Breaking news

At long last, provisional Council plans for where to site on-street waste containers in the New Town and West End are about to be issued. Spurtle has accessed them ahead of schedule.

Streets affected in Spurtleshire are: Albany Street, Baxter's Place, Bellevue Crescent, Blenheim Place, Cornwallis Place, Dublin Street, Dublin Street Lane North, Dundonald Street, Gayfield Square and Street, Howe Street, Jamaica Street, Nelson Street, Royal Crescent, St Vincent Street, Scotland Street, Summer Bank, Union Place and York Lane.

Broughton hammer-throwing sensation and Team Scotland member Kimberley Reed will be busy at today's Lead 2014 conference at Edinburgh University, where she is now an undergraduate.

She will take part in the opening ceremony, mingle with pupils attending from 17 schools (some as far afield as Forfar and Dumfries), and get involved in group activities throughout the event. 

Students from Drummond Community High School have come in as runners-up at the prestigious National Youth Worker of the Year Awards.

The six senior pupils have been involved in the school's S6 Intergenerational Community Project, which fundraises for, manages and delivers activities for residents at the Porthaven Older Persons' Care Home in Leith.

This rather appealing pigeon (right) and its mate have cropped up on one of the disintegrating entrances to the apparently disintegrating 93 McDonald Road (bottom of the page).

With typical brusqueness, the former electricity generating station at No. 93 is described in Gifford et al.'s The Buildings of Scotland: Edinburgh (1984) as:

... a huge shed with showy classical gable ... .

It was designed in 1899 by the City Engineer John Cooper.

The presidential election in Kenya earlier this month brought victory for Deputy Prime Minister Uhuru Kenyatta. Although the violence associated with the election of 2007 was not repeated, the process has still been far from perfect.

Felix Kimathi (pictured far right) is known to many in Broughton as  a former Kenyan exchange visitor to Drummond Community High School, a correspondent with staff and students there, and an occasional writer for the Spurtle. 

Planning consent has been refused for the insertion of two refurbished police boxes for use as coffee kiosks on North Castle Street and Hanover Street (Refs 13/00141/FUL, 13/00142/FUL; see

New doubts regarding fairness, openness and administrative competence have surfaced in relation to granting wider access to Drummond Place Garden (Issue 215; Breaking news, 28.2.13, 11.3.13).

A seemingly mundane planning proposal for land between Logie Green Road and Beaverbank Place is not so mundane after all.

In the fine print, it becomes clear that an important strand of the consented development for the site has now been quietly dropped, and more traffic may soon be on its way to this busy part of Broughton. All this, apparently, with City of Edinburgh Council's agreement.

For my final Spurtle recipe, I’m going back to one of my favourite Broughton Street retailers: Coco Chocolate. I have been in love with their 72% dark chocolate for a few years now, as it works perfectly in cakes and for an after dinner nibble! For this recipe, it adds an extra chocolatey hit in the form of a chocolate drizzle over the top of the cake. 

Since Spurtle published Bill Giles’s response to our piece in Issue 215 (Breaking news, 28.2.13), we have  been contacted separately by two past and present residents (of Drummond Place and an adjacent street) who disagree with how things stand regarding access to the Garden. 

Unwilling to sour relations between current and former neighbours, they have requested anonymity.