March 2024. A pleasant spring afternoon in Moray Place. A hint of peat smoke in the air. The vaguest scent of sewage drifting from the Water of Leith below.
I wait outwith a southern entrance to the central garden to meet a man I know only as ‘The Convenor’. He is an office bearer in one of Edinburgh’s oldest and most exclusive private discutentative associations: the Quinquaginta Club.
A colourful Edinburgh entrepreneur plans luxury underground car parking in the heart of Broughton.
Gorodskoy Kòsmónavt (55) means to convert vacant voids and vaults below the road surface of Mansfield Place into an exclusive 2-storey complex with 150 parking spaces, luxury valeting and high-speed electric-vehicle charge points.
Private toilets and recycling facilities complete the package.
Access is proposed by ramps penetrating the unused central part of the carriageway (see foot of page). Test-trenches have already established the scheme’s viability.
When the United Kingdom exited the European Union on 31 January 2020, many Scots who had voted in the Referendum to remain thought the advantages of EU membership had gone forever.
Now, however, new scholarship suggests the truth for a very few Edinburgh residents may be more nuanced.
Critics have raised serious doubts about suggestions for reinventing Edinburgh’s 'front-line civic stewardship' as potentially unfair, unworkable and unaccountable.
The proposals emerged yesterday in a leaked report by Leith-based policy think-tank Dark Blue Sky (DBS). It argues a three-tier system operating on capital streets could complement the work of police and make life in the increasingly crowded city centre safer and more pleasurable for visitors and residents alike.
When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, Pompeii was not the only casualty.
Herculaneum – nine miles to the north – was likewise engulfed, a pyroclastic surge burying the town and smothering many of its inhabitants in a thick shroud of volcanic ash.
Emanuel Maurice, Prince d’Elbeuf, began excavating here in 1719, and it was from his posthumous estate that the Edinburgh diarist and lawyer James Boswell acquired ‘not cheap’ the plaster cast of a young female cat (shown foot of page) during his Grand Tour of Italy, Corsica, and France in 1764/66.
With concern mounting over the prospects of Britain crashing out of Europe, and the potential negative effects of such a hard Brexit on business and visitor numbers in the Scottish capital, you may think this is a difficult time to make money in Edinburgh.
Think again. Enterprising residents are finding a new way to prosper in the face of uncertainty, and observers say it could turn out to be more than a short-term trend.
The new earning model is called ‘warehoming’ or ‘warehosting’.
COMMUNITY APP TO FIX ROADS
Cyclists and motorists could soon enjoy smoother journeys across Edinburgh thanks to a bespoke pothole-repair app going live tomorrow.
UberHole is the brainchild of Broughton-based entrepreneur Bernard Dintman, who spots a gap in the market now that cash-strapped councils struggle to maintain roads across Scotland to acceptable standards.
… UNTIL NOW
Cabinet papers newly released under the 30-year rule cast a surprising light on Edinburgh’s seascape.
Inchmickery stands roughly two miles off the coast in the Firth of Forth.
Members of the public may not land on this RSPB bird reserve, where ‘small but important populations of tern and breeding eider’ enjoy legal protection. Few pause to question the validity of that prohibition.
BELLEVUE TRANSFORMED
This morning, exclusively, Spurtle can reveal that a major new sports and hotel complex could be coming to Broughton if City of Edinburgh Council grants outline planning consent.
We’ve found no official pre-application trace of the scheme.
However, we understand an undisclosed US businessman – whose international sports-venue portfolio alone is valued at over $600 million – is in talks to purchase, demolish and redevelop the Lothian Buses Depot/HQ area around Annandale Street.
Urban planning experts say there's a strong case for flattening the space outside Drummond Community High School. But they face an uphill task convincing some locals that their plans are well grounded.
The publicly accessible hard surface recreation area currently drops by as much as 28 feet between the bus stop on Mansfield Place and the bike sheds at the bottom of Bellevue Place.
'It's a hazard and always has been,' says Community Outreach Manager Iona Downes of Dutch-based civic forum consultancy Eerste van de Vierde UK (EvdV).