Enlightenment in Edinburgh: Exploring the City that Changed the World

When Edinburgh’s Old Town became overcrowded and filthy in the 1700s, a radical plan to build a new town with wide clean streets and gracious Georgian housing was devised. On this walking tour, you’ll find out how this radical thinking wasn’t restricted to town planning.

Starting outside St Giles’ Cathedral, you’ll weave through the Old Town to Charlotte Square Private Garden in the New Town, where our tour ends. Along the way, you’ll hear about David Hume, Adam Smith, Walter Scott, and James Hutton, all giants of Europe’s Enlightenment Movement, a period of intellectual fervour in the 1700s.

You’ll find out how Edinburgh broke free of traditional thinking and flourished as a centre for new ideas in Architecture, Engineering, Medicine, Science, Geology, Philosophy, Education and the Arts. You’ll also hear how this put the city on the intellectual map, with its thinkers and inventors influencing the world.

On this Edinburgh walking tour, you’ll have a chance to:

• Take in Surgeons’ Hall Museums, once the famous medical faculty that was built on criminal activity
• Find out how Sir Walter Scott influenced world literature
• Learn how to recognise Robert Adam’s Georgian-style architecture which was replicated as far afield as Russia
• Discover Scotland’s influence on the American revolution
• See statues of Professor Adam Smith, physicist James Clerk Maxwell, philosopher David Hume, and novelist Sir Walter Scott, and learn about these great free-thinkers
• Step into the Old Quad at the University of Edinburgh where, in the 1700s, professors were first encouraged to become experts in their field, rather than generalists that taught multiple subjects
• Hear about a few of the medical advancements made in Edinburgh as you stroll past Princes Street Gardens

This walk will take almost two hours to complete but allow longer if you want to stop at one of the Old Town’s many cafes, or spend some time in the gardens at St Andrew’s Square to soak up your surroundings. No matter which way you turn, the vista from this Old Town, developed on an extinct volcano, will astonish you.