Princes Street, Edinburgh 1975

Princes Street, Edinburgh, 1975. A busy west-end stretch of Edinburgh’s main shopping street is seen here with a striking mix of old and new architecture. On the left, the stone bulk of the Palace Hotel rises above a run of Victorian and earlier commercial buildings, while at street level the fascias for Lotus Shoes and Timpson Shoes stand out among the crowd of shoppers.

The traffic is just as evocative of the period. A Lofty Peak Flour tanker is passing behind the parked cars, while a blue box-bodied lorry marked L55 has stopped outside the shops. The line of vehicles along the kerb includes a light blue Hillman Super Minx, a dark Transit van, and a yellow Jensen Healey, all helping to fix the scene firmly in the mid-1970s. Large white flower planters on the central reservation add another distinctive Princes Street detail.

What makes the photograph especially interesting is the changing face of the street itself. Older stone-fronted properties, with their hotel signage, balconies and tall sash windows, sit directly beside a plainer modern frontage, showing how much of Princes Street had already been altered by post-war redevelopment by the time this picture was taken. It is a very characteristic Edinburgh shopping scene of the period, with shoe shops, department-store style frontages, delivery vehicles and steady pedestrian traffic beneath the looming hotels and commercial blocks of the New Town.