Platform: Time to re-evaluate Caltongate and build what residents want

Published on Friday 3 April 2009 21:31

IT IS hard to understand why Malcolm Fraser, writing in The Scotsman on Wednesday 1 April (sic!) believes that the so-called Caltongate project would be good for Edinburgh's Old Town.

His community credentials, his concern for the city and his track record in creating beautiful small buildings – Dancebase and the Poetry Library in particular – are well known. He listened, spoke moderately and was well-received at a constructive meeting of the Save Our Old Town (Soot) group.

Yet very few who care for the history, the architecture, the image and the long-term health of Edinburgh could fail to welcome the collapse of the Caltongate developer, Mountgrange.

Everybody wishes to see the site of the old New Street bus garage developed, and any development will build houses and generate employment. The point is that this is a bad scheme, which will devalue the north back of the Canongate for generations. It may yet proceed, but the drastically changed development climate creates the opportunity to consider alternatives.

History shows that times of high economic pressure are bad for historic cities. A previous boom has given us the St James' Centre and only huge efforts by the conservation lobby saved Edinburgh from an urban motorway.

Have we forgotten the efforts of civilised architects like Sir Robert Matthew and Sir James Dunbar-Nasmith, of campaigners like Eleanor Robertson, Colin McWilliam and Oliver Barratt and of Desmond Hodges and Jim Johnson in the Old and New Towns respectively? These were the people who brought international recognition to Scotland's capital, and who secured its place as one of the great cities of the world. As a wise financier wrote recently: recessions are necessary evils: they clean out bad money, bad practice and bad behaviour. However reluctantly, we must recognise the necessity of this recession.

Sound principles for development in historic cities were first laid down in the early 20th century by Sir Patrick Geddes, pioneer town planner and father of urban conservation. Geddes believed that cities were living organisms and, in his theory of "conservative surgery" argued that change in established settlements should, whenever possible, be small and incremental.

Why was all this ignored?

The answer seems to lie in commercial opportunism, the overweening ambition of the City Council at the time to play the development game, to change the nature of the city to enable it to 'compete' with other cities in a sort of economic race.

The City Council, completely forgetting Geddes, saw the opportunity to extend the site to Jeffrey Street and to make it much larger by proposing the demolition of two listed buildings, one of which – the former New Street School – it owned. Why Historic Scotland acquiesced is hard to comprehend.

At its meeting on Wednesday evening, Soot initiated the establishment of a Canongate Community Development Trust which intends to open discussions with the City Council, with a view to bringing the existing buildings on the site back into use as soon as possible, temporarily landscaping the main part of the site and developing new proposals for the incremental development of the site for a mixture of uses, including more houses.

This may be what the citizens and all those who care for Edinburgh as one of the great cities of the world – including, perhaps, Malcolm Fraser – actually want!

&#149 James Simpson is an Edinburgh architect, a member of the Historic Environment Advisory Council for Scotland and a Vice-President of ICOMOS-UK.