City Council

Flagship waterfront or future ghetto?

By The Basa ⋅ March 30, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

EdinburghSucks.com were on the press list for the recent symposium on the Waterfront which was being held down in Granton the other week.  Unfortunately, we were only allowed to attend the speeches in the morning but the Council press office wouldn’t allow us to attend the afternoon workshops where all the news would have been made.  We were not interested in listening to speeches so we declined to attend and now it seems we were right and indeed the community are being well and truly ripped off from what their Councillors, especially Elizabeth Maginnis had been promised.

For quite a while now http://www.piltonsucks.com/ have been covering some of the let downs that the community have had including multiple broken promises given by Councillor Maginnis at public meetings that local people would make up 9% of the workforce in the project.  It is accepted now that local people make up less than 1% and there is no hope of any more.  Maginnis is the Chairperson of the Waterfront Edinburgh.

The project today came in for stinging criticism from buildings expert and the director of the School of the Build Environment at Napier University, Peter Wilson:

“I get depressed by the quality of so much of what has been built,” sighs the director of Napier University’s School of the Built Environment with a shake of his head. “Some looks as if it’s been made out of chewing gum and string. There are some good buildings around, but there are also many that are diabolically poor.”

This is not quite what we had been led to expect from the regeneration of a massive industrial landscape - among the largest projects of its kind in Britain, optimistically dubbed the Forth Riviera and claimed to be the beginnings of a waterfront to rival the best in the world.

Wilson sighs again. “The waterfront doesn’t have coherent thinking, it doesn’t have quality of design,” he says. “The developers talk a big show but they don’t understand what they are doing here. This area is being driven by property speculation, there just doesn’t seem to have been a coherent analysis of what is the biggest remaining site in Edinburgh.

“The problem is,” he continues, “ninety per cent of people in Edinburgh don’t really know what is happening down there. They hear all this talk about world-class developments but you find it’s all smoke and mirrors. What we have here so far is not world-class.”

And he is not alone.  Architecture and Design Scotland (ADS), the public body set up as a national champion for good architecture, design and planning, has been scathing in its criticism of the latest of three masterplans presented by Waterfront Edinburgh Ltd.  They said the plans were more likely to result in “dark, windswept spaces for much of the year”.

And the daring proposal to create a new island jutting into the Forth, housing a top-class hotel and homes modelled on Dubai’s famous Palm Island was slapped down for buildings which appeared “simplistic in the extreme”, being inaccessible by the general public and “profoundly unconvincing”.

 After hearing this comment, what seems like a group of incapable idiots down at Waterfront Edinburgh came up with:

The comments prompted a response from Waterfront Edinburgh that the island could be made in the shape of a thistle to make it more accessible - a suggestion that leaves Wilson shaking his head in despair, while another leading city architect privately describes it as “absolutely shocking”.

Peter goes on: “There’s lots of rhetoric comparison with Copenhagen and Barcelona, but no-one from abroad is making those comparisons - it’s only Waterfront Edinburgh who are saying that. What is happening to the waterfront is light years from Copenhagen, Hamburg and Barcelona.”

 Even the Cockburn Association have scathing criticism for it:

Comparing the stretch of Forth from Leith to Granton with Barcelona’s acclaimed waterfront developments is “inappropriate, not least on climate grounds”, he adds. The “thistle island” idea, meanwhile, is “premature, ill-conceived and most probably uneconomical”.

McDonald continues: “There is currently an under-provision in the transport network for these areas and it’s fair to say there is public distrust in the delivery of aspirational statements. The opportunity was missed early on to set high standards for future developments and much of the subsequent developments have been piecemeal with a conveyor belt of new masterplans produced.”

Meanwhile, the Chairperson is a very busy person.  She manages to hold the position of Councillor, is also employed as Manager of the Pilton Elderly Project and of course she and her husband (who works full time for the Health Board) have their own consultancy Grierson Associates Limited (wrongly entered in her Register of Interests as Grierson Association) which carries out ‘other business activities’ and she receives occasional expenses and fees from this work.  We hope this consultancy is not a funnel any bribes as has been suggested on other websites.   In fact we would like Councillor Maginnis to let us know what ‘other business activities’ you have time for? 

Elizabeth Maginnis puts her obvious experience of these sort of projects against the abovementioned experts - she is confident that the developments are up to scratch insisting “We are working very hard to try to ensure that the architecture and quality of design is of the highest standard.” although planning chief and Labour colleague at the Council, Trevor Davies says “I’m not satisfied”

Interestingly, Waterfront Edinburgh’s accounts up to March last year revealed a turnover of £17.5 million and a salary bill for its ten administration and operations staff and four security staff of nearly £604,000. Despite its public accountability, its communications manager, Jane Dennison, was unwilling to respond to criticisms of the project.

Napier’s Peter Wilson and others are warning promises of a waterfront to rival the best in the world may well instead deliver the ghetto of the future.

More Info: Is Edinburgh’s flagship waterfront all at sea?

Random Posts you may have missed

• July 31, 2005 -- Lothian Buses Chief ghostwriting?
• May 2, 2005 -- City Schools in Retirement Timebomb
• February 18, 2006 -- Anderson leaving the council
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• January 10, 2008 -- Ewan Aitken - not seeing correctly.
• September 25, 2007 -- Wee Wendy the apologist

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