A competition produced the plan. The winning design, by the young architect James Craig, laid out a grid of broad streets on the fields north of the former loch. George Street ran along the ridge, flanked by Queen Street to the north and Princes Street to the south, with St Andrew Square at the east end and Charlotte Square at the west. The street names reflected Hanoverian British patriotism, and the layout was said to echo the design of the Union Flag. Craig intended George Street to terminate at each end with a church positioned on axis. The western church on Charlotte Square was built, but at St Andrew Square, Sir Lawrence Dundas had already bought the land and commissioned a Palladian mansion from William Chambers. The resulting Dundas House, completed in 1774, is now the registered office of the Royal Bank of Scotland.

The first New Town was mainly completed by 1820 with the finishing of Charlotte Square, designed by Robert Adam. This was the only architecturally unified section of the development -- the rest of the New Town grew building by building, plot by plot, with individual owners commissioning their own houses within the grid framework. Adam's north side of Charlotte Square remains one of the finest examples of Georgian architecture in Britain. Bute House, at its center, became the official residence of the First Minister of Scotland after devolution. As the New Town filled, the wealthy moved north from the cramped Old Town into grand houses on wide streets. The working classes stayed behind.

Success bred expansion. After 1800, the Second New Town pushed northward from Queen Street Gardens toward the Water of Leith, with Great King Street as its central avenue. William Henry Playfair designed an Eastern New Town climbing the slopes of Calton Hill, intended to be even more magnificent than Craig's original. Regent Terrace, Carlton Terrace, and Royal Terrace were built, but the full development stretching north to Leith was never completed. To the west, the completion of Thomas Telford's Dean Bridge in 1831 opened the Dean Estate for development. Very large sections of the Second New Town, built from the early 19th century, survive exactly as built -- townhouses on the east-west streets, tenement blocks on the north-south streets, with service mews running behind the terraces.

The New Town's elegance came at a human cost that was not fully acknowledged for two centuries. Many of its residents were wealthy Scots financially involved in Caribbean slavery -- through slave trading or ownership of plantations. The historian Sir Geoff Palmer stated that the glorious New Town, seen by many as the physical embodiment of the Scottish Enlightenment, was sadly partly funded by the enormous profits derived from the enslavement of Africans. The 1960s brought a different kind of threat: a plan to demolish the entire length of Princes Street to build an elevated walkway. The plan was unpopular but not abandoned until 1982, and before it died, seven buildings were destroyed. The Cockburn Association has campaigned to preserve what remains ever since.

The New Town was reached from the Old Town by the North Bridge, completed in 1772, and by the Earthen Mound -- a causeway that began as a dumping ground for soil excavated during the New Town's construction and reached its present proportions in the 1830s. The Mound now carries the National Gallery of Scotland and the Royal Scottish Academy Building, both designed by Playfair, positioned between the medieval and Georgian cities like a hinge connecting two versions of Edinburgh. The combined New Town, Old Town, and West End were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995 -- a recognition that the contrast between the two cities, the medieval and the planned, the organic and the rational, is itself the point.