Kettle's instructions had been to reproduce, so far as possible, the characteristics of Edinburgh in Scotland. (Hocken, 1898, p. 82.) He did not, as it is popularly supposed, simply impose that city's plan on Dunedin's site. He did not take Edinburgh's Old Town as his model, but the New Town, by that time perhaps the most widely admired urban development in Europe. Kettle set out to juxtapose formality, regularity, symmetry and proportion – relieved from monotony by some designed-in features – with a bold and rugged nature to make the design Romantic in the manner of Edinburgh and the fashion of the day. While Edinburgh's New Town is a modern agora on a ridge, Dunedin's central city is a low-lying harbourside parade, set among bold hills, with distant views of harbour steeps and bushclad ridges, a Claudian seaport, a park of orderly temples lapped by water, in a rugged terrain.