Scotland on Sunday

It is the visual epicentre of Edinburgh. On the one side towers the Castle, silhouetted against the sky, commanding the medieval mile of the Old Town. On the other the grids and crescents of the great Georgian New Town stretch away to the north. And between them, at the foot of the man-made hill of The Mound, sit two of Europe's finest neo-classical buildings. Built by William Playfair between 1826 and 1859, the Royal Scottish Academy and the National Gallery of Scotland have always been the physical embodiment of the aspirations of Scottish culture, and last week those aspirations entered a new era when the two were linked with the completion of the Playfair Project. In just five years and at a modest cost of £30m, much raised from private sources, the National Galleries have achieved what for so long was no more than a dream. From Playfair's magnificent siblings, one underused and decaying, the other bursting with works of art, they have created a new, world-class gallery complex which ranks in Europe as second only to Berlin, and which can make Scotland an equal partner in the share of world-class exhibitions.