LIVID flares on the skyline of this stupendous city, as Festival fireworks blaze above Edinburgh Castle.
What an improbably beautiful capital the Scots can boast! We have a Grand Tier view, standing on the balcony of The New Club. (New? Hardly, founded as it was 1787, but it looks crisper than most gents’ clubs, having been remodelled by Reiach and Hall in the 1960s.) The building, of elegantly cantilevered steel and Rubislaw granite, is now Category A-listed, even if its entrance —bang next to Ann Summers —feels like the approach to a Huddersfield snooker hall.
Within, it resembles a modern Oxbridge college: Churchill, perhaps, or St Catherine’s. A few grandees resigned their memberships when the original William Burn premises of 1837 were torn down. However, the lustrous Georgian sideboards, the redisposed oak panelling in the great dining room, the wide-branched silver candelabra, the swagger portraits of the likes of Earl Haig and Charlie Stuart, look, I think, superb against sharp Modernist lines, black leatherette banquettes and ochre-silk wallpaper.
A breathtaking 18th-century tapestry adorns an unplastered fire-brick wall: an enormous neo-Adam stone urn finial, salvaged from the 19th-century building, stands grandly in the sheet-glass antechamber to our eyrie above Princes Street.
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