Leader: Monstrous carbuncles of Auld Reekie

EDINBURGH, the Athens of the north, the city of Enlightenment with architecture to match that great intellectual flowering. That, at least, is how we like to think of the capital. But it is not always quite like that, as a new book celebrating the post-war architecture demonstrates.

Yes, it features some magnificent structures, like the breathtaking Forth Road Bridge, the ground-breaking hexagonal Scottish Widows building and the revolutionary Royal Botanic Garden greenhouse.

But it must be said that to call some of the buildings on the list monstrous carbuncles would be being unfair to abscesses. Nothing done to George Square in the Sixties deserves anything other than utter derision. Similarly, British Home Stores and the New Club serve only as monuments to the vandalism from which the rest of Princes Street was saved – such modernism was fine for filling sites created by the Luftwaffe, not for replacing historic elegance. As for the HMSO storage depot on the Sighthill Industrial Estate, it would not look out of place in downtown Volgograd.

We should not, of course, mock modern architecture just because it is does not feature classical columns but there must be some sense of beauty. For many of these examples, the bulldozers can't come quickly enough.