they must have taken millions upon millions of years.
[00:12:24] In June 1788, he took two friends by boat along the coast east of Edinburgh, to a rocky point called Siccar Point.
[00:12:36] There, at the water’s edge, two completely different sets of rock layers meet. One set stands almost vertical. The other lies nearly flat on top of it.
[00:12:51] For that to happen, the first rocks had to form, be pushed upright, be worn down by the sea, and then be slowly buried under new layers of sand.
[00:13:04] You cannot do all of that in six thousand years. Hutton’s companions understood, staring at that grey rock, that they were looking at evidence of a past almost too vast to imagine.
[00:13:19] One of them later wrote that “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time”.
[00:13:28] In other words, staring at that much time made his head spin.
[00:13:35] Hutton’s own conclusion about the age of the Earth became one of the most famous sentences in the history of science: “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”. In plain English: no sign of a start, and no sign of an end.
[00:13:54] He had discovered what we now call deep time, and it opened all sorts of new doors to explain the natural world. Without it, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution would have been unthinkable, because evolution needs vast stretches of time to work.
[00:14:15] And it wasn’t just philosophy and science, ideas and theory; Edinburgh’s medical school grew into the finest in the English-speaking world.
[00:14:26] Medicine at this time was still half science, half superstition: humours, blood-letting and so on.
[00:14:35] Edinburgh’s innovation was to teach it systematically: lectures, dissections, and training at the patient’s bedside in a proper teaching hospital.
[00:14:48] Students crossed the Atlantic from the American colonies to train there, then carried Edinburgh’s methods home with them and built their own medical schools on the same model.
[00:14:59] The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was written and printed in Edinburgh, starting in 1768. It was nothing less than an attempt to gather all human knowledge into a single work.
[00:15:15] Word of all this spread far beyond Scotland.
[00:15:19] Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers, visited twice, and became friends with Hume, Smith and half the professors in the city. He later wrote that his six weeks in Scotland had been “six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life”.
[00:15:40] Even Voltaire, the great French writer, admitted, in his slightly mocking way, that Europe now looked to Scotland for ideas on everything from poetry to gardening.
[00:15:53] Fifty years earlier, Edinburgh had been the humiliated capital of a country badly damaged by a failed colony.
[00:16:01] Now it was being compared to ancient Athens.
[00:16:06] There was just one problem. The city itself was still a medieval slum.
[00:16:14] The philosophers might have been discussing how human beings and society could be improved without limit, but they were doing it in taverns down muddy alleyways, dodging falling sewage on the way home.
[00:16:29] While these ideas were developing, the city itself was changing. By the 1750s, its leaders had had enough. Edinburgh, they decided, needed a home worthy of its new reputation.
[00:16:46] In 1766, the town council announced a competition to design an entirely new town, on open farmland across the valley to the north.
[00:16:58] Several designs were submitted. The winner was an unknown local architect called James Craig. He was twenty-six years old.
[00:17:09] His plan was everything the Old Town was not. Instead of a tangle of dark closes, there would be a simple, rational grid: three grand parallel streets, with an elegant square at each end, wide enough for light and air and carriages.
[00:17:30] Even the street names were a statement of loyalty to the new Britain. George Street, for the king. Hanover Street, for his royal family. Princes Street, for his sons.
[00:17:43] The stinking lake below the castle was drained, and a great bridge was thrown across the valley to connect the old city with the new.
[00:17:54] And across that bridge, over the following decades, walked the entire Edinburgh establishment.
[00:18:02] Lawyers, professors, merchants and aristocrats moved into the new terraced houses. David Hume was among the early residents, moving there in 1771.
[00:18:15] The New Town was, and still is, one of the most beautiful pieces of city planning in Europe. Together with the Old Town, it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
[00:18:27] But the move came with a cost.
[00:18:31] When the wealthy crossed the bridge, they took their money with them. The Old Town, now abandoned by the rich, slowly rotted into one of the worst slums in Britain. Those same tall tenements that had once housed countesses and judges filled up with the desperately poor.
[00:18:53] The old city had forced every class of society up the same staircases, into the same conversations. In the New Town, a gentleman could pass his entire week without ever meeting anyone below his own rank.
[00:19:10] And this golden age wouldn’t last forever; it started to fade towards the end of the eighteenth century. Hume died in 1776, Smith in 1790.
[00:19:24] By the middle of the nineteenth century, the centre of British intellectual life had moved elsewhere.
[00:19:31] But Edinburgh’s influence had already spread far beyond Scotland, through its books, its students and their ideas.
[00:19:40] And the city kept producing surprises long after its Enlightenment had ended.
[00:19:46] A century later, a young medical student at Edinburgh sat in the lectures of a surgeon called Dr Joseph Bell. Bell liked to astonish his students by diagnosing patients before they had said a word, reading their profession and their habits from their hands, their walk and their clothes.
[00:20:10] That student’s name was Arthur Conan Doyle. When he later invented a detective called Sherlock Holmes, he knew exactly who he was describing. “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes”, he later wrote to Bell.
[00:20:28] Edinburgh has kept its reputation as a city of culture, too.
[00:20:33] Since 1947, it has hosted the Edinburgh Festival and its Fringe, which has become the world’s largest arts festival.
[00:20:42] Today, more than three hundred years after the Union, Edinburgh has its parliament back. Scotland’s politicians once again argue on the Royal Mile, a few minutes’ walk from where Hume and Smith are buried.
[00:20:59] If you have been to Edinburgh, and you’ve been lucky enough to have had a dry, sunny day, you will know that it is one of the great cities of Britain, perhaps even the world.
[00:21:11] It is no longer smoky, no longer smelly, and fortunately, you need not worry about listening out for shouts of “Gardyloo!”
[00:21:21] OK, then, that is it for today’s episode, the first part of our three-part mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:21:30] Next up we’ll be moving to Manchester, the shock city of the Industrial Revolution, where the modern factory, the modern city and modern protests were all invented at more or less the same time.
[00:21:42] And in part three, we’ll head south to Bristol, from the first English voyage to North America to a trade in human beings whose legacy the city is still wrestling with today.
[00:21:54] We also have episodes on the Darién Scheme, which is episode number 564, on Adam Smith, which is episode number 427, so you can really do a binge listen on the story of Scotland. You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:13] I’m Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I’m Alastair Budge, and today it’s the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:00:33] In today’s episode, we are off to Edinburgh, to find out how a smoky, overcrowded city that had just lost its own parliament became the intellectual capital of the world.
[00:00:46] In part two, we head south to Manchester, the city that invented the modern factory, and then invented the ways of fighting against it.
[00:00:56] And in part three, we sail west to Bristol, the city that opened England’s door to the Atlantic, grew rich on the slave trade, and is still arguing about that history today.
[00:01:09] OK then, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:16] As I imagine you will know, Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland.
[00:01:21] It sits on the east coast, on the Firth of Forth, a wide inlet of the North Sea, about 650 kilometres north of London.
[00:01:31] Today it is a city of around half a million people, famous for its castle, its festival, and for being, for many people at least, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.
[00:01:46] It wasn’t always like that.
[00:01:49] In the eighteenth century, travellers approaching Edinburgh would often notice the city before they could properly see it.
[00:01:59] Hanging above it was a thick grey cloud of smoke, rising from thousands of chimneys crammed onto a narrow ridge of rock.
[00:02:11] The Scots had a nickname for the city: Auld Reekie. In English, Old Smoky.
[00:02:18] And if the smoke didn’t announce the city, the smell certainly did.
[00:02:25] Edinburgh in the eighteenth century was one of the most crowded places in Europe.
[00:02:31] Around fifty thousand people lived squeezed into roughly half a square mile, little more than a square kilometre, along one long street running downhill from the castle on its rock to the palace at the bottom.
[00:02:48] The city couldn’t grow outwards. There was a defensive wall, a steep-sided rock, and a foul-smelling lake blocking the way north.
[00:02:58] So instead, it grew upwards.
[00:03:02] Edinburgh’s tenement buildings, great stone towers of flats, rose ten and eleven storeys high.
[00:03:10] Some reached up to fifteen storeys. For the time, these were some of the tallest residential buildings in the world.
[00:03:20] And inside them, everyone lived stacked on top of everyone else.
[00:03:27] A judge might live on the fourth floor, a countess on the fifth, a shoemaker in the basement and a family of fishwives up in the attic, all sharing the same dark, winding staircase.
[00:03:42] The most desirable flats were in the middle. High enough to escape the stench of the street, and low enough so that you didn’t have to climb ten flights of stairs to get home.
[00:03:54] And about that stench, that horrible smell.
[00:03:58] The city had no sewers to speak of, so the custom was to empty your waste, of every kind, out of the window and into the street below, at ten o’clock at night, when the town drum had sounded.
[00:04:14] The traditional warning cry was “Gardyloo!”, which is thought to come from the French “garde à l’eau!”, or “watch out for the water”.
[00:04:24] If you were walking below, you had a second or two to react. And of course, “water” was a bit of a euphemism.
[00:04:33] This, then, was Edinburgh: dark, cramped, smoky and smelly, perched on a rock at the cold northern edge of Europe.
[00:04:44] It was also about to become the city where much of the modern world was worked out.
[00:04:52] The economics that still shape how governments think. The medicine that became the model for hospitals across the world. The discovery that the Earth is unimaginably old.
[00:05:05] Even Sherlock Holmes.
[00:05:07] All of it has roots in those crowded staircases and closes, the narrow, smelly alleyways of the Old Town.
[00:05:17] To understand how that happened, we need to go back to a national catastrophe, and remind ourselves of some Scottish, English, and ultimately British, history.
[00:05:29] At the end of the seventeenth century, Scotland shared a king with England but had its own parliament in Edinburgh. Failed harvests and famine had left it poor, and it was shut out of England’s profitable colonies.
[00:05:48] So it planned a colony of its own: Darien, in what is now Panama.
[00:05:56] From there, Scotland hoped to grow rich on trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
[00:06:03] Nobles, merchants and ordinary townspeople invested their savings. Somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of Scotland’s available investment capital went into the scheme.
[00:06:17] It was a disaster. Disease killed hundreds of colonists, the Spanish attacked, and England refused to help. Within a couple of years, the colony was abandoned.
[00:06:31] By the way, we did an entire episode on this story, episode number 564. So if you’d like to learn about this amazing story in more depth, that is the episode to listen to.
[00:06:44] But the thing to remember, as concerns Edinburgh, is that the losses from this failed endeavour helped push Scotland towards union with England, which promised money to compensate investors for their losses in the scheme.
[00:07:02] And sure enough, in 1707, the two countries became Great Britain.
[00:07:09] For Edinburgh, the deal meant losing its role as Scotland’s centre of political power.
[00:07:18] Under the Union, the Scottish Parliament ceased to exist. There would be one parliament for the whole island, and it would sit four hundred miles away, in London.
[00:07:30] The parliament that met in Edinburgh in the spring of 1707 simply closed its doors. A Scottish parliament would not meet again for almost three hundred years, until 1999.
[00:07:45] There were riots in the streets when the terms became known. Ordinary Scots felt their country had been sold.
[00:07:54] The poet Robert Burns put it in a line Scots still quote today. Scotland, he wrote, had been “bought and sold for English gold”.
[00:08:06] Edinburgh was still a capital city on paper. But it was a capital without its own parliament; the centre of power had moved south.
[00:08:16] So what do you do, if you are an ambitious, educated, energetic city, and politics has been taken away from you?
[00:08:27] Edinburgh’s answer, over the next fifty years, was ideas.
[00:08:33] The Union had taken Scotland’s parliament, but it had left three things in Edinburgh: the Scottish legal system, the Scottish church, and the universities.
[00:08:45] That meant the city remained full of lawyers, ministers, professors and doctors. Educated men with time on their hands, and, crucially, all living within a few minutes’ walk of one another.
[00:09:00] Remember, this was a city where everyone was piled on top of everyone else. There was no aristocratic quarter, no separate district for intellectuals. You could not avoid your neighbours even if you wanted to.
[00:09:15] And rather than staying at home in their cramped flats, these men met in the city’s taverns and clubs. They formed societies with names like the Select Society and the Poker Club, where judges argued with professors, and ministers of the church debated with men who doubted the existence of God.
[00:09:39] Out of this cramped, argumentative, hard-drinking little world came one of the greatest bursts of intellectual activity in human history: the Scottish Enlightenment.
[00:09:53] The novelist Tobias Smollett, writing in 1771, called Edinburgh “a hotbed of genius”, a place where brilliance seemed to grow as easily as plants in a heated greenhouse.
[00:10:08] So who were the people behind this burst of ideas?
[00:10:13] Perhaps the most famous was David Hume, a philosopher who questioned almost everything his society took for granted: miracles, religion, even the idea that we can ever truly know anything at all.
[00:10:28] Today, philosophers regularly rank him among the greatest thinkers who ever lived.
[00:10:34] He also sounded like a lot of fun to be around; he was, by every account, cheerful, kind, enormously fat, and one of the best-loved men in Edinburgh. He liked cooking, he liked card games, and he liked good company.
[00:10:51] One of his closest friends was a quiet, absent-minded professor called Adam Smith.
[00:10:59] In 1776, Smith published a book called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
[00:11:09] It asked a simple question: what actually makes a country rich?
[00:11:16] His answers, about markets, trade, and the division of labour, became the foundation of modern economics. Almost every economic argument you hear today, from any side of politics, is in some way a conversation with Adam Smith.
[00:11:34] We also have an episode on him, by the way, it’s episode 427.
[00:11:39] Then there was James Hutton, who was a farmer with an obsession with rocks.
[00:11:46] At the time, many educated Europeans believed the Earth was around six thousand years old, a figure calculated by adding up the generations in the Bible.
[00:11:58] Logical enough, I guess, if that is your main point of reference.
[00:12:03] Hutton looked at Scotland’s rocks and saw something that didn’t fit. Layers of stone that had been laid down, tilted, worn away and buried under new layers. Processes so slow that they must have taken millions upon millions of years.
[00:12:24] In June 1788, he took two friends by boat along the coast east of Edinburgh, to a rocky point called Siccar Point.
[00:12:36] There, at the water’s edge, two completely different sets of rock layers meet. One set stands almost vertical. The other lies nearly flat on top of it.
[00:12:51] For that to happen, the first rocks had to form, be pushed upright, be worn down by the sea, and then be slowly buried under new layers of sand.
[00:13:04] You cannot do all of that in six thousand years. Hutton’s companions understood, staring at that grey rock, that they were looking at evidence of a past almost too vast to imagine.
[00:13:19] One of them later wrote that “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time”.
[00:13:28] In other words, staring at that much time made his head spin.
[00:13:35] Hutton’s own conclusion about the age of the Earth became one of the most famous sentences in the history of science: “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”. In plain English: no sign of a start, and no sign of an end.
[00:13:54] He had discovered what we now call deep time, and it opened all sorts of new doors to explain the natural world. Without it, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution would have been unthinkable, because evolution needs vast stretches of time to work.
[00:14:15] And it wasn’t just philosophy and science, ideas and theory; Edinburgh’s medical school grew into the finest in the English-speaking world.
[00:14:26] Medicine at this time was still half science, half superstition: humours, blood-letting and so on.
[00:14:35] Edinburgh’s innovation was to teach it systematically: lectures, dissections, and training at the patient’s bedside in a proper teaching hospital.
[00:14:48] Students crossed the Atlantic from the American colonies to train there, then carried Edinburgh’s methods home with them and built their own medical schools on the same model.
[00:14:59] The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was written and printed in Edinburgh, starting in 1768. It was nothing less than an attempt to gather all human knowledge into a single work.
[00:15:15] Word of all this spread far beyond Scotland.
[00:15:19] Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers, visited twice, and became friends with Hume, Smith and half the professors in the city. He later wrote that his six weeks in Scotland had been “six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life”.
[00:15:40] Even Voltaire, the great French writer, admitted, in his slightly mocking way, that Europe now looked to Scotland for ideas on everything from poetry to gardening.
[00:15:53] Fifty years earlier, Edinburgh had been the humiliated capital of a country badly damaged by a failed colony.
[00:16:01] Now it was being compared to ancient Athens.
[00:16:06] There was just one problem. The city itself was still a medieval slum.
[00:16:14] The philosophers might have been discussing how human beings and society could be improved without limit, but they were doing it in taverns down muddy alleyways, dodging falling sewage on the way home.
[00:16:29] While these ideas were developing, the city itself was changing. By the 1750s, its leaders had had enough. Edinburgh, they decided, needed a home worthy of its new reputation.
[00:16:46] In 1766, the town council announced a competition to design an entirely new town, on open farmland across the valley to the north.
[00:16:58] Several designs were submitted. The winner was an unknown local architect called James Craig. He was twenty-six years old.
[00:17:09] His plan was everything the Old Town was not. Instead of a tangle of dark closes, there would be a simple, rational grid: three grand parallel streets, with an elegant square at each end, wide enough for light and air and carriages.
[00:17:30] Even the street names were a statement of loyalty to the new Britain. George Street, for the king. Hanover Street, for his royal family. Princes Street, for his sons.
[00:17:43] The stinking lake below the castle was drained, and a great bridge was thrown across the valley to connect the old city with the new.
[00:17:54] And across that bridge, over the following decades, walked the entire Edinburgh establishment.
[00:18:02] Lawyers, professors, merchants and aristocrats moved into the new terraced houses. David Hume was among the early residents, moving there in 1771.
[00:18:15] The New Town was, and still is, one of the most beautiful pieces of city planning in Europe. Together with the Old Town, it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
[00:18:27] But the move came with a cost.
[00:18:31] When the wealthy crossed the bridge, they took their money with them. The Old Town, now abandoned by the rich, slowly rotted into one of the worst slums in Britain. Those same tall tenements that had once housed countesses and judges filled up with the desperately poor.
[00:18:53] The old city had forced every class of society up the same staircases, into the same conversations. In the New Town, a gentleman could pass his entire week without ever meeting anyone below his own rank.
[00:19:10] And this golden age wouldn’t last forever; it started to fade towards the end of the eighteenth century. Hume died in 1776, Smith in 1790.
[00:19:24] By the middle of the nineteenth century, the centre of British intellectual life had moved elsewhere.
[00:19:31] But Edinburgh’s influence had already spread far beyond Scotland, through its books, its students and their ideas.
[00:19:40] And the city kept producing surprises long after its Enlightenment had ended.
[00:19:46] A century later, a young medical student at Edinburgh sat in the lectures of a surgeon called Dr Joseph Bell. Bell liked to astonish his students by diagnosing patients before they had said a word, reading their profession and their habits from their hands, their walk and their clothes.
[00:20:10] That student’s name was Arthur Conan Doyle. When he later invented a detective called Sherlock Holmes, he knew exactly who he was describing. “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes”, he later wrote to Bell.
[00:20:28] Edinburgh has kept its reputation as a city of culture, too.
[00:20:33] Since 1947, it has hosted the Edinburgh Festival and its Fringe, which has become the world’s largest arts festival.
[00:20:42] Today, more than three hundred years after the Union, Edinburgh has its parliament back. Scotland’s politicians once again argue on the Royal Mile, a few minutes’ walk from where Hume and Smith are buried.
[00:20:59] If you have been to Edinburgh, and you’ve been lucky enough to have had a dry, sunny day, you will know that it is one of the great cities of Britain, perhaps even the world.
[00:21:11] It is no longer smoky, no longer smelly, and fortunately, you need not worry about listening out for shouts of “Gardyloo!”
[00:21:21] OK, then, that is it for today’s episode, the first part of our three-part mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:21:30] Next up we’ll be moving to Manchester, the shock city of the Industrial Revolution, where the modern factory, the modern city and modern protests were all invented at more or less the same time.
[00:21:42] And in part three, we’ll head south to Bristol, from the first English voyage to North America to a trade in human beings whose legacy the city is still wrestling with today.
[00:21:54] We also have episodes on the Darién Scheme, which is episode number 564, on Adam Smith, which is episode number 427, so you can really do a binge listen on the story of Scotland. You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:13] I’m Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
[00:00:05] Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English, the show where you can listen to fascinating stories and learn weird and wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
[00:00:21] I’m Alastair Budge, and today it’s the start of another three-part mini-series, this time on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:00:33] In today’s episode, we are off to Edinburgh, to find out how a smoky, overcrowded city that had just lost its own parliament became the intellectual capital of the world.
[00:00:46] In part two, we head south to Manchester, the city that invented the modern factory, and then invented the ways of fighting against it.
[00:00:56] And in part three, we sail west to Bristol, the city that opened England’s door to the Atlantic, grew rich on the slave trade, and is still arguing about that history today.
[00:01:09] OK then, let’s not waste a minute and get right into it.
[00:01:16] As I imagine you will know, Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland.
[00:01:21] It sits on the east coast, on the Firth of Forth, a wide inlet of the North Sea, about 650 kilometres north of London.
[00:01:31] Today it is a city of around half a million people, famous for its castle, its festival, and for being, for many people at least, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe.
[00:01:46] It wasn’t always like that.
[00:01:49] In the eighteenth century, travellers approaching Edinburgh would often notice the city before they could properly see it.
[00:01:59] Hanging above it was a thick grey cloud of smoke, rising from thousands of chimneys crammed onto a narrow ridge of rock.
[00:02:11] The Scots had a nickname for the city: Auld Reekie. In English, Old Smoky.
[00:02:18] And if the smoke didn’t announce the city, the smell certainly did.
[00:02:25] Edinburgh in the eighteenth century was one of the most crowded places in Europe.
[00:02:31] Around fifty thousand people lived squeezed into roughly half a square mile, little more than a square kilometre, along one long street running downhill from the castle on its rock to the palace at the bottom.
[00:02:48] The city couldn’t grow outwards. There was a defensive wall, a steep-sided rock, and a foul-smelling lake blocking the way north.
[00:02:58] So instead, it grew upwards.
[00:03:02] Edinburgh’s tenement buildings, great stone towers of flats, rose ten and eleven storeys high.
[00:03:10] Some reached up to fifteen storeys. For the time, these were some of the tallest residential buildings in the world.
[00:03:20] And inside them, everyone lived stacked on top of everyone else.
[00:03:27] A judge might live on the fourth floor, a countess on the fifth, a shoemaker in the basement and a family of fishwives up in the attic, all sharing the same dark, winding staircase.
[00:03:42] The most desirable flats were in the middle. High enough to escape the stench of the street, and low enough so that you didn’t have to climb ten flights of stairs to get home.
[00:03:54] And about that stench, that horrible smell.
[00:03:58] The city had no sewers to speak of, so the custom was to empty your waste, of every kind, out of the window and into the street below, at ten o’clock at night, when the town drum had sounded.
[00:04:14] The traditional warning cry was “Gardyloo!”, which is thought to come from the French “garde à l’eau!”, or “watch out for the water”.
[00:04:24] If you were walking below, you had a second or two to react. And of course, “water” was a bit of a euphemism.
[00:04:33] This, then, was Edinburgh: dark, cramped, smoky and smelly, perched on a rock at the cold northern edge of Europe.
[00:04:44] It was also about to become the city where much of the modern world was worked out.
[00:04:52] The economics that still shape how governments think. The medicine that became the model for hospitals across the world. The discovery that the Earth is unimaginably old.
[00:05:05] Even Sherlock Holmes.
[00:05:07] All of it has roots in those crowded staircases and closes, the narrow, smelly alleyways of the Old Town.
[00:05:17] To understand how that happened, we need to go back to a national catastrophe, and remind ourselves of some Scottish, English, and ultimately British, history.
[00:05:29] At the end of the seventeenth century, Scotland shared a king with England but had its own parliament in Edinburgh. Failed harvests and famine had left it poor, and it was shut out of England’s profitable colonies.
[00:05:48] So it planned a colony of its own: Darien, in what is now Panama.
[00:05:56] From there, Scotland hoped to grow rich on trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific.
[00:06:03] Nobles, merchants and ordinary townspeople invested their savings. Somewhere between a fifth and a quarter of Scotland’s available investment capital went into the scheme.
[00:06:17] It was a disaster. Disease killed hundreds of colonists, the Spanish attacked, and England refused to help. Within a couple of years, the colony was abandoned.
[00:06:31] By the way, we did an entire episode on this story, episode number 564. So if you’d like to learn about this amazing story in more depth, that is the episode to listen to.
[00:06:44] But the thing to remember, as concerns Edinburgh, is that the losses from this failed endeavour helped push Scotland towards union with England, which promised money to compensate investors for their losses in the scheme.
[00:07:02] And sure enough, in 1707, the two countries became Great Britain.
[00:07:09] For Edinburgh, the deal meant losing its role as Scotland’s centre of political power.
[00:07:18] Under the Union, the Scottish Parliament ceased to exist. There would be one parliament for the whole island, and it would sit four hundred miles away, in London.
[00:07:30] The parliament that met in Edinburgh in the spring of 1707 simply closed its doors. A Scottish parliament would not meet again for almost three hundred years, until 1999.
[00:07:45] There were riots in the streets when the terms became known. Ordinary Scots felt their country had been sold.
[00:07:54] The poet Robert Burns put it in a line Scots still quote today. Scotland, he wrote, had been “bought and sold for English gold”.
[00:08:06] Edinburgh was still a capital city on paper. But it was a capital without its own parliament; the centre of power had moved south.
[00:08:16] So what do you do, if you are an ambitious, educated, energetic city, and politics has been taken away from you?
[00:08:27] Edinburgh’s answer, over the next fifty years, was ideas.
[00:08:33] The Union had taken Scotland’s parliament, but it had left three things in Edinburgh: the Scottish legal system, the Scottish church, and the universities.
[00:08:45] That meant the city remained full of lawyers, ministers, professors and doctors. Educated men with time on their hands, and, crucially, all living within a few minutes’ walk of one another.
[00:09:00] Remember, this was a city where everyone was piled on top of everyone else. There was no aristocratic quarter, no separate district for intellectuals. You could not avoid your neighbours even if you wanted to.
[00:09:15] And rather than staying at home in their cramped flats, these men met in the city’s taverns and clubs. They formed societies with names like the Select Society and the Poker Club, where judges argued with professors, and ministers of the church debated with men who doubted the existence of God.
[00:09:39] Out of this cramped, argumentative, hard-drinking little world came one of the greatest bursts of intellectual activity in human history: the Scottish Enlightenment.
[00:09:53] The novelist Tobias Smollett, writing in 1771, called Edinburgh “a hotbed of genius”, a place where brilliance seemed to grow as easily as plants in a heated greenhouse.
[00:10:08] So who were the people behind this burst of ideas?
[00:10:13] Perhaps the most famous was David Hume, a philosopher who questioned almost everything his society took for granted: miracles, religion, even the idea that we can ever truly know anything at all.
[00:10:28] Today, philosophers regularly rank him among the greatest thinkers who ever lived.
[00:10:34] He also sounded like a lot of fun to be around; he was, by every account, cheerful, kind, enormously fat, and one of the best-loved men in Edinburgh. He liked cooking, he liked card games, and he liked good company.
[00:10:51] One of his closest friends was a quiet, absent-minded professor called Adam Smith.
[00:10:59] In 1776, Smith published a book called An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
[00:11:09] It asked a simple question: what actually makes a country rich?
[00:11:16] His answers, about markets, trade, and the division of labour, became the foundation of modern economics. Almost every economic argument you hear today, from any side of politics, is in some way a conversation with Adam Smith.
[00:11:34] We also have an episode on him, by the way, it’s episode 427.
[00:11:39] Then there was James Hutton, who was a farmer with an obsession with rocks.
[00:11:46] At the time, many educated Europeans believed the Earth was around six thousand years old, a figure calculated by adding up the generations in the Bible.
[00:11:58] Logical enough, I guess, if that is your main point of reference.
[00:12:03] Hutton looked at Scotland’s rocks and saw something that didn’t fit. Layers of stone that had been laid down, tilted, worn away and buried under new layers. Processes so slow that they must have taken millions upon millions of years.
[00:12:24] In June 1788, he took two friends by boat along the coast east of Edinburgh, to a rocky point called Siccar Point.
[00:12:36] There, at the water’s edge, two completely different sets of rock layers meet. One set stands almost vertical. The other lies nearly flat on top of it.
[00:12:51] For that to happen, the first rocks had to form, be pushed upright, be worn down by the sea, and then be slowly buried under new layers of sand.
[00:13:04] You cannot do all of that in six thousand years. Hutton’s companions understood, staring at that grey rock, that they were looking at evidence of a past almost too vast to imagine.
[00:13:19] One of them later wrote that “the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time”.
[00:13:28] In other words, staring at that much time made his head spin.
[00:13:35] Hutton’s own conclusion about the age of the Earth became one of the most famous sentences in the history of science: “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”. In plain English: no sign of a start, and no sign of an end.
[00:13:54] He had discovered what we now call deep time, and it opened all sorts of new doors to explain the natural world. Without it, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution would have been unthinkable, because evolution needs vast stretches of time to work.
[00:14:15] And it wasn’t just philosophy and science, ideas and theory; Edinburgh’s medical school grew into the finest in the English-speaking world.
[00:14:26] Medicine at this time was still half science, half superstition: humours, blood-letting and so on.
[00:14:35] Edinburgh’s innovation was to teach it systematically: lectures, dissections, and training at the patient’s bedside in a proper teaching hospital.
[00:14:48] Students crossed the Atlantic from the American colonies to train there, then carried Edinburgh’s methods home with them and built their own medical schools on the same model.
[00:14:59] The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was written and printed in Edinburgh, starting in 1768. It was nothing less than an attempt to gather all human knowledge into a single work.
[00:15:15] Word of all this spread far beyond Scotland.
[00:15:19] Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers, visited twice, and became friends with Hume, Smith and half the professors in the city. He later wrote that his six weeks in Scotland had been “six weeks of the densest happiness I have met with in any part of my life”.
[00:15:40] Even Voltaire, the great French writer, admitted, in his slightly mocking way, that Europe now looked to Scotland for ideas on everything from poetry to gardening.
[00:15:53] Fifty years earlier, Edinburgh had been the humiliated capital of a country badly damaged by a failed colony.
[00:16:01] Now it was being compared to ancient Athens.
[00:16:06] There was just one problem. The city itself was still a medieval slum.
[00:16:14] The philosophers might have been discussing how human beings and society could be improved without limit, but they were doing it in taverns down muddy alleyways, dodging falling sewage on the way home.
[00:16:29] While these ideas were developing, the city itself was changing. By the 1750s, its leaders had had enough. Edinburgh, they decided, needed a home worthy of its new reputation.
[00:16:46] In 1766, the town council announced a competition to design an entirely new town, on open farmland across the valley to the north.
[00:16:58] Several designs were submitted. The winner was an unknown local architect called James Craig. He was twenty-six years old.
[00:17:09] His plan was everything the Old Town was not. Instead of a tangle of dark closes, there would be a simple, rational grid: three grand parallel streets, with an elegant square at each end, wide enough for light and air and carriages.
[00:17:30] Even the street names were a statement of loyalty to the new Britain. George Street, for the king. Hanover Street, for his royal family. Princes Street, for his sons.
[00:17:43] The stinking lake below the castle was drained, and a great bridge was thrown across the valley to connect the old city with the new.
[00:17:54] And across that bridge, over the following decades, walked the entire Edinburgh establishment.
[00:18:02] Lawyers, professors, merchants and aristocrats moved into the new terraced houses. David Hume was among the early residents, moving there in 1771.
[00:18:15] The New Town was, and still is, one of the most beautiful pieces of city planning in Europe. Together with the Old Town, it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
[00:18:27] But the move came with a cost.
[00:18:31] When the wealthy crossed the bridge, they took their money with them. The Old Town, now abandoned by the rich, slowly rotted into one of the worst slums in Britain. Those same tall tenements that had once housed countesses and judges filled up with the desperately poor.
[00:18:53] The old city had forced every class of society up the same staircases, into the same conversations. In the New Town, a gentleman could pass his entire week without ever meeting anyone below his own rank.
[00:19:10] And this golden age wouldn’t last forever; it started to fade towards the end of the eighteenth century. Hume died in 1776, Smith in 1790.
[00:19:24] By the middle of the nineteenth century, the centre of British intellectual life had moved elsewhere.
[00:19:31] But Edinburgh’s influence had already spread far beyond Scotland, through its books, its students and their ideas.
[00:19:40] And the city kept producing surprises long after its Enlightenment had ended.
[00:19:46] A century later, a young medical student at Edinburgh sat in the lectures of a surgeon called Dr Joseph Bell. Bell liked to astonish his students by diagnosing patients before they had said a word, reading their profession and their habits from their hands, their walk and their clothes.
[00:20:10] That student’s name was Arthur Conan Doyle. When he later invented a detective called Sherlock Holmes, he knew exactly who he was describing. “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes”, he later wrote to Bell.
[00:20:28] Edinburgh has kept its reputation as a city of culture, too.
[00:20:33] Since 1947, it has hosted the Edinburgh Festival and its Fringe, which has become the world’s largest arts festival.
[00:20:42] Today, more than three hundred years after the Union, Edinburgh has its parliament back. Scotland’s politicians once again argue on the Royal Mile, a few minutes’ walk from where Hume and Smith are buried.
[00:20:59] If you have been to Edinburgh, and you’ve been lucky enough to have had a dry, sunny day, you will know that it is one of the great cities of Britain, perhaps even the world.
[00:21:11] It is no longer smoky, no longer smelly, and fortunately, you need not worry about listening out for shouts of “Gardyloo!”
[00:21:21] OK, then, that is it for today’s episode, the first part of our three-part mini-series on three cities that shaped modern Britain.
[00:21:30] Next up we’ll be moving to Manchester, the shock city of the Industrial Revolution, where the modern factory, the modern city and modern protests were all invented at more or less the same time.
[00:21:42] And in part three, we’ll head south to Bristol, from the first English voyage to North America to a trade in human beings whose legacy the city is still wrestling with today.
[00:21:54] We also have episodes on the Darién Scheme, which is episode number 564, on Adam Smith, which is episode number 427, so you can really do a binge listen on the story of Scotland. You’ve been listening to English Learning for Curious Minds by Leonardo English.
[00:22:13] I’m Alastair Budge, you stay safe, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.
