Seventy years ago, Sir John Falconer, then Lord Provost of Edinburgh, announced the first international festival with some stirring words. His ambition was that the celebrations should “provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit,” and he added: “History will dictate if the year 1947 has been a focal point in the story of our city.”
He was right on the history, and doubly right in the eloquence which he brought to it. Everyone who contributed to its creation — Rudolf Bing, Harry Harvey Wood, Falconer, the Countess of Rosebery, Sir John Christie of Glyndebourne — thought that the beauty of the city was critical to its success. It reminded Bing of Salzburg; Christie said it was the epitome of a European city; and one enthusiastic Hungarian woman described “the quiet Georgian squares with their gay window boxes, the lazy smoke haze, the incredible theatrical backdrop of the Castle — ‘It’s a mixture of Rome and Manchester, seasoned with a drop of Paris and a dash of Budapest.’ ”
You don’t hear much of that kind of talk these days. Aesthetics have been dropped in favour of economic improvement. The present Lord Provost, Frank Ross, summed up his view in tones a million miles from Falconer’s: “Drawing on my time as the city’s economy leader, I hope to ensure Edinburgh remains a thriving and successful capital city which celebrates its international ties. I look forward to showcasing Edinburgh as the unique destination it is.”
I would not want to invest Mr Ross’s words with a depth that he may never have intended, but that one bleak statement stands as the antithesis of the “human spirit” that Falconer invoked. To describe himself as an “economy leader” rather than the figurehead of a great European city says much about the council’s ambitions. Edinburgh has no chance of remaining either thriving or successful if it regards economic expansion as the only goal. As to “showcasing” a “unique destination”, almost every one of the recent developments in the city, endorsed by the council, has worked to undermine its uniqueness, let alone showcase it to the world.
Who among the thousands of visitors currently thronging the streets of the city will proclaim: “That New Waverley hotel site speaks to my inner soul,” or “I thrill to the prospect of New Waverley;” the Standard Life building in St Andrew Square? it “expresses the European ideal down to the last glass panel;” and as for the proposed new hotel in the St James centre: “why, Robert Adam would have given his eye teeth to design it.”
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Who is there to defend the character of the city, when everywhere commerce rules? No one surely objects to the building of a hotel, but to create one so crassly at odds with its surroundings is an offence. As the writer Alexander McCall Smith, strolling through the city last week with The Times, expressed it: “To [erect] something that competes with the beauty, that destroys it, particularly something so clearly wrong in terms of its surroundings, is simply extraordinary . . . it is an act of artistic destruction.”
It is a strange thing that in this city of architectural style and grace there is no architect’s department to rule on what is acceptable and what is not. Instead the developers dictate, and the council follows, with only the voice of appalled dissenters occasionally calling a halt. The crass Royal High School hotel development was stopped by only one vote, though it is not yet dead. Sadly, the proposed hotel project behind the Central Library, which would cut out all daylight from a building funded by Andrew Carnegie for the benefit of the people of Edinburgh, seems likely to go ahead.
“Aesthetics have been dropped in favour of economic improvement
In no other great European capital could developers dictate the shape of the city. Can you imagine Florence allowing a concrete and glass office building to interfere with the vista of Brunelleschi’s cathedral? In Berlin, Dresden, Potsdam, and other German cities, the emphasis these days is entirely on sympathetic reconstruction. That does not rule out modern design — far from it — but, critically, it is modern design that conforms to the city’s style, rather than brusquely ignoring it.
The defence, such as it is, argues that unless Edinburgh is open for development, it will cease to be a functioning city; alternatively, unless there is hotel accommodation for tourists, they will go elsewhere; or else: preserving old buildings is a barrier to economic viability.
That ignores, however, the essential quality that draws the developers in the first place. As Fergus Linehan, the festival director, put it, somewhat indelicately, last week: “If you took everything we did, and did it in Watford, with all due respect to Watford, it is not going to have the same effect.”
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The time has come for the council to understand that if it continues to sanction developments that ignore the architectural ethos of the city, it will erode the very quality that underpins its success. If the festival and its fringe are to maintain their heady growth, if the tourists are to keep coming, and the investment that follows them to continue, then the Edinburgh that draws them in must be protected.
The festival of 1947 was born in the name of a European ideal. That ideal must be defended, lest the spirit that created it disappears behind concrete and glass.
@magnuslinklater