The debate between Edinburgh and Glasgow is one of Britain’s most durable and genuinely interesting cultural arguments. It is conducted with simultaneous seriousness and comedy, involves genuine mutual respect alongside equally genuine mutual incomprehension, and has been going on since the two cities began competing in the eighteenth century. Here is a fair account of where things stand.
The Basic Distinction
Edinburgh is Scotland’s capital, home of the Parliament, the law courts, the national galleries, the major universities, and the financial industry. It is a city of institutions, of architecture, of a particular kind of Presbyterian restraint that has never quite gone away despite several centuries of trying. Glasgow is Scotland’s largest city, built on industry and immigration, with a working-class culture and a social openness that Edinburgh has always found slightly alarming. Glasgow produced most of Scotland’s significant twentieth-century art, music and literature. Edinburgh produced the institutions that curated and eventually exhibited it.
The Architecture Argument
Edinburgh’s architecture is its unambiguous advantage. The medieval Old Town, the Georgian New Town – a UNESCO World Heritage Site jointly – the castle, Calton Hill: Edinburgh looks like an eighteenth-century romantic fantasy of what a city should look like and it is the genuine article. Glasgow’s Victorian architecture is extraordinary in its own right – the Mackintosh buildings, the Greek Revival banks, the red sandstone tenements – but Glasgow had the misfortune to demolish significant sections of its own heritage in the 1960s and 1970s in ways Edinburgh largely avoided.
The People Argument
The stereotype is that Glaswegians are warm, funny and immediately welcoming, while Edinburghers are reserved, suspicious of newcomers and will eventually be your friend after about three years if you have proved yourself. Like all stereotypes it is an oversimplification that contains something real. Edinburgh’s social culture is more formal and slower to open up. Glasgow’s is more immediately gregarious. Both have their advantages depending on what you are looking for.
The Culture Argument
Glasgow wins on music, nightlife and a certain democratic vitality of culture. Edinburgh wins on literary history, institutional quality and the August festival season. The honest answer is that both cities are necessary and the forty-five minutes between them on the train means that choosing one does not mean losing the other.
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