Is it a walnut whip or something worse? Whimsy of the new St James Quarter

SKYLINES can be like hairdos. One small change, a lick, a curl or a spike, and it can seem that the whole character is changed – the alteration the only thing one’s eye is drawn towards. That’s particularly so when, like the new W Hotel in the St James Quarter, the form is so out of keeping with the rest of the skyline of Edinburgh.

When I first saw it there, as I rounded the top of Leith Walk, it seemed like some wiry, shimmering snake, sticking its head up to see what was going on, and finding itself stuck in a city under Covidsiege. Its pose appeared nervous, as if summoned at the wrong moment by its snake charming creators Allan Murray Architects.

One of the things about this modification in the skyline of Edinburgh is that, after all that build-up – the years in which our skyline was marked by tall, poised cranes that seemed to feed on the buildings below – it feels as if its time is wrong. An ostentatious hotel when no one is going to hotels? A “retailopolis”, as some have called it, when the high street has been in freefall?

People have vied to outdo each other for best insult to describe the building. “A vile walnut whip,” was one popular jibe,“the golden turd” another. There was even a Change.org petition, entitled “Pit Googly Eyes Oan the Jobby”.

Architects have criticised it, too. One, Rab Bennetts, described it as “whimsy”. “There is something,” he considered, “of the fairground about the hotel’s skyline at St James Quarter; a sense that it might be moving on soon. I wonder if it will still be there in 40-odd years’ time?”

Like many, I wasn’t sure I much liked this plan to put such an opulent coil of bling at the heart of my city – and all in the name of tourism and consumerism. It seemed to me like some brash folly. Then one day, standing up on Arthur’s Seat, I saw it there, glinting, and it felt as if someone had plopped a coffee-icing swirl on the cake of Edinburgh.

There was something I liked about that whimsy. It was like a doodle in steel that, particularly in these times, seemed like a careless expression of joy – the opposite of the site’s previous Brutalism.

That snake had put its head above the parapet in a pandemic – and, from there, it looked ridiculously hopeful. Much of the St James Quarter, including its Bonnie & Wild foodhall, is due to open on June 24. In these difficult times it’s at least something new, a birth for us to coo and fret over. I hope it’s still there in 40 years’ time.