The Knowhere Guide

Best and Worst in Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh*

Edinburgh, City of Edinburgh Triumphs and Tragedies

Favourite Building

• next gen and easy everything...cos we're sad.
• Old College law buildings. They make you feel like university's worth doing.
• that area up the end of princess st where all the consulates are...wide, big stones.
• edinburgh castle it just sits proud- i love it
• scots monument
• Tynecastle Stadium
• The scotsman building, the palace and the castle.
• Rosslyn Chapel just outside Edinburgh, or maybe that doesn't count...who cares! It needs to get more attention! General Register house. The whole of George Street. Charlotte Square.
• Festival Theatre on a sunny day. So puuuuuuurrdy! See how it sparkles!
• Edinburgh Castle without a doubt. They need to fix it up a bit on the inside though - those toilets are grim, no loo roll when I last went, I had to drip dry.
• The Castle!
• The best thing about Edinburgh is that it does look nice. The castles particularly good looking, but is crap once you're inside it. And I've grown to like the look of the new Museum.
• Festival theatre- modern front of house, but restored Art Deco interior hiding inside!!
• The castle The Mound Ramsay Garden

Demolish It Now Building

• st georges
• Appleton Tower in George Square. It is beyond ugly. It makes you hate your eyes.
• any on princes street or the fort
• Easter Road Stadium (Hiberian FC)
• The St. James Centre, complete with nasty hotel complex - it's a hideous eyesore and an affront to humanity. We don't deserve this sort of poxy concrete mess in the middle of a very cool place.
• dynamic earth
• The 60's crap on Princes' Street. The Council got so obsessed about it's skyline it forgot to emphasise that the fronts of buildings had to look just as nice as the rest of the city! Idiots! Oh yeah and Teviot House could do with a good nuking, or is that mutually assured destruction?! So bloody full of themselves (mutter mutter mumble)
• Appleton tower...designed to last 25 years...30 years ago. It's perfect for blocking the evening sun from the Peartree's beer garden, and it's chock full of asbestos. Lovely.
• The Castle - if Glasgow can't have one then neither can Edinburgh. Oh and get rid of the Scott Monument, the fucking thing's always got scaffolding round it anyway!
• All of the 1960's architecture on Princes Street.
• All of Muirhouse!
• The sixties bit of Mary Erskines on Ravelston Dykes it is the most ugly building in Edinburgh except for the whole of St James Centre
• The Barcelona bar. Truly a meeting place for jumped up Edinburgh Uni pillocks to go and talk about backpacking, and how they got "weally wasted last night, yeah?"
• Stewarts Mellville College , Queensferry Road. It has no taste!
• The football grounds
• The whole "What Everyone Wants" buliding. Demolish it now!
• Appleton Tower St. James Centre Those blocks of flats near Holyrood Palace

The Best Things

• sex drugs and the very little rock and roll edinburgh has to offer.
• the best thing in edinburgh has to be "Mama Said" on Cockburn street. It is THE best place to go for food, it has everything you ever wanted. like seriously, you go in and find some type of sweet or flavour of crisp you had forgotten exsisted but suddenly remember you really really loved! it also has the cans of bru for 29p!!! swish! kittens!
• Cappadocia kebab shop: You will never eat finer filth.
• The whole atmosphere when you are in Edinburgh is amazing. I get a real buzz each time I return home to the city.
• the cycle path from leith to roseburn
• it gets better all the time. anyone who doesn't live here is mad.
• Heart of Midlothian FC
• with so many students living in the town centre thingsd are very laid back with very little in the track suit/ xr2 brigade. good music, good skaters and beautiful women
• Edinburgh is a great town, respectable with a hint of sleaze underneath. Try the spit and sawdust Burke and Hare or the pub directly across the road from it. Lap dancers and podium dancers but real down home humour with it. Some of the women in Bottoms up in Lothian Road are incredible [if you have the cash to last more than 20 minutes in there]. The Fantasy Bar in TOLLCROSS district is entertaining too. Edinburgh is one of the safest cities in europe I would say so go and enjoy the sites and sounds. Be an ordinary tourist or take a walk on the wild side, it's great for both.
• it really is beautiful
• Pubs that stay open 'til 3am, not like the pooverish nancies in England that shut at 11pm. Great architecture.
• My friend's flat on Broughton St - gorgeous top floor apartment where I've crashed many times after a blindingly good night in town. Lovely people living in a lovely place in a great part of town - what else could a boy want to wake up to after a night out....
• Decent gin Martinis in the Peartree!
• the weather. the drink. the opportunities for sexual experimentation as a teenager. my mum's cooking. visiting for just a weekend. leaving for good and moving to glasgow like any sensible person, before your head disappears completely up your own arse, like most edinburgh residents. hanging about on cockburn street dressed in black and looking alienated when you're 14. getting sloshed in princes street gardens. the drugs.
• The festival- it brings out all those weird and wonderful smiley people they call tourists. Better than all those miserable looking sods who actually stay here all the time.
• The people, the pubs, the culture...
• The atmosphere - Edinburgh is so cool during the festival, the people from all over the world, the lack of Glasgow-type neds, oh and the way you feel like you're abroad even though you only live 35 miles away!
• 24 hour drinking if you want it and know were to get it.
• Brilliant, gorgeous buildings, can spend hours wandering about taking it all in.
• Very pretty with everything closed in together. Shame it all seems to be going downhill. Its certainly not as good as it was five years ago.
• forigners
• The new year street party, how cool can you get??
• The Beltane festival
• View from the top of Arthur's Seat in Holyrood on a clear day- and its free!!
• Pasquale's chips That Kebab shop beside Pasquale's
• The current music scene - Chi, Idlewild, Uresia Yatsura etc
• Mrs Wibble
• Hibs
• Buckfast and Irn-Bru
• Beautiful architecture in/around the city centre
• Cool techno scene

The Worst Things

• The fact that you can't go shopping on Princes Street without having to listen to bloody bagpipes!!
• neds.they attack you.raving schemies trying to be hard.on the bus people saying stuff like "pure shmental goffick"
• Those bloody nuisances you get who go around pestering you wish clipboards when you're trying tob get from one end of Princes St to the other, and the Hare Krishna peopl who prowl around street corners going 'Couranga' or some shit. If ONE MORE of those fuckers come near me they're going to get lamped! I don't object to people's religion, but I do object to religion being rammed down my neck!
• Dario's Takeaway on the Lothian Road - £5 for a distinctly average burger and some potato sections marinated in oil and slightly warmed. Can't even remotely be described as chips. bloody hell.....
• Fucking schemie, working class scum clogging up the corridors. Racist Scots hating English people yet perfectly happy to live off the endless amount of English cash that runs the fucking city.
• how come the art college in edinburgh only has one video machine, while glasgow has about 6?...i was very disappointed.
• the cold
• These two guys who walk around in suits, approaching people to ask them to come to some Bible classes, or some special meetings their church will be having....
• Hiberian FC.
• Townies whining about the festival. Why not piss off to Aberdeen for three weeks and let us use your houses?
• rain. portobello high school.
• American genealogists. Oxfam collectors. American genealogists. Yah students. American genealogists. Pan-pipe players. American genealogists. Teviot comittee members. American genealogists. THE FESTIVAL!!!! THE NEW YEAR PARTY!!!!! American genealogists.
• Leaving after the weekend to go to Aberdeen...
• cliques. ponces. summer jobs at EH1. the bizarre incestuous Pie In The Sky family. morning-fucking-side and all it's skate-wank inhabitants. the staff of Cult clothing - if you're so cool why don't you fuck off to London? getting chatted up by 35 year old solicitors when you're 15 and in the pub. spoilt little rich kids. english students and their shite house parties. those twats in velvet jester hats. the drugs.
• Hogmanay. I won tickets for the street party to bring in 2000, and was left feeling extremely sorry that I went. They played us no good music at the west end, just a crap video of those fat old blokes the Bay City Rollers - over and over again. There was hardly anything to do whatsoever, except for the semi-okay fireworks display. Even George Street was dull. Hope they sort it out.
• The weather
• Traffic
• The Tourists and the arty-farty-theatre-twats who come and clutter up the pubs and cafes and rent all the cheap flats and bore the arse off everyone spouting crap about how great kilts and Haggis are.
• The Festival: Everything about it. The people, the tourists, the pubs. Yes, clubs open later, but you've got to share them with a hundred drunken jugglers and actors. Some good comedians, though, but not enough to justify ruining the good people of Edinburgh's summer.
• All the buses always seem to come late or not enough.
• It's full of failed thespians/yuppies who can't afford to live in London any more
• The millions of tourists and the too many entertainers during the Festival period/
• The club scene seems to be very stale these days, only held up by Pure, Camel Beats and Tribal Funktion. Unfortunately Glasgow seems to be much better (particularly for Techno)
• The price of Taxis - amongst the most expensive in the UK
• Influx of English students. The Festival and Fringe Festival - for foreigners, by foreigners, go away and leave us alone.
• Tourists
• Jugglers. Peruvian pan-pipes. People who hang on every word written by Irvine Welsh.
• Queing up to get in all the pubs when it's raining!! Lack of nice and cheap student housing!!!
• People who support the Glasgow teams.
• All the bloody tourists during the Festival (apart from the nice-looking ones of the opposite sex ;) )
• The pubs on the Grassmarket (or is that Meatmarket?)
• The weather (apart from the summer of 95 :)

The Knowhere Guide started out as a list of places to skateboard in the UK. It is a compilation of (unedited) information and views supplied by users like yourself. It is not a conventional tourist guide!

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Credits

Last updated: 2007-07-19