Breaking news

Pride Edinburgh returns to the streets of the capital tomorrow for the 21st time. 

With an inclusive message that ‘Love is love’, the event is open to all regardless of gender, sexuality, colour, creed or class ‘with total acceptance and a warm welcome to all’.

It starts with speeches outside the City Chambers at 1.15pm, and moves off at 1.45pm before arriving at Greenside Row via Holyrood, Abbeyhill and London Road.

For full details, see the Pride Guide attached at the foot of this page.

In? Out? Shaken all about? Exhausted? 

Why not drag yourself from the house, pick up the latest issue of the Spurtle, and then drag yourself home again to read it? 

Issue 253 is 100 per cent free of EU Referendum coverage, apart from that section at the foot of page 3 which is all about the EU Referendum.

Elsewhere you’ll find glimmers of good news about St Andrew Square, mixed views on George Street, and short shrift from Edinburgh World Heritage on the soon-to-be-revealed plans for Royal Bank of Scotland’s site on Dundas Street and surrounds.

City of Edinburgh Council’s ‘Planning and Building Standards Portal’ has been unavailable since Friday, and there’s currently no firm indication of when it will be fixed. 

A CEC spokesperson told Spurtle today that solving the unspecified technical problem had been given the highest profile. 

CGI – the Council’s ICT providers – are working 24 hours a day on the issue, and ‘hope’ to have the portal up and running again by tomorrow. 

Only a few months have passed since the new pavement in front of Ziggurat’s student accommodation in Shrubhill Place was opened to pedestrians, writes Maria Hart.

But already, dozens of the slabs in that section are badly broken. [Spurtle today counted 176.]

Row upon row of them are cracked, some horizontally and others vertically.

Even one of the bike racks has come loose after the slab to which it is attached broke off completely [see photo above].

Two weeks ago we launched the third of our Edinburgh safaris by inviting readers to search for dogs.  

CITY LANDMARK RETURNS IN MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT 

After an absence of four years, Forsyth’s Finial returned to the Edinburgh skyline in the small hours of this morning.

The operation involved around 30 personnel, at least six HGVs, the shutting-down of tram power cables, and the closure of Princes Street from the Apple Store to Waverley Bridge between 11.30pm and up to 4.30am.

Gilbert Bayes’s 1907 decorative sculpture began the evening in two parts on the back of a long loader.

Ahead of Edinburgh’s municipal elections in 1919, the Scotsman reported on a Broughton ward hustings attended by a large audience in the Free Gardeners’ Institute at 14 Picardy Place on 22 October.

The principal themes discussed back then are startlingly familiar today.

Escalating costs

One of the things we like about living in this part of Edinburgh is that you don’t have to conform. 

Doing your own thing is positively encouraged. 

And as evidence of this, we cite (and applaud) the way the beany people at Artisan Roast regularly encourage us to wake up and smell the coffee, to mix our metaphors, and swim against the tide of history … 

A leading construction and procurement industry professional has been appointed to chair the independent inquiry into the Edinburgh PP1 school buildings fiasco. 

The architect John Cole brings 30 years’ experience to the role, with particular expertise in improving the quality of new, public-sector buildings’ design, procurement and construction.

City of Edinburgh Council is consulting about plans to tender for additional major events in public parks from 2017 to 2020.

It seems to us that any comments you may have are more likely to ‘shape’ events than to stop them from happening in the first place, but we may be wrong.

Venues, events, times