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Princes Street Gardens, linking the New Town to Old, is a landscape for viewing the spectacular setting, a garden of commemoration, and a garden to enjoy. The lengthy flower bank to Princes Street is world unique. Our strategy is simple: we leave this alone.

Splendid new entrances, self-evident way-finding and a re-visioned ‘Blaes’ area provide for contextual augmentations to a new Ross Pavilion which includes a combined visitor centre and performance venue.

In Classical garden tradition there is a typology of a grotto fed by springs for assembly, marriage, song and dance – the Nymphaeum. In imagining the new Ross Pavilion we have carved into the landscape such a grotto. A stage at the foot of the ‘Castle Rock’; marking the memory of the old ‘Nor Loch’, lined in pillars of decorated stone echoing the ‘modern henge’ Royal Scots memorial and surmounted with a golden copper roof in the spirit of the ‘Ross Fountain’.