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Caltongate campaign task force

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Published Date: 04 April 2009
By BRIAN FERGUSON
CAMPAIGNERS are to set up a task force in an attempt to help shape the future of the site of a doomed development in Edinburgh's Old Town.
A development trust is hoped to be created within weeks to try to influence plans for the site of the Caltongate development, which was halted last month when its owners, Mountgrange, went into administration. Plans for a five-star hotel and conference centre, 200 homes, office blocks and a public square are in serious doubt. It is expected to be months before administrators decide what to do with the assets of Mountgrange.

Backers of the initiative hope to bring forward their own plans for the area, ensure empty buildings are brought back into use and encourage the landscaping of a huge gap site. Sally Richardson, spokeswoman for the Save Our Old Town campaign, said: "Ideally, we'd like to take forward our own plans, particularly for buildings that are lying empty."

Writing in today's Scotsman, architect James Simpson states: "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 Mountgrange."





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  • Last Updated: 04 April 2009 12:16 AM
  • Source: The Scotsman
  • Location: Edinburgh
  • Related Topics: Caltongate development
 
1

Buttress,

04/04/2009 04:57:09
Unfortunately, while Malcolm Fraser's inaccurate little rant could (eventually) be read by all, and is now repeated on various architecture websites, James Simpson's response is 'Premium Content'.

Hardly fair, Scotsman.
2

Buttress,

04/04/2009 10:07:10
Read it here:

http://www.eh8.org.uk/node/849

A reaaoned and sensible response to Fraser's rant. I wonder if those Scottish architecture websites which gleefully repeated Fraser's self-indulgent unpleasantness will now print James Simpson's response also?

I suspect many will agree with it.
3

Buttress,

04/04/2009 10:20:41
A few extracts:

"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 to come. It may yet proceed, but the drastically changed development climate creates the opportunity to consider alternatives."

"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. cities were first laid down in the early 20thC 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 itself at the time to play the development game, to change the very nature of the city to enable it to ‘compete’ with other cities in some sort of economic race."

"The City Council, completely forgetting Geddes, saw the opportunity to extend it 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 in this is hard to comprehend."

"At its meeting on Wednesday evening, SOOT initiated the establishment of a Canongate Com
4

Buttress,

04/04/2009 10:21:38
cont


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!"

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

5

Los Angeles,

04/04/2009 10:43:40


As I see it, and have experienced it, too many good architects are egotists, intent on designing signature buildings rather than creating something that will blend in with its surroundings. They create instead disharmony.

There's has to stand out from the others. This is fine if the architect has been commissioned for a singular public building such as a music hall or national art gallery, but a conclave of housing and restaurants adjacent to an old ancient town is a different matter.

The brutally modern will not do.

We can see that in any city in the world.

It is characterless, stateless architecture.

I wish the new Trust all success imposing a vision on the site that is not guided by personal profit, rather it springs from the ground up.






 

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