Undiscovered Scotland

 

Visitors to Scotland's capital city have no shortage of amazing buildings and vistas to admire. Let me put my cards on the table: in my view Edinburgh is the finest city on Earth. This is in large part due to the huge wealth of history that is on view pretty much wherever you look; and also because it is a city built in three dimensions over an underlying landscape that undulates dramatically.

"Edinburgh Reflections" by Jack Gillon is a book that seeks to combine the fourth dimension - time - with the three that are immediately obvious to visitors to Edinburgh. How many people look at the often intricate mix of old buildings and new development in the city and wonder what it used to be like? Fair enough, the smokiness and smelliness that led to the city becoming known as "Auld Reekie" are perhaps best left to the imagination, but the camera, in one form or another, has been around for the better part of two centuries.

Old photographs can give a window on the Edinburgh - the many different Edinburghs - that have come and to a lesser or greater extent gone over that period. The question is how best to use them. Comparison photographs can work very well: displaying new and old photographs next to each other or one above the other so they can be compared directly. "Edinburgh Reflections" takes that approach one step further. In this book most pages comprise two horizontal format photographs, separated by a paragraph of well-written explanatory text. Rather than have one old photograph and one new one, each is split down the middle and the halves transposed. This means that a given page might have an image at the top that has the left half of an old photograph faded into the right half of a modern equivalent photograph: while at the bottom of the page the other halves of the two images are faded into each other the other way around.

The selection of images used is fascinating and taken together the collection shows both how much has changed in Edinburgh over the lifetime of the camera and how much has survived. As an example, it is perhaps obvious when you think about it that an open area called "The Meadows" was once kept trimmed by a herd of sheep, but it still comes as a surprise to see them on the page. There is no shortage of books about Edinburgh, but "Edinburgh Reflections" is a very worthwhile addition to the bookshelf that does bring something different to a visitor's - or resident's - perceptions of this great city.