The New Town

Once the city's financial centre, George Street is now steadily being turned into its most lively upmarket street. All along the street, expensive new bars and restaurants jostle for position with some of the city's most illustrious shops, and some of its grand bank buildings have become spectacular, echoing drinking halls, the largest and most extraordinary of which is the Dome, standing on the site of the old Physician's Hall, its magnificent interior hidden behind a grand columned portico.

As you walk, look up above the shopfronts, where, unlike Princes Street, the street's Georgian origins are intact. Over the first building on the right hand side, the Standard Life Assurance building, the original pediment (1839) includes Steell's sculpture of the Wise and Foolish Virgins. Next door is another more modern interpretation of the parable in bronze relief.

A little way along George Street, on the right, is the elegant oval of St Andrew's and St George's Church.

The church was forced to make do with this constricted site after being displaced from St Andrew Square (see above). The New Town's first parish church, its shape is reminiscent of Bernini's St Andrew's in Rome's Quirinale. The elliptical sweep of the interior is certainly beautifully proportioned, and contains modern stained glass and the original boxed pews.

The church is most famous for being the scene of the Disruption in 1843, when Thomas Chalmers (whose statue stands at the crossroads of Castle and George Streets) led 407 ministers out of the Church of Scotland's annual assembly to set up the Free Church-free from the interference of patronage and the Civil Courts. When the two churches reunited again in 1929, they met here for the first time. In 1964 St Andrew's amalgamated with St George's in Charlotte Square, when the latter was converted into West Register House.

Pause by the statue of King George IV and look left up Hanover Street.

You are roughly on a level with Steell's enormous 25-ton statue of Queen Victoria dressed up as Britannia, sitting on top of the Royal Scottish Academy on Princes Street. It's rather grubby now, and is almost camouflaged against the equally blackened stone of the Assembly Hall on the hill behind. The National Gallery of Scotland is tucked away between the two.

Continue along George Street, westwards.

The fine wine merchant Justerini and Brooks, on the right at No.45, stands on the former premises of Blackwood's Magazine, which counted George Eliot among its contributors. The English essayist Sydney Smith, one of the editors of the first number of the Edinburgh Review, stayed next door at No.46. He described Edinburgh as a place of 'odious smells, barbarous sounds, bad suppers, excellent hearts and most enlightened and cultivated understandings'.

Opposite are the Assembly Rooms, opened for magnificent society gatherings at the end of the 18th century, and still serving much the same purpose today, albeit with considerably less formality. Its pompous portico by William Burn was a later addition to John Henderson's austere essay in continental classicism.