Lizars Plan of Edinburgh

Lizars plan of Edinburgh

Lizars’s carefully and charmingly engraved vignettes of Edinburgh landmarks conveys something of the equivalency that developed in the 19th century between all tourist attractions and all others. Heriot’s Hospital, from the reign of Charles I, stands cheek-by-jowl with Donaldson’s Hospital, a gigantic retro-Elizabethan structure completed just one year before the map itself. The neo-Gothic buttresses of the Walter Scott Monument (1840-46) are likewise twinned with the actually medieval Gothic lantern spire of St Giles. At top centre, a lady with a parasol has the option of surveying either the genuine medieval battlements of Edinburgh Castle to her right, or the mock-medieval ones of the city’s Georgian prison to her left.

William Home Lizars (1788-1859) was a talented artist and engraver, based from 1817 onwards in St James Square in Edinburgh, who also drafted and published some of the most commercially successful Scottish maps and atlases of the early 19th century.  

The map was published in 1852 and is held in the National Library of Scotland.