For a man usually associated with designing one-off classical houses for rich people, Robert Adam sounds boyishly enthusiastic about new-town planning. As well he might. He’s got himself two whole new waterfront city districts to design. Not just anywhere, either. They’re in Leith and Granton, the ports of Edinburgh.

This Robert Adam is unrelated to his 18th-century Kirkcaldy-born namesake. That’s just a happy coincidence. There’s another difference, too: our 21st-century Adam is designing his new Scottish settlements in such a way that modern architects can build alongside the traditionalists without anybody throwing buns at each other. How does he manage this? The secret is something called “design codes”.

Adam has been called in by Forth Ports, owners of the Leith and Granton harbours, to contribute to their part of a huge string of waterside developments now being planned to connect Edinburgh with the sea. This means Adam is in charge of two new townships on the Forth at Leith’s Western harbour and Granton. When you add in homes already being built there by Edinburgh architects, the two schemes add up to 6,400 flats and houses, plus shops, offices, primary schools and parks — more than 180 acres in total. If you add in the business developments as well, it comes to more than £1 billion.

That’s just the start. Forth Ports also has another 18,000 homes sketched out in a third masterplan by architects RMJM for another section of the Port of Leith. Last Thursday they formally launched all three schemes under one marketing banner: Edinburgh Forthside. With an eventual population of 24,000, it and its neighbouring developments will be the equivalent of a large town.

Many thousand more homes will be built on the adjacent Waterfront Edinburgh and Forth Quarter schemes by other landowners on former industrial and gasworks sites in Granton. There will be a steady stream of about 1,000 new homes a year being built on the Edinburgh waterside over the next 20 years.

Terry Smith, property director for Forth Ports, does not see this volume of new housing as a problem. “City planners reckon that Edinburgh needs 5,000 new homes a year just to meet demand,” he says. “So we don’t think we’re over-egging it.”

Housebuilders are already busy in Leith’s Western Harbour. Right next to Adam’s forthcoming scheme, high-rise apartments by Bryant Homes, FM Developments and Gregor Shore are selling for between £190,000 for a two-bed flat and £700,000 for a three-bed penthouse. Developers are buying plots in Adam’s plan and will launch their sales operations later in the year.

Adam has designed dense streetscapes of generally low-rise buildings in Leith and Granton. As the housebuilders move in with their own architects, he now has to sit back and watch others grapple with his ideas. The builders have to conform to Adam’s strict design codes, and he will be policing them. Modern or traditional doesn’t matter, says Adam, so long as people stick to his guidelines on size, proportions, materials and how the buildings relate to the streets. For instance: no all-glass facades are allowed.

“It’s not about building style, but the texture and quality of the district,” says Adam. “We can’t make codes that guarantee good architecture, but they can prevent bad architecture from spoiling the place.”

This is all just a bit like Edinburgh’s 18th- and 19th-century New Town, planned by one architect, James Craig, but built by many hands. There the resemblance ends, however: the New Town was built in fits and starts over a century, whereas Adam’s two smaller townships will be there in six or seven years. Adam is also allowing a lot more variety.

“You don’t have to do clever tricks,” says Adam. “You just have to look at what has worked before, and learn from it.”

By and large, Adam has got Edinburgh’s modern architects on side — by going to talk to them and asking their opinions. He has met one or two who try to get round his design codes, and to them he just says no. He knows what he wants this place to look like. “There’s a moment, when you’re dealing with something like this, when things fall into place and it takes on a life of its own. We’ve created a framework to protect the whole place. We’re able to describe it street by street.”

Not only will traditional and modern homes exist cheek by jowl in his settlements, but the districts planned by other architects will allow a delicious amount of compare-

and-contrast in the years to come. I’m prepared to bet homes in Adam’s townships will quickly start to sell at a premium. They just feel more like bits of a real city, somehow.

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