An item of "Breaking News". Will appear on the Breaking News page and the front page.
WHEN IT'S A BIGGER HOLE
An application to partially knock down a Category A-listed wall and create a single raised car parking space in the back garden behind 20A Drummond Place has been refused (Ref. 15/02907/FUL and LBC).
The garden in question is the one pictured below, beyond the garden used by the Cumberland bar. A similar set of steps currently leads up from it to street level.
If you have time to take in only one exhibition this summer, Audrey Grant’s at the Union Gallery is a strong contender for your attention.
Spurtle has covered Grant’s work several times before (see 4.3.13) , on each occasion admiring her humane but unflinching studies of the human form. She dwells upon its external and internal flaws, its dislocations and imbalances, finding in these imperfections a kind of vulnerable beauty, even nobility.
As reported in Issue 244, the former call centre at 52-52A Annandale Street is to be replaced by housing.
Demolition has already begun, and the current absence of wall at one end affords the nosey passer-by an intriguing glimpse into Standard Life management culture.
Few things are as interesting as other people’s little corners.
Spurtle makes a point of noseying such nooks, and on various errands today enjoyed three particularly interesting basements.
We accept that this isn’t world-shaking news, and is more likely to get us arrested than win us a Pullitzer prize, but we don’t care.
Top-right and below is an absolutely enormous geranium on Drummond Place. We estimate it to be about 10ft tall and in rude good health.
Locals have a chance to influence the future of George Street next week at the first of two summer drop-in meetings open to the public.
From 2–7pm on Thursday 13 August, at the Roxburghe Hotel, the newly appointed design team of Ironside Farrar will be available to discuss what George Street needs to achieve its potential. In Council-speak, to:
Today was the last day of local artist John Patrick Bissett’s weeklong exhibition at Whitespace: Stand – Emblems of Imagination.
Bissett is interested here in flags, and the symbolic mechanism by which they transmit meaning.
All the paintings in this show have taken flags as their starting points, and then invited the viewer to embark on the story of a passage marked by ‘the application of paint, its layers, colours, textures, forms, patterns, viscosity, edges, linear qualities and brush marks’.
PUBLIC ASKED FOR STRATEGIC PRIORITIES
Do you plan on living in Edinburgh or south-east Scotland between 2017 and 2037?
If the answer is yes, then here’s something you might want to have a look at.
SESplan is the Strategic Development Planning Authority for the Councils of East, Mid- & West Lothian, Edinburgh, Fife, and the Scottish Borders. They want your help to set priorities over the next 20 or so years.
Many thanks to Michael MacFarlane, who spotted a perfectly sensible piece of advice recently and presumably thought we could do with it.
It appeared outside the Queen's Arms on Frederick Street at the weekend.
For reasons we shall not go into, Mr MacFarlane entertains serious doubts as to its provenance, and warns us to be on our journalistic guard at all times when accessing anything from the Internet about anything.
More reliably sourced is this Newton quotation which appears in the Anecdotes of Joseph Spence:
Batleys Limited cash and carry are seeking a review of City of Edinburgh Council’s refusal to grant them a temporary extension of trading hours.
As mostly recently reported online here, the McDonald Place wholesaler had originally sought to trade on Sundays during the Festival from 2 August to 8 September (Ref. 15/02378/FUL). But CEC said local residents should continue to enjoy one day a week’s relief from ‘unacceptable noise and disturbance’.
GAYFIELD SQUARE
From East London Street, a setted prelude sweeps south through the ghost of the Estate. I meander up past whitewashed creation. Opposite, beyond finialled railings and letterbox fanlights, attic windows extrude like pop-up flashes.
Thrawn at the apex by black cat glare: a sunny sinecure interrupted. A creature of the New Town steppes, viridescent eyes containing complex knowledge of adjacent nature.