The Balmoral: the clock tower, the whisky, and the best address in Edinburgh

The Balmoral opened in 1902 as the North British Hotel, built by the railway company at the east end of Princes Street so that passengers coming off the train had somewhere to sleep without crossing the road. A good number of Edinburgh residents still call it the NB, which tells you something about how long institutional memory runs in this city.

It is the building with the clock tower, and the clock has been kept three minutes fast for over a century so that nobody standing on Princes Street misses a train. It is set correctly once a year, at Hogmanay, and put back the following morning. That single detail explains the hotel better than any amount of description: it exists in a particular relationship with the station beneath it, and it has never pretended otherwise.

The position

The best in the city, and the reason to pay. The Balmoral sits precisely on the seam between the New Town, where the streets are Georgian and quiet, and the Old Town, where almost everything a visitor wants is stacked up the hill. Waverley is directly underneath, the Royal Mile is eight minutes on foot, and the airport tram stops at the door.

During the festival that seam is worth a great deal. You are close enough to walk to the venues at half past eleven at night and far enough from the Royal Mile that the noise does not follow you back.

The rooms

A hundred and eighty seven of them, which makes this a large hotel by the standards of everywhere else on this list, and the scale shows in the corridors rather than in the rooms themselves. The decoration runs to tartans and tweeds handled with more restraint than that description suggests: muted, textural, and a long way from the tartan-carpet cliche of Scottish hotels.

Bathrooms are marble and genuinely generous, and the small things have been thought about, down to a Dyson hairdryer rather than the usual object bolted to the wall.

The rooms to ask for face the castle. From the upper floors on that side you get the Old Town rising across the gardens, floodlit after dark, and it is one of the great hotel views in Britain. The Princes Street side is livelier and the North Bridge side is the one to avoid if you sleep lightly. It is worth a sentence at booking, because the difference between those aspects is larger here than the room grades suggest.

SCOTCH, and the drinking

The bar holds more than five hundred whiskies and employs people who can actually navigate them, which is rarer than the bottle count implies. Ask for something you have not heard of and give a price ceiling, and you will get a better twenty minutes than any tasting menu in the city.

Palm Court does afternoon tea under a glass dome with a harpist, which is either exactly what you want or entirely not, and the hotel is refreshingly unembarrassed about it.

Food

Number One is the main room, holds four AA Rosettes, and is the most consistently good hotel restaurant in Edinburgh. It is a proper occasion rather than a convenience, and it books out well ahead during the festival.

Breakfast is served in Brasserie Prince and is worth taking in the room downstairs rather than upstairs. The kitchen does the Scottish end of the menu without irony, which is the correct approach in a building of this age.

The spa

Five treatment rooms, an exercise studio, a sauna and a Turkish steam room. It is a good city spa rather than a destination one, and after a day walking up and down the Old Town that is exactly the right amount of spa to have downstairs.

The clock is three minutes fast so that nobody misses a train. A hotel that has been solving that particular problem for a century tends to have solved most of the others too.

What the rate buys

Around four hundred and fifty pounds outside the festival, and comfortably past seven hundred through August. That August number is the most brutal seasonal swing in British hotels and it is worth being clear-eyed about: you are paying roughly double for the same room because a quarter of a million people want it at once.

Outside August it is straightforwardly good value for a grand hotel in this position, and September in Edinburgh is the best fortnight of the year with the rates halved and the scaffolding coming down. If the trip is flexible, go then.

The particulars

• Where: 1 Princes Street, directly above Waverley station.
• Ask for: a castle-facing room on a high floor. Avoid the North Bridge side.
• Do not miss: SCOTCH, with a budget and an open mind.
• Book ahead: Number One, and by February if you are coming in August.
• Best for: the full festival fortnight, or a first trip where the hotel is part of the point.

How it compares for the Fringe is here, and the festival itself is explained here.