C O N T E X T 1 5 0 : J U L Y 2 0 1 7 21 The early 1960s saw renewed proposals for comprehensive development areas, many initially proposed in Abercrombie and Plumstead‘s 1949 Civic Survey and Plan for Edinburgh (reverentially named for Geddes). A significant new town casualty was the 18th-century Greenside and St James Square, largely cleared for a new road system and the St James Centre (1964–9), a massive retail and office megastructure currently being flattened for replacement. Of two major schemes on the southern fringes of the Old Town, one would proceed, the other would be narrowly averted. Dumbiedykes in St Leonards, an area of decayed 19th-century housing, had been subject to sluggish council acquisition when in 1958 a partial tenement collapse provided the catalyst for drastic action.Together with political shifts, the outcome was the demolition of over 1,000 houses, and proposals for 25-storey point blocks overlooking Holyrood Park (1966). Protests reduced the scale to two 11-storey towers and a series of medium-density blocks, and by 1968 a high-buildings policy had been judiciously established. The early 1960s saw plans by the council andUniversity of Edinburgh to raze acres of the historic Southside with a megastructural extension of the university’s George Square. Precisely not the union of community and academia that Geddes had had inmind, this long-standing ambition for an educational quarter was linked with complicated proposals for an inner ring road, both finally abandoned in 1973. Blighted for a decade, the area hung on long enough to see many of its buildings listed in 1974–7, and for the council to radically change tack by designating a conservation area in 1976.The consequent regeneration of the area was aided by local and central government funding and housing improvement grants. The city’s change in direction was encouraged by mounting concern over the harmful effects of planning blight from community groups and the public, already animated by high-profile building losses in George Square and Princes Street.5 Opposition had been boosted by amenity groups, by 1970 given consultee status following statutory listing. (Inter)national concern about the decaying set-piece NewTown saw an advisory body formed to allocate grants, followed later by similar arrangements for the OldTown.6 By 1975, European Architectural Heritage Year, the wider economic situation favoured ‘make do and mend’ rather than grand projects, but the (small c) conservative nature and desire of Edinburgh folk to protect their city should not be underestimated. By the late 1970s, when the council provided new flats in Blackfriars Street, the market had chiefly passed to housing associations. The Old Town gradually saw new public and private projects, helping repopulate the area from a low of 2,000, and in the residential sections of the New Town repair grants to private owners saw thriving rejuvenation.The Edinburgh Festival’s success may have swayed the council, in 1975–80, to convert a listed warehouse as home to the city’s art collection, and further cultural uses followed.7 Edinburgh was fortunate to have avoided its inner ring road and the worst excesses of comprehensive redevelopment, before the council embraced surgery rather than amputation in the 1970s.The best of 20thcentury development has been achieved by working closely with the townscape, plan and topography of the city, often involving a mix of refurbishment and new References 5 The loss of the New Club and the Life Association buildings, a few years before statutory listing, had been partly a consequence of the council’s Princes Street Panel proposals to unify the street with contemporary buildings encompassing a first-floor walkway. 6 The forerunner of the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland was a major amenity body. Advisory bodies were the NewTown Conservation Committee, founded after a major conference in 1970, with the more community-focused OldTown Committee for Conservation and Renewal arriving a decade later.They merged after world heritage status was achieved in 1995. 7 Further cultural infill buildings include Benson and Forsyth’s Museum of Scotland extension (1996) and Malcolm Fraser’s Poetry Library (1999). The Scottish Parliament (1998-2004) transformed the less fashionable third of the Royal Mile. Canongate, Edinburgh. At the right is a 17th-century tenement reconstructed by Robert Hurd in 1956. To the left is a range of council tenements by Ebenezer MacRae (1930), whose facade was recently retained when a new arch was cut through as part of a major mixed-use redevelopment scheme.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=