Edinburgh is going through one of its cyclical Princes Street “conversations” - fruitless, in my time, unless - in a negative way - you count the fear of development and flight from the Street caused by the creation of the Big Mall at St James. Or, positively, include the tram, and the associated new ways we value travel and mobility within the City, and the development market’s response to the opportunity of more Hotels and pavement cafes.
We’ve joined the fray, including by exhuming our 2004/5 Princes Street Framework proposal, originally made as an act of resistance, supporting the Cockburn Association in fighting the mad EDI plan - the Council's arms-length, neo-liberal development agency - to build a shopping centre under Princes Street and against the basements of all its buildings, and turn Princes Street Gardens into its “food court”. As part of that we showed how Princes Street itself could - and should - be rejuvenated, above ground, to enable the mall-hotel-residential mixed use the city needed. Build Buildings before digging up the Park!
We achieved behind-the-scenes sign-offs from Historic Scotland for the demolition of several poor B-listings, so allowing, alongside the demolition of bad 60s buildings, and enhancement of good Victorian ones, larger redevelopment sites to be formed with multi-use malls taken through the blocks to George Street, and chi-chi hotels and flats on top. All of this was combined with an investment strategy based on showing the 7 or so institutional owners along the Street how much money they would make by cooperating with their neighbours. We worked this strategy through with the surveyor who enticed Harvey Nichols to the city.
We passed it to the City for them to advance, but they reversed the strategy, instead advertising the whole Street as a “Sovereign Wealth Fund Investment Opportunity”: thus telling the building owners that the money was to be made by Petrostates instead of them and so causing them to shut up shop. Given such market misunderstanding we acknowledge how the St James seemed simpler.
But our proposals for Princes Street are still relevant, and our advice and strategy remains:
1. Underground shops are rubbish - see the Waverley Market - and the big view of the Castle and Old Town is our huge added value, the USP. So concentrate, instead, on reinforcing that big, long mile, with the Georgian rigidity in plan, and then the jumble of styles that inhabit it, and the dramatic, southerly, Old Towny outlook it faces, into a big, braw, diverse and porous retail and mixed-use range - as our illustrations;
2. Respect and enhance the Gardens: make the way down into them easier at the perpendicular, Castle-Fredrick-Hanover etc crossings, with garden-facing cafes and the like - remembering not too many underground shops, so only wee clusters round the n-s street accesses;
3. Remove some railings, around the Scott Monument, and make the Big Space for the City, flowing across the Street and down into the Green.
