Proud legacy

Susan Stewart, director of the Open University in Scotland, promotes her institution by r e f e r e n c e t o a n a d d r e s s b y the university’s first chancellor, accompanied by a photograph of the massed ranks of white male academics (Scotsman Online, 22 April).

T h e s o l e w o m a n i n t h e photograph, so gratuitously ignored in the photograph and article, is Jennie Lee, Minister of Education and promoter and founder of the university.

A native of Fife and wife of Nye Bevan, the founder of the National Health Service, Jennie Lee not only had to fight doubters and the traditional academic communit y to see her vision through but also the mandarins of the Treasury, no mean feat at the time.

It might be more pertinent for today’s students and their teachers if they were taught t h a t t h e t wo g r e a t a c h i e ve - ments of post-war Britain – the creation of the NHS and the broadening of access to higher education – were the achieve

Off-key decision

I looked on in disbelief in the Dean of Guild cour troom as Edinburgh city council’s planning committee sat through a PR onslaught which included a blatantly one-sided presentation from its own planning officer on a proposal to build a glass and concrete concert hall which will soar over St Andrew Square and ruin one of the most important views in the New Town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

I t w a s e ve n m o r e s h o c k - ing that this desecration was s u p p o r t e d b y E d i n b u rg h’s s o - c a l l e d “h e r i t a g e g u a r d i - ans”, the Cockburn Association and the World Heritage Trust. (“First concert venue in more than a centur y gets goahead”, 25 April)

This was a particularly painful experience for myself, as a l o n g te r m s u p p o r te r o f t h e need for a new music venue in Edinburgh. In the 1970s, I was c h a i r man o f t h e S o u t h s i d e Association and played a proactive role in persuading the Scottish Chamber Orchestra to locate to the Queen’s Hall, rather than a less than suitable church on Belford Road. More recently, I have been amongst t h o s e a d v o c a t i n g t h a t t h e R o y a l H i g h S c h o o l s h o u l d become a music school.

Ev e n a t t h i s l a t e s t a g e , I would hope that the developers and their architect could reconfigure their prop osal, and possibly excavate down a fur ther 10 metres or so to remove the threat of this unacceptable disruption of the skyline of one of the worlds most important historic cities. We do, indeed, need a new concert hall, but it isn’t this one.