Damian Killeen: Sands of time sweep across changing face of Portobello

Imagine Portobello. Are you a visitor to Edinburgh? Did you know that the city has an extensive beach and more than a kilometre of Promenade? Have you lived in Edinburgh all your life? When was the last time you visited Portobello? Possibly when you were a child, the open-air swimming pool was still in action and the donkeys carried you a hundred yards and back. But things are changing in Portobello and now is the time for Edinburgh to begin to value its city beach.

Portobello Beach and Promenade is one of Edinburgh's greatest secrets. When I moved to the city in 1974, I was unaware that Edinburgh had a shoreline. I regularly meet visitors today who are surprised to find that the city is on the coast. But why should that be a surprise? There is nothing at the airport, rail or bus stations to promote the existence of a seaside in Edinburgh and the marketing on public transport does not suggest a visit to the shore. We have noticed that the number 26 bus, for example, is always going to the zoo but never to the city beach. Many of the city's tourism and festival maps stop somewhere short of Portobello.

The Edinburgh Inspiring Capital website, the city's online tourism hub, informs us on its front page that 'The surrounding coast and countryside of East, West and Midlothian is perfect for beach walks in Gullane or Yellowcraigs'. But we have to penetrate two more layers of the site before we learn that '3 miles to the southeast of Leith lies Portobello, Edinburgh's town beach.'

Edinburgh has aspirations to be an internationally recognised waterfront city, but it fails to fully appreciate the asset it already has in an accessible beach, close to the city centre, with a historic high street, an interesting industrial and social heritage and an attractive residential conservation area.

Portobello has long suffered from a sense of neglect and a feeling that it is peripheral to the main interests of the Capital. I learned this early in my time in Edinburgh when I moved from Morningside to Portobello and was told by a neighbour, troubled for our future, that 'people move from there to here'. Class plays a role in this, as well as old-fashioned politics. But Portobello is changing. Younger professional families are increasingly moving in to the area, old properties are being renovated in innovative ways and businesses with their finger on the pulse of what people now want from pubs and cafes are succeeding in attracting more visitors.

Big Things on the Beach is just one of Portobello's lively community organisations. Our contribution to the area is to revive the creative spirit of Portobello by inviting innovative and sometimes challenging artists to create work in Portobello's public spaces. People remember the pyramids of 'Wonder' by Hill Jephson Robb and Miles Thurlow's fruit machines of 'Black Swan' on the beach. There is a demand to repeat the Garden Gallery in which we showed the work of 30 artists in front gardens along the promenade and in the adjacent streets. Behind the scenes, we have also developed education courses for ourselves and other members of the public in commissioning public art and created opportunities for people to explore their visions for the area. The most substantial of these was last year's 'Imagine Porty Prom' project, a collaboration with the city council that generated a 'Public Art Strategy for Portobello Promenade'.

Everyone, of course, is strapped for cash and the strategy now sits on the shelf in the City Development Department waiting for the political and professional leadership to take it forward. But the community is not sitting back expecting things just to happen. We think that one of the ways we can encourage action is to bring increasing numbers of people to the beach to experience the Portobello that might be.

This year, during the Edinburgh Art Festival, we are bringing a group of contemporary Italian artists to Portobello to provide different experiences of public art, including a human installation involving 500 people. On Sunday, July 24, from 3pm, we invite everyone in Edinburgh to come to the Beach for 'The Big Welcome', as part of the Cultural Olympiad that accompanies the upcoming Olympic Games. Bring decorated tablecloths to cover a kilometre of sea wall and enjoy a variety of entertainment and a picnic food market to express the openness of Portobello and Edinburgh to the wider world.

If you would like to live in a city that can boast a world-class city beach; if you would like Portobello to thrive as a sustainable place of cultural recreation for Edinburgh's citizens and visitors and if you want to support a community that is thinking creatively about its future, come to Portobello Beach on July 24.