Short-term business interests threaten Edinburgh’s incomparable character
Your frontpage headline (Scots man ,8 May) demonstrates again the tiresome, if helplessly anticipated, shortterm focus of trumpeting politicians: “SNP accused of ‘hypocrisy’ for ditching airline tax cut”.
However, it is the response by Gordon Dewar, chief executive of Edinburgh Airport, which drew my attention.
His assessment that“Scotland’s global reputation would be damaged” by abandoning the promised cut in air departure tax just emphasises the selfishly narrow perspective which corporate bodies and commercial developers (and indeed greedy individuals) share, their goals set firmly on their own advancement, irrespective, it seems, of the part they play in a much bigger game.
As it happens, that“bigg er game” was addressed eloquently, if desperately, in the previous day’s Scotsman by Cliff Hague, chair of the Cock burn Association, in his piece “Edinburgh’s iconic heart is in danger of being ripped out”.
This compelling article by one who knows th es en sitive issues surrounding city planning was a cri de coeur setting out why separate commercial developments are impinging on the essence of Edinburgh’s unique character and setting.
He refers to the Waverley valley, that essentially important geological setting run - ning from the coast through the city centre, the tac tile experience of which is a unique factor of central Edinburgh’s cityscape but which, as Mr Hague explains, now risks even greater compromise than exists at present.
Splitting the “iconic” nature of the city’ s centre into units of separately-focused commercially- driven i nd iv i dual developments is no way to enhance the unique experience of Edinburgh for visitors and residents alike. Council planners also, it seems, are blindly prone to eating out of the hands of destructive - ly short-term business interests at the expense of the city’s innately incomparable character. An easy life for some.
For myself, I see the whole of Princes Street being included in a full rewilding scheme with waves of grassy banks leading right up to the fronts of small shops and front doors of affordable domestic dwellings, with the occasional lazy tram rumbling along a twistingly sympathetic track. Not even a cyclist in sight. Deer would graze, only raising their heads to sounds occasionally drifting from a concert taking place somewhere down in the Waverley valley.
No railings then on which to fix barriers to vision against those horrible“voyeurs” who “haven’t paid” to see the concert–scroungers! Inclusion, not exclusion, would be my theme for the heart of Edinburgh.