The Guardian

Ladies and gentlemen: to your port side, the work of Mr Robert Adam. To your starboard, more work by Mr Robert Adam. And there, away in the distance, beyond the new detention centre and much-loved parliament building, masterpiece upon masterpiece by Mr Robert Adam - but not, I hasten to point out, the same Mr Robert Adam ... Let me explain. Imagine a journey on an Edinburgh launch, in 2015, from Leith to the Forth Bridge and Fife. There is Benjamin Baker and John Fowler's peerless Forth railway bridge - privatised, rusting and pasted with digital advertising maybe, yet etched forever into the lowland firthscape. Behind you, there is the magnificence of Edinburgh's city centre, made glorious by such 18th-century talents as those of Robert Adam (1728-92), architect of Charlotte Square (1791-1820), an act of city-making that rivals anything continental Europe has to show. West of Port of Leith, between Granton and Western harbours, is something you may not have expected to see: a brand new Edinburgh New Town formed out of these two once-redundant docksides.