Regent Terrace is a residential street of 34 classical 3-bay townhouses built on the upper south side of Calton Hill in the city of Edinburgh, Scotland. Regent Terrace is within the Edinburgh New and Old Town UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 1995.
Houses
The name Regent Terrace was chosen because of the visit to Edinburgh in 1822 of George IV who had been Prince Regent until 1820 during the illness of his father George III. The terrace was designed by the architect William Playfair in 1825 and built between 1826 and 1833. Playfair designed Regent, Royal, and Carlton Terrace at the same time as part of an Eastern extension to the New Town that was planned to be even more magnificent than Craig's original New Town. Playfair hoped to attract the "fashionable and wealthy people" to Regent Terrace. The houses are all category A listed buildings. The houses were built as a terrace on the north side of the street, stepped down at intervals following the slope of the road. Originally, eighteen houses were of two stories and basement (although many have added a full third storey or attic) while the remaining sixteen houses were three stories and basement. The front elevation features continuous cast-iron trellis balconies while each house has a porch with fluted attached Greek Doric columns. Thirteen of the houses retain the original three-ringed transom windows above the main doors. The terrace faces Holyrood Park, Arthur's Seat, Holyrood Palace, the Old Town and the Scottish Parliament building. The houses in the terrace are a mixture of tenures — most are privately owned and occupied but some are rented as holiday accommodation. Some of the houses in the terrace have been split into flats.
Number 3 Regent Terrace has been the United States Consulate since 1951. Number 28 was originally the Free French House and was opened by General de Gaulle in 1942. Later it became the French Consulate and then the home of the French consul-general. Number 32 was the home of the Norwegian consul-general until 2008. The western end of Regent Terrace was closed to traffic in 2001 because of security concerns about the United States Consulate.
House prices
Number 6 Regent Terrace was sold for £1,500 in 1831 and £2,700 in 1877. Prices then dropped as low as £1,000 before World War II and rose to £2,000 at the end of the war, £4,000 by the mid-1950s and £400,000 in 1993. In 2021 the average house price on the Terrace was estimated at £1.68 million, the highest in Scotland.
People
The first resident was Isaac Bayley, a solicitor in the Supreme Courts of Scotland, who occupied number 13 Regent Terrace in 1826. Bayely's father-in-law Dr. George Husband Baird, principal of Edinburgh University, also lived there towards the end of his life. Louis Antoine, Duke of Angoulême (the elder son of Charles X of France, last king of the House of Bourbon and hence the last Dauphin of France) and his wife Madame Royale, (the daughter of Louis XVI of France and Marie Antoinette), moved into what is now 22 (then 21) Regent Terrace in 1830. The widowed duchesse de Berry, sister in law of the Duke of Angoulême, also lived at what is now 12 (then 11) Regent Terrace at that time. Her young son, Henri, Count of Chambord grandson of Charles X and next in line after the Duke of Angoulême, is said to have wept bitterly when his family left for Austria in 1832 as he had become very attached to Scotland.