Breaking news

 DECISION TOMORROW 

A planning application for the erection of a ‘Festival Village’ above Waverley Mall will go before the Development Management Subcommittee tomorrow.

 CHIPS WITH EVERYTHING 

Current City of Edinburgh Council policy is to add colour to all new bus and cycle lanes by embedding red stone chippings into normal grey tarmac, writes Tim Smith.

Provided this is done correctly, the advantage for the Council is minimal maintenance costs.

Applied red coatings (as used on the recently installed bike crossings on the tram route, for example) are much more visually striking, but are liable to wear away, often unevenly, needing costly replacement.

If something lang-leggit goes bump in the night tonight, don’t worry. 

Chances are it’s either an absolutely enormous, parasitic crane-fly skittering about blindly in the dark, or the latest copy of the Spurtle arriving through a letterbox near you. 

Issue 268 is bursting at the seams with news about people and places in your vicinity. We start with things which are: pleasingly shorter; able to be much improved; or moving forward with a hop, skip, and a jump.

 X-RAY FINDS A QUEEN 

A research project by the National Galleries of Scotland and the Courtauld Institute of Art has revealed a hitherto unknown and unfinished portrait of Mary, Queen of Scots.

The image lies beneath one, dating from 1589, by Adrian Vanson, of  the Lord Chancellor of Scotland Sir John Maitland, 1st Lord Maitland of Thirlestane.

 DRAFT 2 – MORE DETAIL

Transport & Environment Committee Convenor Lesley Macinnes has announced that the Council will prolong consultation about redesigning Picardy Place until January 2018.

The extension from an already extended December deadline is to improve debate about how the area may be used and improved.

Arachnophobes and the faint-hearted, look away now. 

Broughton suddenly got scarier over the weekend with the annual arrival of Christina ‘Granny’ Thomson’s Halloween spook show. 

A witch with bad teeth is central to the Bellevue Place design. She has clearly never heard about the deterrent properties of rowan trees. 

She has for company a number of ghosts, dismembered heads and this limp-necked and limp-wristed skeleton who seems to have lost the will to live.

 STRANGE ENCOUNTER OF THE HARE KIND 

Spurtle met this unusual character propped up against the wall of Simpson & Marwick on Broughton Street last night. 

Regrettably, he’d had a few. 

To our enquiry about his well-being, the hare replied: ‘Aye, Ah’m sure ye kent, there wur times whin Ah chatted mair than Ah cuid chow’. 

Spurtle nodded neutrally, wracking our brains to work out what he meant and whether we’d ever met him before.

As contractors celebrate the end of their first year on-site at the St James Centre, with the project so far on schedule, doubts about the future of Leith Street are surfacing elsewhere. 

The proposals causing concern involve various changes in use from carriageway to footway and footway to cycleway. 

To join the debate about Picardy Place, writes David Jamieson of ZONE Architects, we offer the attached solution.

It's a proposal which, unlike the Council’s traffic-centric plans, is based on enhancing the sense of place and adding to the cultural quarter generated by the Playhouse,  Omni Cinema and St Mary’s Cathedral. 

The space for a potential building, no longer marooned in the middle of a roundabout, could be a worthy site for a new 1000-seat concert hall, for example.

 ‘FASCINATING ASSEMBLY’ REVIEWED 

While occasionally displaying works of art from further afield (such as this unusual bronze by Eutrope Bouret, see Issue 267), Glenn Ross’s Colours Gallery on Dundas Street has championed nineteenth and twentieth-century Scottish painting for many years.

As well as highlighting the great Colourists – and such as Eardley, Redpath, Gillies, Maxwell et al. – the gallery has profiled lesser-known and neglected artists whose stars have long deserved to shine again.