Princes Street: A Decision, and Now the Real Work Begins

Princes Street has never stood still. Over more than two centuries it has changed from the residential southern edge of Edinburgh’s New Town into the city’s premier shopping street, a transport artery, a visitor destination and one of Scotland’s most recognisable urban spaces. Its extraordinary southward prospect across the Gardens to the Castle and Old Town remains one of the great views of any European city. Yet few would argue that Princes Street today is fulfilling its potential.

This week, the City of Edinburgh Council’s Planning Committee made an important decision about what happens next, voting by a clear majority to progress its preferred approach to the Princes Street and Waverley Valley Strategy. SNP, Labour and Conservative members backed the pragmatic option; the two Liberal Democrat members voted for the more radical alternative; the two Green members supported neither, citing concerns about what the proposed road layout would mean for cyclists. The decision follows a long, and at times difficult, debate about the level of ambition Edinburgh should have for its principal civic street. Last November, councillors declined to adopt the then proposed Strategy, judging it to lack “ambition and imagination,” and instead called for further work involving elected members, officers and stakeholders with expertise in transport, culture, heritage and placemaking. The Cockburn Association subsequently took part in the major workshop held in June this year, which produced a choice broadly characterised as one between an “ambitious pragmatism,” concentrating on deliverable improvements to the existing street, and a more fundamental rethink of how Princes Street might work.

The decision to move forward matters. For too long, Princes Street has suffered not from a shortage of plans, studies or good intentions, but from the difficulty of translating them into coordinated action. What was agreed this week is, in practice, a direction of travel rather than a finished design: a revised Strategy, built on the pragmatic approach, is expected to return to committee for approval in early 2027, with detailed work on funding, transport modelling and design to follow in the meantime.

A duty inherited

There is a longer view worth taking on all this. The Cockburn Association takes its name from Henry Cockburn, the Scottish judge and diarist whose 1849 pamphlet on the best ways of spoiling the beauty of Edinburgh remains, a century and three-quarters on, the founding text of civic vigilance in this city. His charge to the city’s magistrates was blunt: their duty, he wrote, was to protect the city “from hurtful projects, and from hurtful indifference.” Cockburn fought, sometimes almost alone, against proposals that would have driven a railway and engine depot through the Gardens, turned the ground beneath the Scott Monument into a market, and built over the south side of Princes Street, closing off the views he considered among the most singular of any town in the world. He won those fights, largely through the statutory protections he helped secure for the “perpetual openness” of the street and the valley beneath it, and the sightlines Edinburgh still enjoys today are, in real measure, his legacy.

His warning was never only against radical schemes, though. He was just as alert to indifference — the slow erosion of a city’s character through neglect, half-measures and inattention. That is arguably the more useful test for this week’s decision. Choosing the pragmatic option over a more transformative rethink is defensible, even wise, if it delivers real, tangible improvement to how people use and experience the valley. It stops being defensible the moment it becomes an excuse for another decade of drift.

More than a shopping street

The Cockburn Association has consistently argued that Princes Street cannot be understood simply as a struggling retail street requiring economic regeneration. It is part of the First New Town. It forms one edge of the Waverley Valley. It lies at the heart of Edinburgh’s World Heritage Site. It is a major public transport corridor and, perhaps most importantly, it is one of Edinburgh’s great civic spaces. Its future cannot, therefore, be measured simply by footfall, hotel occupancy, retail floorspace or investment. The question, rather, is whether Princes Street becomes a better place.

The Council’s Strategy recognises many of these competing demands, with objectives encompassing placemaking, heritage, economic activity, mobility, climate resilience, nature and accessibility. The earlier public consultation demonstrated substantial support for many of the individual measures proposed, while also revealing a strong desire for better design standards and a clearer overall vision for the street. That breadth of ambition is welcome, though it will need to be matched by equal discipline in delivery.

From strategy to street

There is much in the emerging direction that the Cockburn can support. The package now being taken forward includes a southern pavement widened by around 1.5 metres, new lifts and ramps down into the Gardens, cafés within the existing shelters, improved public toilets and drinking fountains, longer opening hours for the Gardens, and better natural stone paving and seating alongside the refurbishment of the Ross Bandstand. It is accompanied by a smaller set of supporting transport measures: a possible new cycle hub at Waverley Station, some narrowing of the south carriageway to free up walking and wheeling space, and a bus gate under consideration for the street’s east end to help manage congestion. The Cockburn is particularly glad to see accessibility given real weight throughout, in principle and in practical detail alike — step-free routes into the Gardens, wider pavements for wheelchair users and parents with buggies, and attention to a street whose steep cross-falls and worn surfaces have long been a genuine barrier for many people. Individually modest, taken together these measures could meaningfully improve how the street is used and experienced day to day.

One question has been left largely unresolved: the balance between buses, trams, cycling and walking along the street. Campaigners for segregated cycling continue to argue that the pragmatic option falls short of what a genuinely people-first Princes Street would require; Spokes has specifically warned that widening the south pavement while retaining the dual carriageway could push cyclists closer to the tram tracks, with real safety implications. The Council, for its part, has pointed to concerns about the effect on bus and tram journey times. Tellingly, an amendment seeking a joint look at cycle provision on George Street was set aside during the meeting itself, with the matter instead directed to the Transport and Environment Committee. The Cockburn does not need to take a side in that debate to note that it cannot be settled for Princes Street alone, nor considered by a different committee in isolation. As with so much else, it is bound up with what happens on George Street, and the two streets need to be planned as a pair rather than resolved in sequence, by separate committees, on separate timetables.

We have previously argued that the street should be considered as part of the First New Town as a whole, rather than as an isolated commercial strip. Its historic feu pattern, surviving Georgian fabric, later buildings and roofscape all matter, as does the architectural quality of whatever comes next. So too does its relationship with the streets around it. Rose Street has long depended on Princes Street for footfall and servicing, and any shift in how Princes Street functions will be felt there directly. George Street, meanwhile, cannot be planned as though Princes Street were a separate problem: changes to traffic, parking and pedestrian priority on one will inevitably alter how the other is used, and the two need to be thought through together rather than in sequence. The same is true further afield, from the newer retail geography around St Andrew Square to the West End, where Princes Street’s role as a transport corridor does not simply stop at Lothian Road. A Strategy confined to the street’s own boundary risks solving problems by moving them next door. The transformation of retail also makes diversity increasingly important. Princes Street will undoubtedly accommodate more leisure, hospitality and other uses, but allowing market forces alone to determine its future risks replacing one monoculture with another. A successful city centre needs shops, services, workplaces, culture, places to eat, opportunities to live and, above all, reasons for Edinburgh residents as well as visitors to be there.

A plan of plans

Look behind this week’s decision and a genuine problem becomes visible: Edinburgh does not lack for strategies. The Princes Street and Waverley Valley Strategy itself sits within, and is required to align with, City Plan 2030’s city centre policy, the City Mobility Plan, the roughly £314 million Edinburgh City Centre Transformation programme, Our Future Streets, the Council’s Thriving Greenspaces 2050 vision and its Net Zero 2030 commitment. Each of these is sound in its own terms. Together, read end to end, they amount to a plan of plans, in which it becomes genuinely difficult to say, in one sentence, what the Council actually wants Princes Street to be.

The fragmentation isn’t only paperwork, either. Responsibility for different parts of the same townscape is scattered across the Council’s own committees, Network Rail, Transport Scotland, Lothian Buses and Edinburgh Trams, Historic Environment Scotland and Edinburgh World Heritage, each working to its own priorities and its own timetable. Coherent management of the First New Town as a single place, rather than a set of adjoining jurisdictions, would do more to protect its character over time than any one strategy document.

That underlying question deserves a direct answer, not just another public realm framework. Is Princes Street meant to become substantially residential above ground-floor level over time, as much of the rest of the New Town already is — or should the ambition instead be fuller pedestrianisation, with buses and trams the only vehicles left? Neither question has an obvious answer, and there’s a real case that its role as a transport spine makes full pedestrianisation unrealistic for years yet. Nor is it clear whether the street’s future is primarily retail reinvented for a different age, or something closer to a linear park with shops attached. This week’s committee did not need to resolve any of that, and the pragmatic option is right not to force it prematurely. But it cannot be deferred indefinitely either.

City Plan 2040 may be the opportunity to provide that answer. The plan is still at an early stage — its evidence report was only agreed by full Council in June, and adoption is several years off — which means there is genuine time to use it properly, rather than simply carrying forward the assumptions of City Plan 2030 by default. A local development plan is, in the end, the only document with the statutory weight to settle Princes Street’s fundamental identity rather than simply improve its edges. The Cockburn Association intends to press for that fundamental question, and not only detailed public realm design, to be addressed as City Plan 2040 takes shape.

What ambition costs

None of this happens without money, and it is worth being honest about scale. Edinburgh’s wider City Centre Transformation programme carries a ten-year price tag of around £314 million, funded through a mix of developer contributions, the Council’s own capital programme and match funding from the Scottish Government’s Places for Everyone scheme, administered through Sustrans — the George Street and New Town project alone has already drawn some £20 million from that route. Set against that scale, the individual elements of the Princes Street package approved this week are modest, and modest need not be a criticism: an earlier draft of the Strategy put improved Garden access at up to £5 million and better pavements at up to £3 million per block, figures that would barely register against the city’s other big-ticket infrastructure commitments, from tram expansion to the wider Transformation programme itself.

That comparison cuts both ways. It suggests the pragmatic option is genuinely affordable and deliverable without waiting on a major new funding settlement, which is precisely the case officers made for it. But it should also prompt a harder question about ambition: if Edinburgh’s most internationally significant street can be meaningfully improved for a sum that is modest against the city’s wider capital programme, what would it take to secure a committed, long-term funding stream for the Waverley Valley specifically, rather than relying on ad hoc allocation and, as this summer showed, emergency response money? The Scottish Government moved quickly after the Debenhams fire, making £5 million available for recovery within weeks. The same urgency, directed instead at long-term investment in the nation’s capital street, would do more for Edinburgh’s future than any single planning decision.

The Valley matters too

There is another danger in talking about the “future of Princes Street”: forgetting the other half of the Strategy’s title. The Waverley Valley is not leftover space behind the street. Princes Street Gardens, Waverley Station, Waverley Market, the Mound and the great landscape divide between the Old and New Towns together form one of Edinburgh’s defining urban compositions, and changes within it therefore require particular care.

The Cockburn continues to support the sensitive refurbishment and improved use of the Ross Bandstand, but we remain strongly opposed to the progressive commercialisation of Princes Street Gardens as a major events venue. The Gardens’ value lies precisely in their greenness, tranquillity and availability as public space in the heart of a busy city. Similarly, the future of Waverley Station cannot sensibly be separated from the future of Princes Street. The Strategy already recognises this, setting out a place brief intended to guide Network Rail’s own plans for the station’s renewal, and that alignment needs to be maintained in practice as those separate processes move at their own pace and under different funders, not simply asserted on paper. Better connections, a more dignified arrival experience and a reconsideration of the spaces around Waverley Bridge and Waverley Market offer potentially transformative opportunities; the proposed cycle hub at the station is a small but useful example of how the two can be thought through together, rather than as separate projects that happen to sit next to one another.

A moment to raise expectations

There is an additional poignancy to this week’s decision. The devastating fire at the former Debenhams building in July brought Princes Street’s vulnerability dramatically into public view. The subsequent closure disrupted businesses, residents, visitors and the city’s public transport network before the street finally reopened at the end of August, and work continues on the damaged listed building, with efforts being made to retain historic fabric wherever possible. That episode should reinforce, rather than diminish, the case for thinking carefully about the street’s long-term future.

Princes Street needs investment. It needs confidence. It needs better public space and buildings capable of adapting to changing uses. But it also needs the patience and design discipline appropriate to somewhere of international significance. The choice should never be framed simply as preservation versus change — Edinburgh’s history demonstrates that good cities survive because they change. The issue is the quality of that change.

It is worth noting that this is not solely the Cockburn’s view. Edinburgh World Heritage has similarly backed the more cautious approach, arguing that the street’s existing qualities should be built upon rather than radically overturned. That convergence matters: it suggests the case for careful, deliverable change rests on more than one organisation’s institutional caution.

For the Cockburn Association, then, this week’s decision is welcome as a step forward, but it is a beginning rather than a conclusion. The Strategy must now translate into detailed proposals, and those proposals must be properly tested. Heritage, accessibility, movement, climate resilience and economic vitality must be considered together rather than traded against one another, and communities and civic organisations must remain involved as individual projects move from attractive illustrations to detailed design. Above all, Edinburgh should resist the temptation to accept the merely adequate because it is deliverable.

Princes Street occupies an extraordinary position between two of the world’s great historic townscapes. Few cities possess anything comparable. What it needs now is not only investment, but clarity of ambition, a settled sense of place and identity, and the resilience — financial, institutional and civic — to carry a long-term vision through past the next budget cycle or committee reshuffle. The task is not simply to improve a street. It is to rediscover what Princes Street is for, and to ensure that the decisions taken over the coming years are worthy of the place Edinburgh has inherited.

Image: G. Gainey

Sources and further reading

City of Edinburgh Council, Princes Street and Waverley Valley Strategy: https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/princesstreet

City of Edinburgh Council, Step forward for Princes Street and Waverley Valley as design approach is agreed (9 September 2026): https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/news/article/14485/step-forward-for-princes-street-and-waverley-valley-as-design-approach-is-agreed

City of Edinburgh Council, Planning Committee, 9 September 2026: https://edinburgh.public-i.tv/core/portal/webcast_interactive/1121474

Edinburgh Evening News, Edinburgh councillors back less radical option for future of Princes Street: https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/edinburgh-councillors-back-less-radical-option-for-future-of-princes-street-9002854

City of Edinburgh Council, Progressing delivery plan for Edinburgh’s transformation: https://www.edinburgh.gov.uk/news/article/12677/progressing-delivery-plan-for-edinburgh-s-transformation

Edinburgh Evening News, Edinburgh Princes Street: New vision for premier street (September 2024, earlier draft strategy costs): https://www.edinburghnews.scotsman.com/news/edinburgh-princes-street-new-vision-for-premier-street-including-ross-bandstand-and-waverley-footbridge-4767828

The Edinburgh Minute, 10 September 2026 (on the SNP’s George Street amendment): https://www.edinburghminute.com/the-edinburgh-minute-thursday-10-september-2026/

Cockburn Association, Princes Street at a Crossroads (November 2025): https://www.cockburnassociation.org.uk/news/princes-street-at-a-crossroads/

Cockburn Association, Princes Street and Waverley Valley Consultation response: https://www.cockburnassociation.org.uk/news/princes-street-and-waverley-valley-consultation/