New Town

Mike Worobec answers his critic 

Michael Upton’s response (8 June) to my article (29 May) is revealing, not because it successfully dismantles the argument but because it repeatedly avoids engaging with it. 

—Michael Upton—

In the Spurtle on 29 May, Mike Worobec argued for two changes to the New Town’s communal gardens; first, an ‘expert-led’ programme of gardening and silviculture to ‘restore’ them, and secondly, allowing the public to ‘move through’ the gardens.

How the ‘emerald necklace’ became a green barrier

—Mike Worobec—

Few cities in the world are so intellectually and aesthetically deliberate as Edinburgh. 

March 2024. A pleasant spring afternoon in Moray Place. A hint of peat smoke in the air. The vaguest scent of sewage drifting from the Water of Leith below.

I wait outwith a southern entrance to the central garden to meet a man I know only as ‘The  Convenor’. He is an office bearer in one of Edinburgh’s oldest and most exclusive private discutentative associations: the Quinquaginta Club.

On 17 March, councillors on the Development Management Subcommittee granted permission for the police box on Heriot Row to operate as a coffee and food sale point (20/02262/FUL).

So ended a planning issue which has divided parts of the Second New Town for over nine months.

The decision was explained as follows: