Skip to main content

Layered defence of Street decoration

 

Stretch

Dear Spurtle,

Two observations for your anonymous 'purveyor of sunbeams' before they next contact Planning Enforcement (Issue 367, p.3).

First: the premises. The Street is a gay bar, and the corner it occupies has housed many establishments over the decades, none of them trading behind anything resembling the frontage the architect, Robert Burn, planned for this terrace in 1807. 
 
The shopfronts on Picardy Place were modernised long ago, and the surface now carrying the Dotmaster's stencil is itself layers deep in paint: decades of repainting over repainting. Whatever your complainant believes they are defending, it is not Georgian joinery but someone else's gloss work, most of it considerably less interesting than what has just been added. 
 
A stencil on that palimpsest is not vandalism on Georgian Edinburgh; it is the newest coat in a very long series.
 

Second: the claim that the work 'says nothing specific about here'. I've watched that facade change many times in almost six decades, and this is my favourite version yet. It says a great deal about here: that this is a street with a thriving queer venue at its heart, where wit is welcome and where 'here' resolves, prism-like, into more colours than your complainant appears able to see. 

I'd gently suggest the deficiency lies in the looking, not the art.

I note the same issue cheerfully weighs K-Pop's effect on bat echolocation, so I trust the 'crass crap' verdict was reported rather than shared. Perhaps the Spurtle might ask your complainant exactly which of the original 1807 shopfronts they believe they are defending.

Sally Findlay