Changing view of city’s future

Sir, – Last week your paper featured a fascinating bird’s eye view of a tug towing the Frigate Unicorn from Earl Grey Dock.

It showed a swathe of the immediate area and, mistily beyond, the rear of Green’s Playhouse and part of the City Churches.

Of the immediate area there is nothing left, save for the southern buildings of Whitehall Crescent.

Shame on the then Council for demolishing so much and with a complete disregard for that which framed the lives of so many Dundonians.

Other parts of our city shared a similar fate – Overgate, Wellgate, West Port, Victoria Road, Hawkhill and on and on.

Saddest next to a city lost is a city half gone. And for what? Roads it seems, endless and leading nowhere!

However, all is not lost! We have the V&A and more hotels than a Spanish resort. Does an insidious mystery lurk behind the demise of so much industry and life, which once thronged the scope of that bird’s eye view?

Perhaps, it is because we are now a city of brains rather than brawn and the global reach of our once industrial output is supplanted by a city of discovery, which is manned not by those, who rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty, and dreamt rather than thought, but by a crew of welleducated, deep thinkers.

It would appear then that progress has left behind those of us who are not so smart and preferred “pehs” and Bovril to fillet steak and Nuits St George.

We now find ourselves in a city tailored for another breed, to stand bewildered by the surrounding “culture” we so often scoffed, and watch the world tread many paths to view its wonder.

I did not leave my city. My city left me.

Leslie Isles Milligan. Myrtlehall Gardens, Dundee.