Unsuccessful development

In 1949 the Canongate was faced with similar threats when Abercrombie’s ‘A Civic Survey and Plan for Edinburgh’ was published. This plan proposed wide scale demolition in the city including a significant portion of the Old Town and all of the First New Town. Although this plan was later abandoned we have been left with a reminder of what could have been, with 2 infamous ‘great projects’ - the St James Centre and Appleton Tower in George Square. Many proposals of that time, including widening of the Royal Mile, would have destroyed the medieval, pedestrian nature of the Canongate, but thankfully these were later abandoned.

Successful development

Throughout history, committed, creative, forward thinking architects and planners have left their mark in the Old Town. The slum clearances promoted in the 1700’s and 1800’s through the City Improvement Acts, whilst necessary to improve public health at the time, became outdated with the emergence and use of more appropriate housing and planning legislation in the 1900’s. The Old Town has more recently been protected from politically fashionable and unnecessary street widening and mass demolition schemes. Instead, architects and planners have followed the theories and principles of Patrick Geddes with the "conservative surgery" approach of City Architect E.J. McRae in the interwar era. The focus was to acquire slum tenements, to improve and restore them where possible, or replace them with new publicly owned tenement flats which retained the original street pattern and residential scale. Public buildings which were no longer required were adapted to alternative uses but kept in public ownership. This approach was continued by architects Robert Hurd and Ian Begg in the 1950’s who focused on the careful conservation and restoration of this urban village to ensure a range of residential, commercial and community uses continued to be represented in the Canongate. The huge increase in rates and rents in the city centre recently alongside the lack of investment in community services has driven out many local and low income residents and smaller independent businesses. It seems a terrible shame that we now have to defend some of the flats which were built as part of McRae’s sensitive redevelopment of the Canongate, from a massive scale redevelopment scheme which draws its design inspiration from the City Improvement Acts, and has little regard to the history, culture and aspirations of the community it claims to be regenerating. Robert Hurd is now buried in Canongate Kirk (where he also undertook building conservation work). Perhaps a fitting memorial him, McRae and Geddes would be to regenerate the Canongate by continuing the Scottish Modernism approach which successfully achieved “a vernacular architectural style whilst creating a vibrant community by re-introducing a residential population from all social classes”. This cannot be achieved by the sale of valuable community assets and demolition of sound, reusable, historical buildings.