The Quaich Project podcast now online
The Edinburgh Reporter recently sat down with David Ellis, the Managing Director of The Ross Development Trust, and Cliff Hague Chair of the Cockburn Association.
The vexed question of what kind of development is appropriate for West Princes Street Gardens will have to wait until the city recovers from the many challenges of coronavirus.
But now that we have a captive audience, we are releasing our podcast on anchor.fm (see
P2) about the proposals. The Quaich Project is a public private partnership between The Ross Development Trust, a charity, and The City of Edinburgh
Council to design, fund and build improvements in West Princes Street Gardens. It surprised us that there were not daggers drawn over the need for the project. It is of course in the execution that opposing parties have different views. And the devil is in the detail.
Cliff Hague said: "The difficulties for us are really two or three concerns and they're all interrelated. One is the the scale of the new performance area arena. My understanding is that it will more or less double the capacity of the existing Ross Bandstand.
"Linked to that is the intervention beneath Princes Street to create what's been called the Welcome Centre. So together, we think there's pretty major interventions, and they're intrinsically disruptive. They're going to take quite a long time to construct when there will be a mess. They're high end items that will require a lot of money and a lot of risk. Our concern is that this then leads you into an overly commercialised solution, when what we think is that a pragmatic set of relatively small scale interventions could actually deliver an outcome that more or less everybody in the city would be supportive of."
David Ellis countered: "When this project started. When Norman Springford and I first sat down and looked at how we were going to go about this and what we were trying to provide as a replacement for the Ross Bandstand, there were only two large events a year - one was the Festival fireworks and one was Hogmanay. So when this project first started, these are the calendar of events that are causing all the controversy at the moment. They weren't even in the gardens. Now, the bandstand that we're providing is focused on being a space for small community, mainly unamplified performances. That's what it's always been about."
Listen on anchor.fm