Edinburgh weekend, July 2025

In July 2025, more than 20 Companions and friends gathered in Edinburgh for a weekend of talks, tours, visits and discussion, in and around the city. The programme was devised and led by Guild Companions Peter Burman, Ross Burgess and Nic Boyes. Our full itinerary can be downloaded from the link further down this page.

We are grateful to Companions Kathryn Ogden and Gray Brechin for each sharing their impressions of the weekend, which you can read below. Images on this page are by Rachel Dickinson, Martin Green, Frances O'Connor, Kathryn Ogden and Simon Seligman.

We would like to place on record our gratitude to speakers Peter Burman, Nic Boyes and Alexander Hamilton, and to our guides James and Anne Simpson, Pam Barnes and Rosemary Mann. If you would like to see the full itinerary of our weekend, you can download it HERE.

Kathryn Ogden

After several months of being confined to the Calder valley, West Yorkshire the journey by LNER along the Northumberland/Scottish coast countryside brought back many happy memories of that area.  The temperature was hot and I was happy to enter a well air conditioned room at the Premier Inn, Princes Street.  The weekend appeared packed with interesting talks and visits, but more importantly meeting old friends and making new ones.

Fellowship began on Friday evening with a lovely meal in South Trinity which set the scene for the weekend.  The itinerary looked interesting but exceeded all expectations.

Saturday morning was hot and a taxi to Riddle’s Court, a centre for learning set up by Sir Patrick Geddes was a must for me.  It was a beautiful building with a courtyard reminiscent of a corte in Venice. Wonderfully restored with unexpected finds, a bread oven in the disabled bathroom (see image on the left), seeing the wonderful ceiling upstairs prior to a wedding and learning about John Ruskin in Scotland.  

I enjoyed spotting some of the buildings we were told about in the lectures by Peter Burman and Nic Boyes who both whetted our appetite for what was to come.  We were given an account of the restoration of Rosslyn Chapel and so fortunate to visit it a few hours later to have the restorations explained in situ.  Reading about a place is not the same as having it discussed in front of you.  This also applied to Nic’s talk about the Temple of Hygeia the following day with a walk along the Waters of Leith.  We peered over the wall on the bridge to see the Anthony Gormley statue in the river, I saw many of them last year at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, and added another one to my collection.  The walk took us past beautiful Georgian homes, medieval buildings, waterfalls and gardens ending with a visit to the Mansfield Traquair Centre, another little known gem with wonderfully painted walls and ceilings.

We learnt of Phoebe Anna Traquair, an amazing multi-tasking artist, wife  and mother with her illustrations from the Bible. Our local guide was so knowledgeable and brought Phoebe to life.

Three of us were the “last men standing” for dinner at The Spanish Butcher on Sunday evening, then meeting another couple for a drink at The Oxford Bar, featured in Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus series of novels.

An amazing weekend, I do hope the Board and other companions are able to organise another one in the future.  Many thanks to everyone for the preparation.

Gray Brechin

Bob and I greatly enjoyed the meticulously planned and clockwork-run events of our weekend in Edinburgh and the chance to meet other convivial Companions of the Guild as well as to get reacquainted with the city itself.  It and Roslyn Chapel were narrated by those who know them both far better than do we and whetted our appetite to learn more.

The twin highlights for me were, first of all, Peter Burman’s talk on Ruskin’s disciple Patrick Geddes in the very Old Town buildings that Geddes himself renovated for social benefit. Geddes was so much a friend and mentor to Lewis Mumford that Mumford named his son Geddes, Mumford was my mentor, his books on urban history an inspiration for my own book Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin which I now realize derives much from the Scots polymath into whose biography I will soon dive.  

My other favorite event of the weekend was our stroll up The Water of Leith, a wooded ravine that slashes through the rational layout of the New Town which itself fully deserves its status as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This was a complete surprise to us as was the delightful streamside village of Dean which is largely made so by the faux-medieval Well Court (see left) at its center, a pioneering social housing project built by the owner of The Scotsman and philanthropist John Ritchie Findlay in 1886. I will not be at all surprised to learn that this initiative — like Geddes — was inspired by Ruskin who would have appreciated the Court’s purpose and picturesque contrast to the Georgian crescents, squares, and circles of the New Town above the ravine whose uniformity, we learned, he loathed.