New Statesman Scotland - Edinburgh's in the prime of its life
"Dear Edinburgh, how I remember you,/your winter cakes and tea, your bright red fire,/your swirling cloaks and clouds," runs Iain Crichton Smith's "Jean Brodie's Children". The Edinburgh memorialised here, and in Muriel Spark's novel, is the Edinburgh of the thirties. Spark's autobiography of her early life, Curriculum Vitae, fills in the details of the even earlier Edinburgh in which she grew up. Reading it, some years ago, I couldn't help but note that the "Dear Edinburgh" I remember in the fifties had changed little from hers, for mine was still the Edinburgh that could spawn not only Jean Brodie, but also Jekyll and Hyde. The city then lived closer to the sea: the air was salty, malty, prone to mists and haars. It was sedate in the leafy New Town, whose streets looked almost too broad for the sparse traffic of cars, each of which I could name. There was room enough, too, for the buses and for the trams that trundled down and through the city's low-lying pockets of unease, down the Cowgate, the Grassmarket, past black buildings and closes that smelled of piss. The suburbs still felt unfinished, pocked with waste ground. Standing at a bus stop, it was possible to speculate on each person's likely destination.
In my adult reflection, I think of that city in a perpetual autumn, pleased to be done with the summer tourists and festival-goers. For, at the same time as I became aware of the festival, I became aware of the citizens' antipathy towards it, disrupting as it did Edinburgh's stately rhythms. It seemed a suspect affair, colonising otherwise respectable church halls. There was always a collective sigh of relief when it was all over and the city could be returned to itself, to the smoky chill of autumn.
It must have been a deep-seated desire for change, change at all costs from the drabness of postwar life, desire to put faith in the future rather than to bear the weight of the past, that gave birth to a vision of Edinburgh that I only ever heard condemned as sheer architectural vandalism. Princes Street bore the brunt. In the sixties, the ornate stone facades came tumbling down to be replaced by sleek planes, concrete and glass. An unfinished walkway was envisaged; its broken path can still be followed. Princes Street - for which my mother said one always had to wear gloves - was filled with huge department stores, drawing in people who had previously been excluded. "Oh, the types you get in Princes Street these days!" my mother would exclaim. And, as Princes Street declined, in aesthetic value if not in popularity, so George Street grew grander, retaining the values of decorum and proportion of which Princes Street had been robbed.
The building of the St James's Centre in Edinburgh's East End was, if not the last straw, some kind of cathartic end-point to the carnage. Completely insensitive to its surroundings, cavalier in its attitude to the city's glorious skyline, it reminds me of a first description someone gave of the Lincoln Centre in New York as resembling "something Mussolini ordered over the phone". How could this, this abomination, get past the planners? Apart from its functional adequacy, it is still hard to see how: unless, as I remarked earlier, there was a pent-up energy that somehow had to be released. It was the same energy that visited the small towns of Scotland, like Dumfries, where I now live, a decade or so later. Here, as elsewhere, the swishing brush of capital showed itself to be equally insensitive. The old proportions were swept away in a rash of shopping-centres, garish chain hoardings and, in some kind of misguided compensatory nostalgia, cobbles and heavy Victorian street fittings.
It has taken more than 30 years for an architect to show the confidence again of those barnstorming transformers of old Edinburgh. However, the new Museum of Scotland in Chambers Street shows an acute awareness of its surroundings and history. It manages to sit comfortably in its surroundings, while reminding the viewer not of a multi-storey carpark, but of an impregnable keep. It is an exhilarating sight - as indeed the new Scottish Parliament promises to be. Recently a number of other building projects for the new capital were unveiled - a futuristic drawing of a huge glass pyramid and, below Princes Street, an underground mall. As befits a capital city, Edinburgh will once more be a city with a vision; an optimism regarding its future. After all, Edinburgh is now a city in its prime, whose season should be springtime; a city that no longer withdraws into its "swirling cloaks" once its festival is over.
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