Photograph: Alamy
The month of August is when Edinburgh’s classical magnificence ought to be regarded in its best light. During those long hours when daylight slowly and reluctantly gives way to the night is the best time to admire Edinburgh Castle and the Calton Hill and some of its Hellenic masterpieces. In August, though, Edinburgh becomes captive to its festivals and the city, and everything in it that is solid and fastened down, seems to move and sway with the multitudes. This is not a time to observe the beauty of Edinburgh.
Perhaps that’s why it seemed appropriate that Alexander Stoddart, Her Majesty’s Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland, chose the first day of September to reveal a new work. Stoddart’s sculptures are crafted in the neoclassical tradition and those that he has already made for the city have helped to maintain its beauty by paying homage to its past. His latest statue is of William Playfair, the great architect who did more than any other to make Edinburgh the Athens of the north. At the statue’s unveiling, outside the National Museum of Scotland, Stoddart gently and eloquently expressed a de profundis for Edinburgh’s classical character. “Peace and rest,” he said, “are promulgated by classical buildings. Modernism, on the other hand, likes conflict and action. Like all dynamic creeds, it likes nothing better than a fire in a planned city. It gives the potential for perpetual revolution.”
Some of Edinburgh’s planners and civic architects, though, seem bent on a process that would turn Athens into downtown Tirana during the Hoxha years. The eastern end of Princes Street and the top of Leith Walk, which ought to serve as antechambers before the glories of Calton Hill, have instead been disfigured by a brutalism that makes Cumbernauld look like Lisbon.
The long-overdue demise of the unlovely St James Centre presented the ideal opportunity to begin a process of repair. Instead, the city’s planners and architects sought to embed further their dismal credo and now a bizarre luxury hotel complex will soon begin to take shape. On the drawing board, it looks like a giant sore thumb loosely wrapped in bandages. Only recently were Edinburgh’s panjandrums reluctantly persuaded to ditch plans that would have turned Thomas Hamilton’s neoclassical Royal High school in Calton Hill into another luxury hotel.
This would have made it look from afar as if a giant pair of Mickey Mouse ears had been added to the building. Perversely, this would have been a fitting monument to a Mickey Mouse council. And although the plans were dropped the damage to Edinburgh’s reputation has been incalculable. “What else might they do if we don’t keep a close eye on them?” we were asking ourselves. It would take a few volumes to explain the chicanery and sheer, unadulterated vandalism of the Caltongate, the glass-and-stone portable building in the Old Town. Imagine the Sex Pistols playing Swan Lake and you begin to get a sense of the effect.
Sandy Stoddart was scathing on Wednesday about the recent attempted desecration of the city’s architectural heritage. He said: “We mustn’t underestimate how lucky we are to be relatively unscathed. We have to guard against the consistent and wilful desecration of these things.”
It’s good to see that Stoddart gets it and can convey in simple terms why all of this stuff matters. This is not a debate reserved only for a cultural elite and their languid preferences. It concerns the rest of us too and acutely so. For, until the super-rich find a way of restricting the right of access to these buildings and the avenues on which they stand, their beauty remains a free gift that is handed down through generations for all the children of the city, both high and low.
In Glasgow, whose civic buildings don’t quite possess the majesty of Edinburgh’s finest, there is nonetheless sufficient beauty in its built heritage to make those of us who live and work here proud. Its Georgian architecture running upwards from the city centre through the grid network of its big streets is among the finest in Europe and the intricate stonework on some of its office buildings can make you stay a little longer and reduce the pace of your life. As Sandy Stoddart said: “Peace and rest are promulgated by classical buildings.” In places and among people where peace and rest are hard to come by and where, instead, there is conflict and squalor these buildings possess even more value.
One of Glasgow’s most historic thoroughfares is the old High Street, which possesses some of the city’s oldest built heritage. Here is where Provand’s Lordship resides; here, too, the splendour of Glasgow Cathedral, standing in front of the magnificent necropolis. As this old street winds down towards Glasgow Cross the old buildings on either side convey the essence and soul of the city. This street, though, has become a monument to civic neglect that is every bit as distressing as the Edinburgh council’s wrecking ball in the east. In desperation at the plight of the shops that keep some of these buildings alive the High Street Merchants’ Association has been formed to raise awareness of the slow death of one of Glasgow’s oldest streets.
Pictures collected by shopkeepers up and down the high street paint a vivid but unedifying picture of filth with rot and raw sewage running through many premises. The To Let signs that now dominate this place make it seem like a natural extension to “City of the Dead” behind the cathedral. The council will argue that it has more pressing concerns with the publication of the latest despairing figures from the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. Glasgow’s High Street is where a journey into the city’s East End begins. Perhaps the council wants to let this old street be a fitting signpost to the poverty and ill health that lies beyond. If so, they are making a good job of it.
Like Edinburgh’s grand buildings, the High Street belongs to the citizens. It would be grand to seize possession of them and divert the rents into making the old buildings lovely once more.
