Edinburgh The peopleScotland, United Kingdom Gaelic Dun Eideann

Edinburgh’s population is largely a mixture of middle-class professionals and nonprofessionals. Both are more prosperous than their ancestors, most of whom emigrated from the surrounding countryside and small towns to provide the 19th-century city with unskilled and semiskilled labour. The workforce has changed considerably since then, and now white-collar workers outnumber blue-collar workers. Most of the population is native to Scotland; about one in eight residents was born in England, representing by far the city’s largest immigrant group. There are small percentages of Irish, Chinese, and South Asians, as well as a sprinkling of new immigrants from continental Europe. But the most striking element in the city’s demographic composition is its student population. Edinburgh’s universities enroll tens of thousands of students, many of whom come from overseas (notably from the United States and from countries of the European Union and Asia) and contribute to the cosmopolitan character of the city. There are other unexpected features of life in Edinburgh. Edinburgh’s white-collar workforce commutes both into the centre of the city and out from the centre to new virtual villages of suburban low-rise office blocks in places such as Gyle and Leith. The commuting belt extends well into Fife, across the Forth Estuary to the north, and as far west as Glasgow, resulting in overcrowded trains and highly congested roads.

A very different city from Scotland’s largest city, the sometimes maligned Glasgow, Edinburgh is changing faster than Glasgow and has a more assured future, particularly since the late 1990s, when it regained its full status as a capital city. Edinburgh largely escaped the motorway schemes of urban planners beginning in the 1960s that proved detrimental to Glasgow’s centre. The two cities have a different historical legacy too. Glasgow experienced a far greater influx of both Roman Catholic and Protestant immigrants from Ireland in the 19th century. As a result, at the turn of the 21st century Glasgow was split about evenly between adherents of Roman Catholicism and those of the Church of Scotland. In Edinburgh, by contrast, members of the Church of Scotland greatly outnumber Roman Catholics, though the proportion of those of all the main denominations who attend church regularly is quite low. Perhaps more significant, some one in three of the city’s inhabitants professes no religion. Although Muslims make up only a small percentage of the overall population, their presence is especially visible in the city centre and is marked by a large mosque near George Square that was completed in the 1990s.