Robin Worsnop: Athens of the North needs a spit and polish

Published on Wednesday 25 January 2012 12:24

The capital cannot rest on its laurels when it comes to making the most of tourism’s economic potential

The Old and New Towns are widely recognised as Edinburgh’s most prized assets. The outstanding natural and built heritage of the city centre provides a superb “theatre” in which most of the city’s tourism activities take place. In addition, the fact that it is a Unesco-designated World Heritage Site gives Edinburgh a global status of huge worth.

World Heritage status puts us on the same stage as Machu Picchu and the Great Wall of China. It’s not just the Old Town and other well-known sites that are in the spotlight, it’s also the juxtaposition between the Old Town and the New Town and the gardens in between, a wonderfully expansive area that must be nurtured.

These are outstanding competitive advantages for a city that must be both celebrated and protected. Therefore it’s vitally important to ensure that the Old Town and the New Town are managed with great care, to standards that are both appropriate to a World Heritage Site and worthy of a five-star visitor attraction.

When visitors come to Edinburgh they usually want to enjoy and experience the city as a whole. The city itself is the attraction, the brand, the destination that brings them here. So if parts of this experience are disappointing, it detracts from the overall experience. Edinburgh has been likened to a grand building where visitors step inside to find peeling paint, dirty windows, tatty carpets and a general air of disrepair. The quality of the city’s public realm – the cleanliness of the streets, the upkeep of buildings, the preservation of cobbled streets, the pavements and walkways – must be improved if we are to live up to visitors’ expectations.

For instance, going up to Edinburgh Castle some of the cobbles are in a terrible mess, holes refilled with tarmac rather than being replaced with stone setts. Visitors and residents do not want to be hassled by beggars as they wander around the city. Often our bins are overflowing with rubbish, which on windy days is scattered across pavements and public gardens. Up and down the Royal Mile there is different signage with no consistency or clarity, or a theme that takes the visitor along with them. For instance, there could be more imaginative signing and storytelling – through new technology, or traditional signposts, that enable visitors to better move around the city, and to discover other places, such as Stockbridge.

The Motel One development on Market Street shows how even a building site can become a point of interest, by dressing up scaffolding and building works with eye-catching covers.

The best towns and cities offer places and experiences that are distinctive and attractive. This is often best achieved in areas where there is a concentration of interesting buildings. In Liverpool, for example, continuing investment has created one of the finest culture clusters in the country. It has a user-friendly wayfinding system, with one side showing visitors where they are, and the other giving the history of the location and its buildings and monuments.

Milan also demonstrates good practice – from the transformation of its centre by nurturing a diverse retail offering, to cleaning its monuments and providing visitor services such as bicycles for hotel guests.

Edinburgh needs to wake up and see itself as others see it, see itself on the world stage. It needs to embrace the opportunities that tourism growth can bring in terms of employment and wealth, not just for the people of Edinburgh working in hotels and restaurants, but for their fellow countryfolk working in all sorts of jobs, throughout Scotland. Ultimately everyone will benefit from a stronger tourism product in the capital, in its role as a gateway to Scotland.

Edinburgh as a destination is working in a very competitive international market. Other cities in the UK and abroad also have lots of heritage and have to look after it, maintain it and refresh it to a very high standard. There are many supreme examples of how other cities in the UK and abroad are ably and creatively looking after their public realm.

The challenge of maintaining the quality of the cityscape and ensuring that the highest quality of management is in place is considered by many to be the top priority for the city, as the foundation of its success as a tourism destination. For instance, Princes Street could be transformed into one of the most sought-after addresses in the city – and not just for shops. Its incredible vista makes it ideal for restaurants, bars, clubs and hotel rooms. The redevelopment of the St James Quarter into high-end retail could be a natural prompt for retailers to move there and free up Princes Street to be quite a different thoroughfare.

In the years since the last major strategy, tourism revenue in Edinburgh has grown from £250 million in 1990 to more than £1 billion in 2010 – the highest tourism spending in any UK city after London. Tourism accounts for about 12 per cent of the city’s workforce, employing 32,000 people.

Edinburgh has outperformed most of its peer cities in Europe. However, it faces a threat from UK cities such Newcastle and Leeds, which have woken up to tourism’s potential, and from European cities such as Prague.

Developing and delivering a new Edinburgh tourism strategy in the current economic climate is clearly challenging.

However, Edinburgh already has a strong and unique asset base and this, coupled with a pipeline of ongoing investments in our tourism-related product, facilities and transport infrastructure, gives us a great platform on which to grow our thriving tourism sector.

At the Edinburgh Tourism Action Group (Etag) conference today Edinburgh 2020: The Edinburgh Tourism Strategy was unveiled. This is the city’s most significant tourism development plan for 20 years. It sets out a clear and ambitious plan for the growth of tourism for the period to 2020. It will act as a catalyst for partnerships and collaboration across the industry and we hope will build the case for and prioritise investment in the tourism product.

• Robin Worsnop is the chairman of Etag.

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Navvy

Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 09:23 AM

Absolutely correct. The signage is terrible and confusing and there is too much of it. On the continent towns such as Leiden and Bruges manage to control parking and more with far fewer signs. Litter and badly maintained roads are a disgrace and are issued that drag on year after year and Dawe has done nothing about it not has the Provost. The pink and yellow paving slabs, many broken must be got rid of. Ideally we should have flag stone like we used to. What is happen to all the setts on the tram route at Coates and Atholl Crescents - dumped? Each citizen can do his part in keeping the city clean

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glassbenmhor

Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 05:49 AM

Well at least the Castle is not sliding into the Fourth!

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young reekie

Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 05:40 AM

The council can certainly afford to spend some money on keeping the place clean and tidy.Get it ready for 27th May. I 'm coming over to run the marathon.

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young reekie

Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 05:38 AM

Over a billion pounds in 2010 .

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