Princes Street

[1] However, when King George III was shown a print or drawing of the proposed New Town by Sir John Pringle, he objected to the name as he associated it with the notorious slum area of St Giles, London.

Through the 19th century most buildings were redeveloped at a larger scale and the street evolved from residential to mainly retail uses.

Princes Street was also home to two leading department stores, Jenners founded in 1838 and rebuilt in 1893–1895, and Forsyth's built in 1906–1907, both technically advanced and architecturally ornate buildings for their time.

[4] This theme was taken up by the Princes Street Panel, whose 1967 report proposed comprehensive redevelopment with Modernist buildings to incorporate a first-floor level walkway, theoretically doubling the shopping frontage.

However the walkway as built was never more than a number of isolated balconies and in practice the Royal Bank of Scotland was the only business to maintain a frontage at this level for any length of time; that branch of the bank closed early in the 21st century, leaving the upper walkway largely forgotten.

[11][12] On 25 January 2021, it was announced that Jenners department store, which has been located on Princes Street since Victorian times, was to close on May 3, 2021, in preparation for a three-year-long redevelopment.

This was taken over by the Edinburgh Council in the late-nineteenth century, by which time most of the street was commercial and there was no great need for private residential gardens.

Due to the much lower position of the gardens this led to the creation of the steep embankment on the north side, still visible today.

The Gardens contain the Ross Bandstand (an open-air theatre), a war memorial to US soldiers of Scottish descent and a floral clock, together with other attractions.

Princes Street remains popular, although it has now fallen from its status as the most expensive place to rent shop space in the UK outside of London.

The Princes Street tram stop is an in-road island, situated just west of the Royal Scottish Academy near the foot of the Mound.

Edinburgh Bus Station is around 100 m (330 ft) north of the east end of Princes Street, in the north-east corner of St Andrew Square.