Three-year project looks at history of Cowgate

IT is the throbbing heart of Auld Reekie, a depression of close-packed streets that have seen riots, revolts, and centuries of raw, stinking life - and on the Cowgate of a Saturday night, not much has changed, according to the authors of a new book.

Locus Of The City, which will be published on St Andrew's Day, is the result of a three-year research project by academics and students at Edinburgh College of Art (ECA), inspired by the capital's Old Town.

Karen Forbes and Gordon Brennan, both from the college's School of Painting, studied the Grassmarket and streets that lead up to the college building, linking a chain of powerful institutions to Edinburgh Castle.

The artists interviewed experts including a local minister, journalist, astronomer, architect, archaeologist, historian and geologist. They also commissioned two former ECA students to produce artwork and events inspired by the area.

"It really is the dark side of the Grassmarket," said Forbes, head of the School of Drawing and Painting. "We have been running a research project on the area cutting through the Grassmarket, as a dissection of the city and its institutions of power. The book is a record of the artistic performances we commissioned, as well as presenting the area through the eyes of a barrister, astronomer and others we interviewed.

"It was a place of public riots and it still is a no-go area on a Saturday night. David Hume wrote about the nice people of town avoiding the Cowgate by building bridges to the New Town. That great heart of darkness still exists."

The book, which is being published by the Visual Arts Research Institute Edinburgh on November 30, is part of a strategy to raise awareness of the 100-year-old ECA, which is researching ways of putting its multi-million-pound collection of art into an online resource.

Some works, including a much-publicised portrait of a young Sean Connery posing in his underwear, are currently on loan to an exhibition at the City Art Gallery. New works donated by former students will be auctioned this Thursday at the Royal Academy of Arts in London to help renovate the college's listed art studios.

As well as including warts-and-all visual representations of the area in commissioned art by Craig Coulthard and Rabiya Choudry, the book includes interviews with local experts.

Simon Harley, a professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh, explained that the low-lying area of the Grassmarket was created by extremes of volcanic activity and glacial erosion: the rock on which Edinburgh Castle stands, the basalt plug of an extinct volcano, lay in the path of a glacier travelling from east to west.

He said: "Like having a stone on a sandy beach with the tide coming in and then flowing out again, the ice direction was moving around either side of the Castle rock, producing a gouging effect and then, beyond Cowgate, leaving a flute of deposited sediment. This is what we call crag and tail topography."

The result was a lack of space for building and thus the evolution of the narrow closes that led to the erection of buildings of up to 14 storeys high - some of which were stripped bare again after the Old Town fire of 2002.

Dr John St Clair, an eminent lawyer, said: "The key point is that the essential features of the old medieval town survive the views down the High Street to Arthur's Seat and the sea, the narrow closes, the towering buildings and the swirling Edinburgh skies. The Old Town is easy to understand when you understand its geography."

Malcolm Fraser, architect of Dance Base, Scotland's National Centre for Dance, and an advocate for the people-centric development of the area, said the Grassmarket has always been "the agricultural end of town, literally and metaphorically, where all the horse fairs were but also a lot of dissidence, hangings, the Porteous riots."

He said: "This kind of dark activity continues because a lot of the Grassmarket is characterised by stag nights, hen nights, drinking. The question is how to increase amenities for people who live here but not tidy the place up into some cappuccino bar hell."

He added that Dance Base has already had an effect in bringing in people who emerge "energised and calm. In a way that helps with subtle policing." This kind of social diversity, St Clair said, is part of the Grassmarket's history.

Professor Alan Riach, chairman of Scottish Literature at Glasgow University, said: "It strikes me that the area is very much what Sydney Goodsir Smith is describing in The Black Bull o Norroway': the bonny coo' - the prostitute - who cack't the bed in ecstasy'. And it stands for the extremes you'll find down there. Hugh MacDiarmid was right: Edinburgh is a mad god's dream, where earth eyes eternity'."