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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.
LAWRENCE MEETS LOCALS IN LIVELY DISCUSSION
City of Edinburgh Council’s Executive Director of Place Paul Lawrence addressed the New Town & Broughton Community Council yesterday evening, and took questions from members of the public about the controversial Picardy Place proposal (PPP).
He initially covered much of the same ground covered during the Transport & Environment Committee on 5 October.
On the face of it, the sign attached to a Princes Street pedestrian crossing seems to make rather a bold claim: ‘press the button to access a glimpse of planetary consciousness’.
I tried it, and pressing the button resulted only in a yellow ‘Wait’ sign lighting up, and a short pause before the usual little green man and an urgent peeping.
It all seems a far cry from James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis of an evolving, self-regulating integration of Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and pedosphere.
VICTORY WITH A HOP, SKIP AND A THUMP
Players from Drummond Tennis Club have once again beaten all comers to retain their title as team champions in the World Stone Skimming Championships, writes Marcus Mackenzie.
ONLY LIMITED ROOM FOR MANOEUVRE
Fundamental redesign of the proposed Picardy Place gyratory is not possible if it entails spending more money or time on the project.
So said Paul Lawrence, City of Edinburgh Council’s Executive Director of Place, in answering questions at today’s Transport & Environment Committee.