Edinburgh area guide

Radiating out from the narrow wynds and vennels of Old Town at the historic heart of the city, are parks, wealthy stone-faced streets and the suburb-villages that the city has subsumed, leafy Stockbridge and edgy seaside Leith. Students hang out in the South, rugby fans in the West, and all is overlooked by Arthur's Seat, the extinct volcano that stands above the city.

Old Town

Viewed from the air – or, more easily, on any one of the copies of 17th- and 18th-century maps you can buy around town – the Old Town resembles some ancient leviathan, running from Edinburgh Castle down to Holyrood. The Royal Mile is its undulating spine, while the ribs of the beast splay out to the north and south, taking in both major thoroughfares and tiny passageways.

On the ground, this translates into a compact, sloping walk that takes in more historic attractions and key sites than any other pocket of land in Scotland, including the Palace of Holyroodhouse, the Scottish Whisky Heritage Centre, and the National Museum of Scotland. Politics, religions, lives and loves were forged, betrayed and destroyed in among the closes, pends, wynds, tunnels and vennels of the Old Town. With much of the commerce centred around the tourist industry it's hardly surprising that the Old Town is like a huge open-air museum, with around 900 years of architecture on show.

New Town

Edinburgh's New Town comprises of a regimented grid of streets and gardens that runs from Princes Street down to Cumberland Street. The result of two huge successive construction projects, it represents 18th-century Britain's biggest and best piece of town planning, and still holds some of the finest Georgian architecture in the country.

The neighbourhood is dotted with impressive boutiques (Arkangel, Jane Davidson, and Boudice) an eclectic selection of cafés (Cornerstone Café, Queen Street Café, and Rick's, as well as the usual gamut of high-street shopping emporia. However, it's still chiefly a residential area, home to Edinburgh's well-heeled elite.

Stockbridge

Village backwater, Georgian vision, bohemian enclave, workers' utopia: Stockbridge has been many things to many people over the centuries. But while housing trends and shopping fashions continue to come and go, Stockbridge still feels less like an urban neighbourhood and more like a village that just happens to have a city on its doorstep.

With cafés, pubs and small restaurants galore (Maxi's, Stockbridge Restaurant, Gallery Café, Bailie), some of its most striking features are its schools: neo-classsical Edinburgh Academy and gargoyle-heavy Fettes, which was apparently JK Rowling's inspiration for Hogwarts.

Calton Hill & Broughton

It was from the top of Calton Hill that Robert Louis Stevenson drew much of the inspiration that fuelled his writing on Edinburgh and although The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was set in London, its atmosphere of moral hypocrisy was charged with what Stevenson saw from here.

The hill is on the edge of old Edinburgh and is home to the City Observatory. In the run-up to Hogmanay, it's the destination for the annual torchlight procession, culminating in a fireworks display and boat-burning. The Nelson Monument is also a great place from which to view the spectacular fireworks that close the Edinburgh International Festival each year.

Leith

Despite its proximity to central Edinburgh Leith is very much a separate place, with an atmosphere of its own and a history almost as chequered as that of its neighbour. At various points a medieval fishing settlement, a crucial port, a shipbuilding centre and a crime-riddled suburb, it's now on the up, and in quite spectacular fashion.

Things really started to take off when, in 1992, the docks were privatised, and new owners Forth Ports looked at alternative uses for the emty land. The huge Scottish Executive building was completed at Victoria Quay in 1995, followed in short order by the 1998 arrival of the Royal Yacht Britannia and the opening of the Queen Terminal shopping mall in 2001. It's also home of Hibernian FC.

South Edinburgh

Starting at the new Quartermile residential development on Lauriston Place, South Edinburgh stretches off like a slice of cake, taking in everything from the green spaces of the Meadows and Blackford Hill to tenemented suburbs such as Marchmont and Bruntsfield. There are students galore here, thanks to the campus outposts of Edinburgh and Napier universities and the presence of Edinburgh College of Art; their influence ensures that the area boasts plenty of budget restaurants and cafés (Metropole, Suruchi, Dragon Way, Kwok), pubs (Human Be-In, Pear Tree House) and second-hand bookshops (Armchair Books). But what really defines much of South Edinburgh is the middle-class reserve apparent in any leafy backstreet in the Grange or Morningside, where the grandest houses sit discreetly behind the highest walls.

West Edinburgh

Aside from a handful of iconic attractions further out – Edinburgh Zoo, Murrayfield Rugby Stadium and Hearts FC – West Edinburgh is not an area that generally detains or diverts visitors to the city. But it's here, way out West, that various layers of Edinburgh's economic history fit together like some topological puzzle, just as a few old buildings hidden away in residential warrens hint at a less urban past. The most surprising feature may well be the Union Canal, its terminus tucked discreetly away just off Lothian Road. Well, that and the penguins...

See all venues in Edinburgh