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Like-for-like white doesn’t make it right

 

Dear Spurtle,

 

I write to highlight a common problem associated with New Town development which places historic buildings at risk. 

I live next door to an A-listed property which is currently being upgraded by a commercial developer. I have always supported and appreciated that company’s choice to improve these run-down buildings, which for many years have been a scar on the streetscape. 

I recently enquired about the basements here, as I discovered that the developer plans to render and paint them white. Council guidelines (pp. 9–11) strongly advise against this practice, and if caught early enough owners should repair what they have done.

 

The danger is that after several years, painting exterior basement walls in this way becomes ‘like for like’ and – unofficially, at least – is deemed to have created a precedent which provokes neither comment nor complaint. 


These Georgian buildings are a World Heritage resource, not a bungalow or suburban semi. Original and authentic finishes must and should be reinstated, not overlain by what has mistakenly been applied in the years since. We do this important, artistic urban scheme a shameful disservice if we don’t stick to our principles. 

On my street, the developer responded (accurately) by stating that all planning proposals had been approved, but I still feel that such ‘whitewashing’ destroys the mass and integrity of the New Town. It looks cheap and squalid. 


Will anyone support my points? Where do the New Town & Broughton Community Council, Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland, Cockburn Association and Edinburgh World Heritage stand on this issue? Did any of them comment on the original application?

 

Mike Worobec

nab

 

ywb
**********
www

Could've bin better

 
Dear Spurtle,
 
What to think, how to feel about the Council consultation, currently underway, on the New Town phase of the bin-hub roll-out?
 
It is clearly now too late to go back to the drawing board and start again, but my own preference would be for us all to take our plastic food packaging back to the source of it, i.e. Tesco and the other supermarkets. This would give them a real incentive not to place in a punnet and swathe in plastic every fruit and vegetable you can buy. The fairly recent complete removal of recycling facilities from supermarket car parks is surely a step in the wrong direction. If it was up to me then supermarkets would have to work with Councils to take the lead on recycling and make suitable facilities available.
 
Then our streets could see an end to their role as the default storage option for waste, and have a civic role as pleasant public spaces.
 
But regarding this consultation, I suspect I'm not alone in feeling like a child of warring parents, arguments going on over my head between the gull bag faction and the bin hub club.  This has been a badly dysfunctional process, which has been going on for 4 years, and yet the two factions seem only just to be discovering the existence of the other!  What was the New Town & Broughton Community Council doing in advocating (and litigating!) purely for people living in townhouses?  Why did those who feel so strongly about keeping bins hold it all in until now?
 
All I want is to be able to walk around the New Town without having to know what my neighbours had for supper last night and seeing the remains of it strewn and smeared across the pavement.
 
Which of the options on offer looks more promising against that benchmark? I live in a tenement and we currently have on-street bins which work OK, so in an ideal world I might prefer well-designed and well-sited communal bins. The reality would be, however, that with every surrounding street on gull bags, my street's bins would be used by three times more people than intended and would be constantly overflowing.  
 
The way that people in neighbouring streets currently present their recycling for collection (chuck it in a box; see it blow across 30 metres of pavements and gutters; job's a good'un) gives me some doubts about their likely gull bag behaviour. The Council seems to have made no written commitments about the capacity of the gull bag or the collection frequency, and the gull bag faction's own propaganda flyer ominously stresses the need for those responding to the consultation to make their support for gull bags dependent on weekly collection.
 
Nevertheless, on balance it seems to me that for a street like mine, surrounded by other gull bag streets, street cleanliness is likely to be better if we do as asked and make an effort to make gull bags work.
 
All that remains is for me to transform the room formerly known as my kitchen into my own mini waste transfer station ...
 
And to wonder, who were the heritage experts who agreed that appropriate modifications to make a bin hub fit for the EWH site comprised a darker green flap on the mixed recycling bin, a smaller area of purple on the flap of the glass bin and black metal guard-rails round the hub instead of brushed chrome? (See under heading "World Heritage Site" on p.1.)
 
Was it really EWH that agreed to this nonsense on our behalf?  If so, it is very disappointing.
 
Caroline Roussot
 
*****
frc



 

WEST END

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Quiet evening on Melville Street. 

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ROSE STREET

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The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Drinker. 

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