On your right, look for a formal rectangular garden framed by pale stone Georgian buildings, with the tall fluted column of the Melville Monument rising from its centre.
St Andrew Square was the New Town’s first clear declaration of intent. When James Craig drew his plan for this district, he imagined a city arranged with discipline: straight streets, balanced fronts, and a social order that could be read in stone. Building began here in seventeen seventy-two, and within only a few years this became one of the most fashionable addresses in Edinburgh. The geometry looks calm and reasonable. That, of course, was part of the sales pitch.
But the order was never quite as pure as it pretended. Before the square had even taken shape, Sir Lawrence Dundas bought a tavern called Peace and Plenty in seventeen sixty-eight on ground that planners had reserved for St Andrew’s Church. He then claimed the plot for his own mansion, Dundas House, on the east side. It is a marvellous little warning, really: even the most rational city plan can bend when money arrives early enough.
That house became a trophy of finance as well as a private residence. In eighteen twenty-five, the Royal Bank of Scotland bought Dundas House for thirty-five thousand three hundred pounds, roughly four million pounds in modern value, and turned it into its headquarters. If you look at the image on your screen, you can see how the square’s banking power settled into architecture. For generations, banks and insurance companies crowded this address so densely that St Andrew Square could claim to be the richest patch of land of its size in Scotland.
People gave the place its polish as well as its prestige. The philosopher David Hume lived here after being coaxed across from the Old Town, partly because his reputation might tempt others to follow. On the north side, number twenty-one welcomed a child in seventeen seventy-eight who would grow into Lord Henry Brougham, a lawyer and writer, later a fierce defender of Queen Caroline during the great royal divorce scandal of eighteen twenty.
And then there is the column in the middle. The Melville Monument honours Henry Dundas, first Viscount Melville. It did not simply appear out of unanimous admiration. After his death in eighteen eleven, committees argued for years over where the memorial should stand; Royal Navy officers paid for it by subscription; the design won approval in eighteen twenty-one; and the statue went up in eighteen twenty-seven. On your phone, the monument’s detail shows its confidence rather plainly. Yet that confidence has become unsettled, because Dundas’s part in delaying the abolition of the slave trade remains bitterly disputed.
Even the gardens carried a quiet boundary line. Private owners kept them for years as part of the New Town Gardens, and only in two thousand and eight did they open to the public. So this square began as a polished public face, but for a long time it offered access on very selective terms.
Today, shops, hotels, restaurants, buses, and trams keep the square in constant use, but its deeper story is still one of money, influence, and image. From here, that story slides neatly onto Princes Street, where commerce became spectacle, and where one of Edinburgh’s grandest stores met disaster. We’ll find that at Jenners.
