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Susan Rae of the Scottish Greens was the first Ward 12 by-election candidate to confirm attendance at the Spurtle hustings later this month.
We bumped into her canvassing outside the Croall Place police box on Saturday, where she told us that overflowing bins and the lack of affordable housing were the main issues local people had raised with her.
In the midst of all the Festival fun and hullabaloo … a real human drama.
The kind of nightmare you always think will never happen to you, but sometimes does.
In the last week, a student has lost a USB stick like the one pictured here, probably between King George V Park and George Square or between the Meadows and King’s Buildings.
It contains invaluable PhD work and is the only copy.
There’s an unspecified monetary reward, but the owner is essentially depending on people’s sharp eyes and better natures.
Come on, Edinburgh. Please help!
JENNY MASON’S ‘BLOOM’
I’ve been hoping to see more of Mason’s work since I first encountered it in a mixed show at The Sutton Gallery in March (reviewed here). I was captivated by it then, and the paintings on display this month in the same venue’s Festival Exhibition do not disappoint.
Costa Coffee will take over running the café pavilion in St Andrew Square ‘Garden’, a reader pointed out to us today.
The company was granted a Building Warrant on 11 August to refit the premises according to its own style and requirements (Ref. 15/02546/ALT).
We don’t know the date of the works, but assume they will follow the Festival.
Gayfield Creative Spaces and Whitespace in Gayfield Square are proving a real draw this Festival, showcasing a variety of innovative and thought-provoking events in dizzyingly quick succession.
This disorganised reviewer just managed to catch the last hour of In Our Element, a group exhibition of landscapes painted en plein air.
Among those works which particularly caught the eye was Edinburgh-based Josie McConnell’s semi-abstract ‘Beach 2’, part of her ungoing project to capture ‘the underlying structures, rhythms and functions of the land’.
EXCLUSIVE
Antony Gormley’s Six Times will be fully restored to the Water of Leith next year, possibly as soon as May.
The four component statues that were removed from the river in early 2012 and put into storage in Granton will return to their original positions.
An anonymous private patron of the National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) will meet the costs of re-engineering, re-installation, and of any ‘failures’ for the first three years afterwards.
A total of ten candidates had registered to stand in the Leith Walk (Ward 12) Council by-election by yesterday's deadline.
They are, in alphabetical order:
DONALDSON, Marion – Scottish Labour Party
HUSSAIN, Mo – Scottish Liberal Democrats
LAIRD, Tom – Scottish Libertarian Party
MELVILLE, Alan Gordon - UK Independence Party (UKIP)
MURDIE, Gordon – Scottish Conservative and Unionist
RAE, Susan Jane – Scottish Green Party
REID, Natalie – Scottish Socialist Party
RITCHIE, John Lewis – Scottish National Party (SNP)
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.