Greenest Circus in the World Competition

From Robert Alstead:

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I’d like to enter a street into your green streets competition as a balance to the bias toward North American grid-like streets 🙂 

This may not be the best example of a Georgian circus but it is a very good one and I have a photograph of it.

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It’s an elegant use of space – all houses face onto the Lord Moray’s verdant “Pleasure Garden” which now has dense mature trees, lawns for lazing on, and well tended flower-beds. The feuars (property owners) all pay for the upkeep of the private garden and all share the benefits. 

It is slap in the middle of the Edinburgh city centre, three minutes walk from Princes Street, the main shopping thoroughfare, and ten minutes walk from Edinburgh’s castle and Old Town. It was built to last using locally quarried stone. What you see is pretty much what the feuers of the 19th century would have seen, although the Pleasure Garden is now mature. The circus is on a hill so you walk in one door at street level and then have to descend a floor to walk out at ground level.

There’s more here, and the Google map gives you a sense of how the large communal space of the private garden makes up for the small back gardens of each feuar’s individual property. The green corridor on the West of Moray Place is a steep slope down to the Water of Leith – main river through Edinburgh.

Note also in the map that the pilons have been erected at the intersection of Moray Place and Great Stuart Street and at the top of Forres Street.