Patience is wearing thin around Hopetoun Crescent Garden, where residents continue to allege anti-social behaviour by a few visitors and some users of both the guesthouse at No. 17 and the Missionaries of Charity at No. 18.
Littering, fouling, intimidation, abusive language, physical bullying of disabled passers-by, and threats to individuals and private property are among the problems reported.
Whilst sympathetic to the lot of less fortunate neighbours, some residents are frustrated by a situation they say has worsened over the last 12 years. Police are aware of the complaints, but cannot monitor the area 24 hours a day.
Spurtle was recently shown correspondence from an exasperated householder to the Missionaries of Charity (which was also copied to the Police and Cardinal Keith O’Brien).
‘In my opinion,’ went the letter, ‘the only way of resolving the current untenable situation is for you to show mercy and give me and my neighbours a thoroughly well-deserved break by slinging your hook and moving to a neighbourhood where there is no well-maintained garden for your residents to trash.’
Cardinal O'Brien's cool response later appeared on the Internet. He declined to archive a 'banal in the extreme' short story which accompanied this letter, but promised to discuss the correspondent's serious 'insinuations' with his closest advisors.
There is no simple solution. As previous zero-tolerance campaigns have shown, moving-on homeless and desperate individuals from one site merely encourages them to congregate elsewhere. The growing problems in Hopetoun Crescent are themselves in part evidence of this.
Paradoxically, Hopetoun Crescent Garden won another Green Flag this summer (Breaking news, 23.7.12), and its level of community participation was just what Edinburgh needed to display in achieving its coveted Beautiful Scotland City Award last month.
[Image: Wikimedia Commons.]