Additional £25m for Capital’s new concert hall is a case of deja vu all over again

You report that the cost of the proposed new concert hall is already beginning to rise before a brick has been laid (“Cost of new ‘game changer’ concert hall soars by £25 million”, August 16). Given the Scottish Parliament precedent, it would seem to be that old feeling of deja vu all over again.

Impact Scotland, in opting for an over-scaled vanity icon by an international “starchitect” rather than an excellent local alternative, is manifestly the author of its own misfortune, and has raised eyebrows even among those, such as myself, who are strongly in favour of a new performance venue. The coup de grace in this case, however, may well be the judicial review sought by a subsidiary of US pension giant TIAA, developer of a nearby “Galleria” shopping mall and a “copper spiral” hotel which, at a guess, would struggle for approval on Las Vegas Strip. This global corporation has already helped to block a plan for a film studio six miles from the city on the pretext that it might have gone on to develop a retail element. One of TIAA’S objections is that the concert hall was to benefit from an element of financial support from public revenues, yet both Edinburgh Council and the Scottish Government have gifted this US pension corporation with $1 trillion under management a subsidy of £61.4m to help “unlock” its St James Quarter development, a bung described by the First Minister as an “innovative funding model [which] will see the Scottish Government work in partnership with City of Edinburgh Council and private developers TIAA Henderson Real Estate”.

TIAA goes on to beggar belief by claiming that the concert hall will damage Edinburgh’s Unesco World Heritage Site when its own outlandish “golden turd” hotel is set to wreck the city skyline, while its shopping mall is about to transform Princes Street into a retail desert.

Edinburgh planning policy, it seems, is now controlled from TIAA’S global headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina.

DAVID J BLACK Glanville Place, Edinburgh