Travel Guides | Edinburgh Travel Guide
Edinburgh Travel Guide
Tattoo and Trainspotting
Edinburgh may be the most beautiful of Britain’s cities, but it is also the most divided: half Tattoo half Trainspotting. Surrounding the wealth and elegance of the city centre is a ring of outlying estates containing areas of grinding poverty and festering alienation, populated by real-life characters from an Irvine Welsh novel. This is the Edinburgh the tourists don't see. The kind described by Ian Rankin in his best-selling Inspector Rebus novels, where drug addiction, violence and corruption are a part of everyday life, going on under the noses of cultural and political elites, and where radical counter-culturists rub shoulders with the prim and proper ladies of Morningside, the embodiment of Scottish puritanism.
Jekyll and Hyde city
There have always been two sides to Edinburgh, perhaps not surprisingly. For this is the city that inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In medieval times wealthy merchants and professionals lived cheek by jowl with the great unwashed in the cramped conditions of the Royal Mile. This uneasy social integration was brought to an end when those who could afford to decanted to the New Town, leaving the Old Town to degenerate into a decaying slum. The Old Town has since been cleaned up and is now the hub of Edinburgh's tourist activities. The slums are still there, however, only they've moved out to the fringes of the city, creating an even sharper social division. This is at its most evident in Leith, Edinburgh's old port, which has been tarted up with converted waterside apartments, fashionable bars and bistros and expensive restaurants. Only yards from such indulgence are grim, faceless council blocks, where single-parent families have to exist for a week on less than what you'd pay for a decent bottle of Chablis. It should be a recipe for revolution, but a healthy wit somehow seems to keep it all together.
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