Gallery work delay to leave gardens in disarray
● Apology as new main entrance falls months behind schedule
A huge swathe of Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens is to remain a building site over the summer after the National Galleries of Scotland admitted a multi-million pound overhaul of its flagship attraction had run into fresh problems.
Bosses have been forced to apologise as they revealed that a new main entrance to the Scottish National Gallery and a major landscaping project in the gardens is running several months behind schedule.
A large part of the gardens, as well as the gallery cafe and restaurant, will have to remain out of bounds as the original 12-week programme, which began in January, is not expected to be completed until the main Edinburgh Festival season in August.
Completion of
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0 The Scottish National Gallery revamp includes a new entrance and a major landscaping project
revamp, which includes new displays for some of Scotland’s most important paintings, is running three years later than initially envisaged. The cost has risen from £15.3 million to £22m since 2015.
However Sir John Leighton, director-general of the National Galleries, insisted the project was not running further over budget and was still due to be completed by early 2021, the revised date
announced last autumn ahead of work getting under way.
The new-look gardens will be revealed in August, when public access will reopen on the Mound precinct, one of the most popular locations to watch open-air street theatre.
The complexity of the engineering work to create new pathways and re-landscape the park next to the main entrance of the attraction has been blamed for the delays.
Sir John apologised for any inconvenience caused by the delays, but insisted the “transformative” changes would benefit all visitors to the attraction and the gardens.
Sir John apologised for any inconvenience caused by the delays, but insisted the “transformative” changes would benefit all visitors to the attraction and the gardens.
He added: “We have programmed the project so that the most complicated and difficult work has come at the beginning, including the work in the gardens. Once that’s completed we will have hopefully broken the back of theprojectandfromhereonin things should get a bit easier.
“When you look at what is being done, and what’s been achieved, the team have actually done really well. It’s taken a little longer than planned, but in the overall scheme of things we’re talking a matter of weeks.
“This is a complex project in a World Heritage Site, above a railway line, below an A-listed building, in the middle of the city centre.”