LOVELY LEITH STREET CLOSURE COMING SOON
Developers, contractors, investors and City of Edinburgh Council are combining to win hearts and minds in advance of the 10-month Leith Street closure, starting on 2 September.
Their relentlessly upbeat brochure is now doing the rounds, which you can find attached at the foot of the page. It has been produced by touchy-feely Together for Edinburgh, ‘working in partnership for a better Edinburgh’.
Useful information
There is some useful information in it for those who haven't been paying attention since we broke the story on 28 February.
The Leith Street works will entail: removing the central reservation and footbridge; widening pavements; reconfiguring slopes; upgrading surfaces, pedestrian crossings, cycle lanes and bus stops; putting in new street lights; and ‘picking up surface and wastewater requirements from the new Edinburgh St James’.
The improvements will, the brochure explains:
allow us to reconfigure and renew the whole of Leith Street in the most efficient way possible, creating a high quality, much-improved environment, that better serves Edinburgh’s pedestrians, public transport and cyclists.
Instead of prolonged, severely restricted access along Leith Street, this solution ensures that works will be contained over a ten month period … mitigating any unnecessary disruption to the wider city.
By renewing and enhancing below ground local infrastructure, we are also greatly reducing the requirement for future works and repairs.
Yup. Heard all that before (14.3.17; 24.5.17). The idea is to learn from the tramworks and avoid prolonging the agony. But honestly, who’d bet against Scottish Gas tearing it all up again two weeks after it’s finished?
If you have any questions, email contractors Laing O’Rourke or Tel. 0782336 2404.
The persuasive arts
The St James Quarter development people are clearly putting the best gloss they can on what is likely to be a testing period for motorists, visitors and residents.
The brochure opens with a smiling blonde who has apparently daubed ‘I can’t wait for the changes’ on a wall.
Obviously, this is exactly the kind of thing everybody feels when confronted with the prospect of a menopause or walking past massed pneumatic drills for 44 weeks in a row.
It continues by way of a positively spun map of the diversions, headlined ‘Let’s keep moving’ (Hey! And let's hold hands because we’re having such fun together), and concludes with a sweet little girl in a virtual reality headset thinking ‘I’ve seen the future’.
That last statement is almost entirely meaningless, but serves to distract, disarm and generally make us feel we’ll all receive a complimentary My Little Pony without offering much evidence for it.
At the bottom-right of the last page, there’s a large pink roundel containing the words ‘Thank you in advance for your patience’. That, in a nutshell, is what this brochure is all about.
Virtual reality may well be the best way to get around Edinburgh between now and August 2018. Good luck, everyone.
Got a view? Tell us at spurtle@hotmail.co.uk or @theSpurtle or Facebook
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