David Black  was a founder member of the Old Town Association in the 1970s and 1st chairman of Southside Association  and is the author of the book about the building of The Scottish Parliament - All the First Minister's Men' 

PROPOSED DEVELOPMENT BY MOUNTGRANGE; OBJECTION

Dear Sir

As a preliminary I would formally request that this letter and the enclosed letter to the Council’s chief executive should be circulated to all members of the planning committee for their full consideration.

Prior to commenting on the proposed development itself, I wish to state that each individual member of the planning committee on assuming office also assumes a legal obligation to ensure that the activities and transactions of the committee and the individuals serving on it are fully compliant with the requirements of the law, both national and European, and that the exercise of discriminatory or arbitrary power in pursuit of a pre-ordained objective may be deemed a contravention of binding legal provisions as well as the applicable code of conduct for elected representatives as engrossed by the Standards Commission for Scotland.

I refer to section 7 of the applicable code where it is indicated inter alia that a member of a planning committee (1) is required to come to a decision in respect of a planning decision in an impartial and reasoned manner, (2) may not express a prior public view ahead of the decision being taken, and (3) may not lobby either overtly or covertly for a particular interest group or to the commercial benefit of a particular applicant. In doing what would appear to be all three (Edinburgh Evening News Thusday 11th October) the convener of the City of Edinburgh Council planning committee, Councillor Jim Lowrie (Lib Dem) is clearly in breach of the code of conduct and should demit office forthwith. I would be obliged if you could indicate what steps have been, or will be, taken by your department in accordance with the relevant disciplinary procedure.

As a general principle, I would aver that the criteria by which the suitability, or otherwise, of a planning submission may be judged should not include the sweeping and unproven statement that if the demands of major development companies are not accommodated they are likely to ‘walk away’ from a city such as Edinburgh. I have not seen any persuasive evidence to sustain such an argument. It is outrageous that the convener of the planning committee should be engaging in what would appear to be quasi-intimidatory tactics of this nature in pursuit of the interest of any single commercial interest, or private commercial interests as a whole, and it is clear that there is no objective justification whatever for making such a statement.

The members of a local authority planning committee are elected to office for the primary purpose of representing the interests and safeguarding the rights of those who elect them, and must be aware that they operate under statute within the framework of a public law body which is also an entity of the state. Their function is to assess the quality and suitability of a proposed scheme in terms of visual character, appropriateness of types of use, impact on the surrounding environment, and aesthetic relevance to the prevailing urban context. The Mountgrange proposal fails every test, and deprives the Old Town of perhaps the last remaining significant development site which could be incorporated within an existing matrix, which - unusually for the centre of a British city - remains residential in character.

The opportunity to develop an integrated and sustainable socially mixed ’urban village’, while retaining high quality listed buildings of stone construction, should be the axiomatic guiding principle for this site. A crass commercial development with the bolt-on addition of a handful of ’name’ architects will end up being little more than a re-make of the St James’ Square development of the late 1960s in terms of land use, environmental impact, and aesthetic disbenefit. The City of Edinburgh, admired around the world for its architecture and topography, should be regarded as something more than a lucrative development opportunity for a capital-rich global developer in search of a profit, particularly when that developer expresses an aspiration to demolish listed buildings in the care of the local authority, and even more particularly where there may be points of law to be considered (qv letter to Council chief executive)

The threatened pre-war buildings which city architect E. Macrae designed on the Canongate frontage not only provide housing for local people, but also contribute positively to the general grain of a medieval which contains some of the most important historic structures in the city, such as Canongate Kirk and Tolbooth, Milton House, John Knox’s House, and Huntley House. It may be noted that long before the word ’sustainability’ had currency Macrae had devised a programme for recycling stone, and in this case I understand that the stone used came from the old Bridewell which once occupied the site of St Andrew’s House - that fact alone lends them a certain historic interest. The Canongate school is also a structure of high townscape value, and should certainly be retained. The proposed development will intrude detrimentally on a number of historically important vistas, such as the view from Calton Hill and North Bridge. Given the stance of ICOMOS in the case of inappropriate and intrusive development in other cities, it would appear that there is a very real risk that, should this development go ahead, Edinburgh will be stripped of its world heritage status.

As a founder committee member of Edinburgh Old Town Association and former Chairman of the Southside Association I find it regrettable, to say the least, that we do not appear to have moved on from the planning errors of the 1960s and 70s. This application should be refused without a moment’s hesitation.

Yours sincerely

 David J Black