‘The housing land should be purchased’

Published on 10/07/2012 12:00

How would you feel if you were told that you had to move home? That a major transport project was going right by your door and there was no choice but to sell up?

This is the situation that some homeowners near Dalmeny in the west of the Capital have been living with.

Network Rail planned to buy six properties as part of the “Dalmeny chord” – a link between the Edinburgh-Glasgow line and the Fife line – and a key part of the £1 billion Edinburgh-Glasgow rail improvement programme.

But now the community has been left in limbo after the Scottish Government announced that the project would be scaled back.

Residents have not been told 
officially whether Network Rail will still go ahead with the purchase of their properties, or whether they will be left with houses blighted by the possibility the scheme will be revived at some future date.

Given that this remains a possibility – a new administration at Holyrood may want to revive the scheme as a priority – the homeowners should be removed from the uncertainty as soon as possible and the land purchased by Network Rail.

The alternative is further years of uncertainty. Who would want to plan that new kitchen, or that extension, if there was a possibility of a knock on the door at some point saying the scheme was back on?

Good neighbours

WHILE the war of words between the Craighouse developers and those campaigning to stop the plans intensifies, it’s good to see one of Edinburgh’s oldest buildings being given a new lease of life.

What is even better is that the late 18th-century derelict structure at Abbeyhill is not being made-over into a ticky tacky little glass box, nor is its revamp impinging on any greenery.

But whoever the mysterious new literary owner of the small house is, they will be hoping to get on well with the neighbours. There’s little you can do about noise with a railway at the bottom of your garden, but the family next door has been known to invite a few hundred people to its garden 
parties.

Indeed, having Her Maj as a neighbour will certainly make borrowing a cup of sugar a more silver service affair than normal.