Exploring Edinburgh: Culture, cuisine and coffee in this scenic city

A handful of times every year, the weather in London really does get too hot. An ephemeral moment presents itself: the opportunity to go north to enjoy a milder climate. One weekend in July, as London was in the throes of its third summer heatwave, the mercury spiked to well over 30C. Scotland, by contrast, was a balmy five degrees cooler. So, without further ado, my girlfriend and I packed up our bags and took the train up to Edinburgh after work on Friday – saving a third off our tickets with our Two Together Railcard.

And as our carriage chugged along the tracks, we were chuffed to be swapping London skylines for Scotland’s cobblestones and cliffs. On arrival in Edinburgh, we dropped our bags at the newly opened hotel, The Hoxton.

Located close to Haymarket station and set across 11 beautifully unified Georgian-style townhouses, there is enough room inside for an Italian restaurant and even a cinema. We had arrived with our own list of attractions to visit, but after chatting with our hotel barman that evening – an Edinburgh local – we soon changed our minds and found ourselves abandoning our best laid plans for the path he had neatly mapped out for us on a napkin. Right from the start we were struck by just how friendly and forthcoming the Scottish people are – always on hand for a chat, or to offer up a quick tip.

City walking and Leith’s waterside

Our Saturday began with coffee at Ante, a lovely coffee shop tucked away down a set of stairs just beneath street level on Haddington Place, in the East of the city. Once we had ordered, we found a table on the pavement, basking in the sunshine with our iced coffees while splitting a gooseberry tart for breakfast. Suitably energised, we set off for nearby Calton Hill.

Formed by volcanic activity millions of years ago and shaped by glaciers during the Ice Age, Edinburgh town council had the bright idea to purchase the land in 1724, establishing it as one of Britain’s first public parks. Today, Calton Hill is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site that stretches from Holyrood to Edinburgh Castle.

We scrambled up to the National Monument, or “Edinburgh’s Disgrace” as it is known locally – a Napoleonic War memorial built as a replica of the Parthenon but left unfinished when the money ran out. From this vantage point we were rewarded with sweeping views of the city.

After a few hours on our feet we had built up a sizeable appetite. Luckily for us, we had a destination in mind: Alby’s, a sandwich spot that has been feeding the city’s students since 2019. We knew the sando gods were on our side when we caught the last sandwiches of the day. Alby’s formula is simple; take the fillings of a classic sandwich – a chicken club or even a pork belly banh mi – and stuff them between two slabs of focaccia.

Safe to say, all that bread wiped us out. So we headed to Leith – famously the setting for Danny Boyle’s 1996 cult film Trainspotting – to recover on the waterfront. These days, Leith is home to Edinburgh’s creative, artsy crowd and the number of specialty coffee shops here could rival even the edgiest corners of East London.

We had prebooked dinner at Ardfern, a choice that greatly impressed the locals we encountered during our trip. Taking its name from a coastal village in Argyll, Ardfern’s warm interiors reference the landscape and colour palette of its namesake, while the chef Roberta Hall-McCarron uses local ingredients to inspire her small plates menu – from game to seafood, wild mushrooms to berries. The barbecue cod paired with fennel and a tartare sauce stole the show, which we enjoyed alongside french beans and chopped Nocellara olives whipped in cured egg yolk.

Modern art and Sunday markets

Waking up on Sunday, we made a beeline for Modern Two, one of Edinburgh’s contemporary art galleries. Having missed Steve McQueen’s ‘Resistance’ exhibition at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, we seized the chance to catch it here.

Collecting photographs from over 100 years, spanning everything from Women’s Suffrage to the foundation of the Notting Hill Carnival, the show explores how acts of resistance have shaped life in the United Kingdom. Later, we wandered along the Water of Leith walkway searching for the Anthony Gormley installation – a series of statues placed at various points in the river’s waters – but found ourselves sidetracked by a heron.

Once we had retraced our steps, we made it to trendy Stockbridge just in time for the weekly market and some last minute shopping, before it was time to relax on the train journey home.