Edinburgh, drawn from its own streets.

Edinburgh on paper

The Firth of Forth closes the top of the frame as open water, with the docks and the shoreline drawn against it, and everything else in the print runs up towards it. Below that, Edinburgh is the most legible city in Britain on paper, because the contrast does the work. The New Town prints as three long parallel streets with cross-streets at regular intervals and squares punched into the corners — the plan is two and a half centuries old and it still reads as the most deliberate thing in the frame. Immediately south of it the Old Town does the opposite: one long spine along the ridge with dozens of closes and wynds dropping off either side, drawn as short stubs, which is exactly what they are.

Between the two lies the valley. The gardens and the railway run along it, so the print shows a clear band of green and rail separating grid from spine, with the bridges crossing at a handful of points. Holyrood Park fills the eastern side of the sheet as a large pale shape with almost no streets in it at all — an absence that anchors the whole composition. The Water of Leith threads down from the west through Dean and Stockbridge, narrow and winding, the one line in the frame that predates every plan on it.

The seven-kilometre frame here holds the coast, the New Town, the Old Town, the Meadows and the park, with Leith on the shore and Morningside at the bottom of the sheet. Take it in to two kilometres and the closes become individually countable; take it out to fifteen and you reach the Forth, the bridges and the shape of the coast, at the cost of the detail that makes the centre worth looking at.