PUTTING SOME NAMES TO FACES
As the façade of the new John Lewis ‘infill’ building on Leith Street nears completion, we thought it might be useful to offer a little background detail.
What we now see emerging is a non-material variation (14/05263/VARY) on an earlier, consented plan. It was required by internal ‘design refinements’ to the location of essential plant, revisions to the service vehicle tracking routes and adjustments to the cores including staircases and lifts.
The consequent external changes to ground-floor displays and folding gates, ‘and some shuffling of windows, wall panels and louvre assemblies’, were approved in January 2016.
For a start, the conveniently close correspondence between architect’s drawings and the view from Calton Hill allows us to apply terms like ‘Ocean Blue Fossil honed’ and ‘Celtic Blue’ to those components we could previously describe only as ‘that black bit over there, next to the other black bit opposite the grey part on the other side’.
Judging by conversations we’ve had with locals and random strangers on street corners, it is clear that the new infill building is not to everybody’s taste. One person described it to us – rather cruelly, we thought – as ‘a Glasgow dentist’s idea of a good time’.
Certainly, its tall, dark and vertical presence, with granite plank infill panels, is oddly reminiscent of the unpopular St James Centre we thought we were bidding goodbye to.
However, Spurtle is keeping an open mind. We’ll judge it when the stone-clad new additions running uphill towards Waterloo Place are complete. At that stage, we hope, the dark materials will act as a satisfying point of punctuation, and a coherent link to what remains of the looming original structure above and behind.
Visualisations of the completed street are available on pages 1–3 and 6 here.
Got a view? Tell us at spurtle@hotmail.co.uk or @theSpurtle or Facebook
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