ALAN TAYLOR’S BOURGEOIS EDINBURGH

Submitted by Editor on Fri, 06/12/2024 - 11:02

Charlie Ellis recounts the launch of a new social appraisal of Scotland’s capital city

Most books on Edinburgh emphasise its historic and architectural qualities, especially the eccentric eruption of building which constitutes its Old Town. There are not many books which look at Edinburgh in a more socially analytical way. David McCrone’s Who Runs Edinburgh? (EUP 2022) is an excellent exception.

Another, Edinburgh: A Living Guide, published in 1976 by EUSPB (Edinburgh University Student Publications Board), examined Edinburgh as a city people lived and worked in, not just visited or admired.

Its Introduction pointed to the deep contrast between the ‘neatly packaged history’ and the realities. These included the ‘catastrophic concrete outbacks’ – the ‘schemes’. The displacement of working-class communities from the city centre had further enhanced Edinburgh’s reputation as a bourgeois city.

Edinburgh 900

These themes were central to journalist Alan Taylor’s recent public appearance at the Central Library. This Book Week Scotland 2024 event focused on Taylor’s new edited volume Edinburgh: The Autobiography. Taylor also talked about the book in a recent edition of the Scots Whay Hae! podcast.

Taylor’s anthology of essays, observations, poems and articles takes us through the pivotal periods in the city’s history and explores some of the key figures and institutions that have shaped Edinburgh.

The event was due to feature Alistair Moffat (author of Edinburgh: A New History) as well, but he was unable to attend. Instead, the event was a lively and enjoyable discussion between two of Scotland’s best-loved authors and journalists: Alan Taylor and Rosemary Goring.

The conversation had the feel of the best podcasts, with gentle probing and interesting tangents and asides. As a married couple, Goring and Taylor added to the relaxed atmosphere of the event. It helped them capture the personality and character of the city better perhaps than a formal lecture.

The conversation had a strongly biographical aspect. Though born and bred in Musselburgh, Taylor has spent much of his life working in Edinburgh, particularly during his years at Scotland on Sunday and then the Scotsman – as deputy and then managing editor. The venue was particularly appropriate as Taylor had begun his working life as a librarian, first at McDonald Road Library and then in the Reference Department of the Central Library.

He had also spent many hours across the road in the National Library, working on his acclaimed book about Muriel Spark, Appointment in Arezzo. Spark’s large archive, a product of her self-confessed hoarding tendencies, is at the NLS, an institution which Taylor believes is ‘one of the truly great resources of this country’.

Taylor talked amusingly of the way that public libraries attract a wide variety of characters, including ‘lunatics off the street’. In his own experience, these included one man who had somehow brought his kitchen sink into the Central Library one day. Taylor’s time in the library had been an initial inspiration for his writing, and then for a while he combined his journalism with his library work, often disappearing into the stacks to fulfil an editor’s urgent requests (‘I need 800 words on Georges Simenon by 5.00pm’).

Social apartheid

At the heart of the discussion were the deep contradictions and divides on which, Taylor believes, Edinburgh is built.

The clearest manifestation of this is the creation of the New Town, created by the ‘Edinburgh bourgeoisie’ to escape the cramped and fetid Old Town. This ‘social apartheid’ and the snobbery it bred has marked Edinburgh ever since.

It has also provided the city with a profound sense of superiority, especially in relation to Glasgow. Edinburgh ‘wears its snobbery on its sleeve’. This was captured in the response to the ‘Glasgow’s Miles Better’ campaign: ‘Edinburgh’s slightly superior.’

Taylor contrasted this book on Edinburgh with another of his on Glasgow. In both he was trying to prick some of the preconceptions and stereotypes.

In his Glasgow volume, he paid attention to Glasgow’s undoubted glories: its parks and its rich architecture and cultural life. Also, it has long had a strong middle class and many well-heeled areas. Glasgow is far more than a sprawling industrial powerhouse.

In the case of Edinburgh, he wanted to prick some of the pretension and provide a more accurate portrayal of the city, including its less salubrious features. In short: ‘What makes Edinburgh Edinburgh? … What are its defining characteristics?’

These included the character of the Old Town in the past, when it had been ‘the object of fascination’ for visitors. Edinburgh had been a ‘hotchpotch’ of a city, formed by the need to build up rather than expand sideways. This had, in time, produced an Old Town that was very different from today’s tourist-friendly ‘iteration’.

As captured in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, many considered the darker nether regions of the Old Town to be like a foreign city, a place into which they would not venture. As Spark put it, a ‘reeking network of slums which the Old Town constituted in those years’.

Stopping things happening

The Edinburgh outlined by Taylor is one of enduring class divides. In Glasgow, the key divides are sectarian; in Edinburgh it relates to education. Not only the split between private and state schooling, but also the subtle, often unstated, hierarchy among the private schools.

‘Where did you go to school?’ remains a way of quickly placing someone on the social hierarchy.

For Taylor, Edinburgh’s domination by its legal fraternity and its elite institutions (such as the New Club) has shaped the city. The New Club, ‘a place of whispers’, has been the site of many key decisions. More generally, Edinburgh’s powerful middle class has, over the decades, succeeded in stopping things happening.

Most notably, it prevented the building of the Inner City Ring Road, which would have torn through parts of the Old Town and led to stilted highways across the Meadows and the edge of Inverleith Park. Similarly, its members put a stop to the idea of building on the south side of Princes Street. In contrast, Glasgow’s middle class failed to prevent such projects ‘being visited on the city’.

More broadly, Edinburgh, for better or worse, has been marked by a tendency to resist change. This does give it a different feel to most modern cities, with the virtual absence of high-rise buildings. On a recent trip to London, I felt I was in another world, or another century.

Taylor compares Edinburgh to her ‘sister’ Florence, in that both cities are highly historic and rather hemmed in, causing both to be battling overtourism. Taylor, though, suggests Florence lacks Edinburgh’s topographic ‘drama’.

Fantastic paper

Another institution Taylor focused on was the Scotsman. This had, historically, played a key role in articulating a vision of Edinburgh, and a Unionist vision of Scotland. The paper had high ambitions, aiming to be a local paper, a national paper for Scotland but also one with international reach and credibility. The editors had sought to challenge the UK broadsheets of Fleet Street and in Taylor’s view had produced something superior: ‘It was a fantastic paper.’

This had again fed into Edinburgh’s boastful tendency, though in this case it was entirely legitimate. These glory days of The Scotsman are now over, reflecting a much wider trend of decline in the ‘legacy media’.

For many, the Scotsman’s decline has been particularly steep. Taylor did the ‘unthinkable’ in moving westwards to work for the Herald. He did so, in a cheeky aside, to ‘run away from Andrew Neil’, referring to the controversial broadcaster and journalist’s controversial stewardship of the paper.

Unique aspect

Taylor talked about the way that the Scotsman’s preparation for the Festival was similar to ‘organising for a war’, with ‘the combatants’ (reviewers) given the Herculean task of covering every show.

This might have been possible in the 1980s and 1990s, but would be impossible now, given the thousands of shows on offer.

The Scotsman used to be a significant force within the Festival and Fringe. Though it still has some profile and clout, through respected critics such as Joyce McMillan and Kate Copstick, it no longer has a central role.

While the Scotsman and its role in the Festival have declined, Taylor didn’t share the disgruntlement that some in Edinburgh have about the Festival. For Taylor, its arrival ‘by chance’ has given Edinburgh a ‘unique aspect’, and one to be truly proud of.

Born in the aftermath of war, it has also demonstrated the ‘healing power’ of art. It was, following the Enlightenment, the city’s second ‘defining moment’. It was in some sense ‘epochal’, bringing to an end a deeply parochial era.

The first Festival had, through the ‘inspirational’ Rudolph Bing, attracted an ‘amazing array of talent’, securing Edinburgh’s place in the cultural sphere. The ‘natural theatricality’ of the city and its compact centre meant it was well suited.

Though Taylor admits that some find the Festival ‘irksome’, he believes they are a minority. ‘Edinburgh wouldn’t have tolerated a festival for all these decades if they didn’t have a fondness for it.’ Echoing cultural figures such as Richard Demarco, he believes the Festival has added much needed colour and energy to a rather drab city. It rescued the city ‘from the cultural doldrums’.

However, the perception that the contemporary Fringe is dominated by the middle class (often with a London bias), has some basis in truth. Edinburgh’s middle-class character tends to seep into most spheres.

Always heaving

Taylor largely resisted nostalgic takes on the city. He recalls a ‘dark’, ‘clandestine’ and often empty city. ‘It’s never empty now, it’s always heaving.’

A recent visit to Leith had allowed him to witness the ‘transformation’ of the area, with its ‘bubbling ethnicity’ helping to add to its ‘amazing energy’.

This was part of a city that was ‘booming’ in many ways, though ‘gentrification’ was also part of this.

In general, Taylor’s book is something of a love letter to the city, despite its many ‘stupid things’.

He ended by admitting that: ‘I love it to an incontinent degree.’

During the Q & A, a French audience member asked about the lack of an accepted title for residents of Edinburgh (in contrast to Glaswegians, Dundonians etc). She suggested, given Taylor’s focus on the city’s bourgeois, ‘Edinbourgeois’.

Certainly underlying Taylor’s engaging account of the city was the continued dominance of its middle class and its institutions. They, as Taylor noted, also tend to ‘live in separate compartments … different postcodes’.