Grand designs on beauty are laudable, but people also need a place to live – Lesley McLeod

When Edinburgh became the first Unesco City of Literature, its grandeur was captured in a quotation from the number one chronicler of the Capital’s modern eccentricities.

Calton Hill. Picture: Shutterstock

Alexander McCall Smith said Auld Reekie was ‘a city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again’. Edinburgh – from her vistas from –Calton Hill and even to the views to Fife from the rise above the Royal Infirmary – has the power to make you catch your breath. But, for very many people – either living in the more brutalist parts of the younger city or stuck in other less glorious ­surroundings altogether – what breaks the heart is the sheer ugliness of what the human tribe has thought fit to inflict on its fellows.

The contrast between the charm of the Old Town and the enlightenment splendour of the planned New Town shines a harsh light on the mess ­successive planners have made of Princes Street or the misery caused to people condemned to live in what was the unreformed ­wasteland of the likes of Sighthill, ­Pilton or Leith’s Banana Flats.

Edinburgh’s not alone – every ­Scottish city has a post-war corner that is forever Raploch or Rutherglen. Nor is it only the major conurbations. I grew up in Thurso – a northern gem of classical town planning. The Caithness town was redesigned by local landlord and social scientist, Sir John Sinclair, the orchestrator of the Statistical Accounts of Scotland. It has a grid pattern new town, ­Georgian houses overlooking a ­riverside park and a higgledy-piggledy older settlement around the river mouth. It also had some amazingly hideous modern buildings – my own secondary school included.

Lesley MacLeod, CEO, Association for Project Safety

Thurso High just goes to prove that architectural plaudits don’t necessarily mean you get something that makes the heart sing. Sir Basil ­Spence has a lot to answer for including 50 Queen Anne’s Gate where I worked when I first moved to London. ­Neither one had windows that fitted.

So, I picked up the final report of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission with interest and some hope. Living with Beauty has much to commend it and little with which you can disagree. I think it is a laudable ambition to strive for ­beauty in the built environment. I wish we were all in the fortunate position – as the Commission suggests – to reject ugliness. Oh! that we all had the time, the leisure and the money to look to stewardship of the places where we live and work rather than just doing the necessary repairs and keeping the grass – where we have any – under control.

For my members – the professionals in design and construction risk management who make up the ­Association for Project Safety, the report is also all a bit worrying. For nearly 200 pages the life-affirming effects of planning attractive homes, offices and urban spaces are praised and promoted. I’m not saying that’s wrong – but safety, far less affordability, doesn’t get a look in.

With an urgent need to build to correct the country’s million-home shortfall there are, perhaps, more pressing concerns than aesthetic integrity. Frankly, at the moment, I would settle for buildings that are not repeatedly submerged by ­rising floods or condemned to mortgage limbo because your once des res with views over the Forth is ­virtually impossible to sell as it’s blighted by possibly dodgy cladding. We must redress failings in the current ­building stock and stop just throwing things up for quick profit. The Federation for Master Builders has also highlighted our looming ­construction skills’ crisis. Many trades will fail to clear the wages bar the Home Office is setting for would-be seekers-after-entry to the UK. Arguably, the construction ­sector should have brought on home-grown talent before but it’s too late now to rush through trainees by the end of the year. Sadly, none of this is going to accelerate house building.

Given a free choice maybe we would all choose to live somewhere lovely. Maybe we would want to aspire to live within apple-bobbing distance of a fruit tree as suggested by the authors of Living with Beauty. But, for ­people in the real world, your own front door will always be more of a juggling act between the needs of our families and the depth of our pockets than dreams of a grand design. Until supply ­outstrips demand to the extent that prices don’t soar beyond the ­fingertips of people chasing a roof over their heads, I’d settle for safe and sound over winners of the ­Stirling prize.

Lesley McLeod, CEO, Association for Project Safety