Cleansing and Clearances o' of Canongate

24 days to go

The Evening News journalists who now get paid to cut and paste press releases from the Mountgrange spindoctors PPS here, (Director Donald Anderson, ex-leader of the Labour Council) reported earlier on in the week that "homes" were to be saved here but for those that follow the Independent Republic of the Canongate know that is nae true, (indeed we think the proper term is LYING).

What is happen about housing is this:-

18 flats on the Canongate are to be demolished, 9 of them were owned occupied but were bought by the developers are rented out by Rettie and Co. 9 of them were owned by the council as council houses, they have been owned by City of Edinburgh since they were built in the 1930s by the city architect Ebenezzer Macrae as part of the Housing (Scotland) Act 1919 here. However the council have cleared 7 of the houses. leaving them empty i.e. no rent is being taken on them despite Edinburgh housing crisis. The council have not repaired the pavements from the top of New Street down past the Sailor's Ark and Macrae Tenements because it is a "regeneration area" despite the whole of the Royal Mile being down up.

The council's and Mountgrange's proposals are to get everyone out of the flats - they are solid, stone flats with balconies and a big drying green at the back, they are houses that would last another 100 years with a little maintenance unlike the housing built in the 60s and 70s - Westburn, Pennywell, Greendykes, West Granton etc that needed to be demolished. The Macrae tenements are highly sought after council housing. The flats are on the Royal Mile and have the No 35 bus stop right outside.

The flats are to have their back taken away, their insides gutted and there will just be the facade - the facade to the hotel i.e. the 5* hotel will look like 1930s council housing but it will be 5* luxury inside - I know it is crass! There will be no HOMES - only two luxury three bedroom apartments above the arcade part at Captain Jack's Close (next to Frescoes the roll shop) will be built by the developers. Obviously these luxury apartments won't be council houses despite having a council house façade. It is all the rage in London, tower blocks in Greenwich and Hackney being turned into executive's suites.

On the Mountgrange site which was the bus depot is where the hotel will be built, offices, shops and more luxury, executive housing fuelled by underground heating from the geothermal energy that is to be funded by the Department of Trade and Industry. There is to be NO affordable or social housing on the bus depot site!!

The developers have acquired land down on Calton Road which was council land and have got grants from Communities Scotland and are to be built by Places for People here. They are not doing anything that couldn't have been done by the council or any housing association yet they are being allowed to claim that they are building their quota of social/affordable housing - but in reality it is being offset and a bit of a scam. Oh guess what - this housing won't have access to the geothermal underground source heating paid for by your taxes!!!

Developers are meant to build 25% social/affordable housing in big housing developments - but offsetting is common i.e. they get into cahoots with councils to do things that would have been done anyway in order not to follow through. What the Independent Republic of the Canongate are saying - the area down on Calton Road should be social/affordable housing anyway and there should be 25% on the bus depot site. And the Macrae tenements should be preserved as people's homes - no more neighbours having to move away.

The Canongate historically had hundreds and hundreds of families and we would like more families in the area - it's a great place for families to live in but Places for People and the developers refuse to accept that three and four bedroom housing is needed. They tell us "families don't like to live in the city centre" yet the expensive flats and town houses are to be three and four bedroom with their own private parking.

It feels like social cleansing to us - our historical neighbourhood is being gentrified - and the traditional people of the Canongate are being cleared out here.

HOMES NOT HOTELS

Homes Not Hotels

25 days to go

"we only went out for a pint of milk, now our home is a 5* Hotel!"

Campaign Poster by local artist and campaigner David Hutchison, David was one of the artists evicted from the New Street artist studios in the former bus station, by the developers for the premature demolition.

There is a piece in TheHerald today

To demolish or not to demolish

26 days to go... In The Scotsman today there is a piece stating how Historic Scotland is backing Caltongate Developers articlehere
To see Historic Scotlands Full response click on this link HSresponse then click on Associated Documents, then click on View Associated Documents, then scroll down until you see the Historic Scotland document dated 20th December 2007. Sorry but thats the only way to do it via the councils planning portal.

You can read what the Status and Role of Historic Scotland is here HistoricScotland

It is known in the conservation world that Mountgrange Developer Manish Chande and Historic Scotland`s Malcolm Cooper are friends.
Manish Chande was appointed by Tessa Jowell as a Commissioner of English Heritage. Sept 2003, where he is also on their Finance and Business Committees.
"Malcolm Cooper spent ten years with English Heritage before joining Historic Scotland in April last year". (2005, same year as first Caltongate Masterplan unveiled)

Scotsmanarticle

From the article
"More than its southern equivalent, its word is law. As Cooper puts it "English Heritage advises the minister, in Scotland we are the minister."

"The most glaring symbol of Cooper's deliberate change of emphasis has been Caltongate, the £200m plan proposed by English developer Mountgrange to convert part of Edinburgh's historic old town. This involves knocking a hole in part of the old tenement streetscape of the Canongate to improve access to a complex containing shops and a five start hotel.
Cooper explains that once the decision was taken to approve the masterplan for regeneration of the old town seen as vital to the city's future needs, Historic Scotland saw the importance of facilitating what it was convinced was for greater economic good of the city."

Ron Hewitt, chief executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, said: "Meeting Malcolm and hearing his views has been a breath of freshair.

Manish Chande is the Chamber`s Property Policy Group Chairman
go to the June-July issue of their comment magazine see page 2 - 6 of EdinburghChamberCommerce

Todays Evening News has a good letter in response to the misleading article printed on the 8th Feb -

Threat hovers over Old Town
IT is simply not true to suggest the MacRae flats in the Canongate have been saved (News, January 8).The latest submissions by the developers Mountgrange do propose that most of the facade of the building would be retained. But the flats behind the facade would disappear to be replaced by "de luxe" hotel bedrooms. Ordinary people would still be evicted from their homes and the Old Town would lose even more of its socially mixed character and go a step further towards being a Disneyland-style stage-set.Our councillors can refuse the planning application. More fundamentally they can refuse to sell the land on the Canongate which the council owns and send Mountgrange homeward to think again.Robert Cairns, Ratcliffe Terrace, Edinburgh

linktoletterspage

The Battle for Edinburgh`s Heart

27 days to go....
Well I wasn`t surprised to read Todayspiece in the Evening News. I wrote to them yesterday to ask them to apologise for printing incorrect information and to do an article explaining that the "new" application still involves the full demolition of the tenements. This PR tactic by Mountgrange is to fool people into believing that they have listened to their concerns, and they have made changes. In fact they have just pulled out plan B that they probably had all along, which is just like Plan A.


This has made me think of how from day one this developer has been trying all sorts to get his way.

Here he is Caltongate Developer Manish Chande pulling a "Bravemoo" Coo through Princes Street Gardens on the 14th March 2006(Common Good Land belonging to the folk of Edinburgh)

As the major sponsor of Edinburgh`s Cow Parade in 2006Evenewsarticle Mountgrange had dozens of fibreglasss cows all over the city with Moungrange branded on them.

A Canongate resident wrote the following in response a few days later to the EveningNews Letter page -

Fight on his hands WHAT a laugh. Manish Chande, the chief executive of the Canongate's most hated company with a sabre under his arm pulling a braveheart coo (News, March 14). Well, he'll need his brave heart and his sabre when he comes head to head with the people of the Canongate. The Mountgrange Group wants to rip the heart out of Canongate - but we'll take our 'coo' from William Wallace et al. As long as there are a hundred of us left in the Canongate they'll no be demolishing our homes and listed buildings to build their fancy monstrosities.

28 Days till D-Day!

Today The Evening News printed an misleading article entitled

"Royal Mile Flats saved as demolition ditched"
this is untrue as the tenements are still to be demolished. Seearticle

Their editorial isn`t much better.

Read about the controversial PPS Group the PR firm behind developers Mountgrange, pps they have appeared on Channel 4`s Dispatches Programme, The Evening Standard and Private Eye. Their director in Scotland is none other than Donald Anderson former leader of Edinburgh Council, who backed Caltongate when in office.

We are 28 days away from all the Caltongate Applications going before the City of Edinburgh Council`s Planning Committee on the 6th February. For more information on Save Our Old Town campaign do check the website as well as this blog http://www.eh8.org.uk/

If it wasn`t for those pesky protestors!

Its a pity we couldn`t just flatten Edinburgh and make as much money as we can building hotels, multiplexes, luxury hen houses...its such a pain having so much history, beautiful architecture and concerned residents...basically the flavour of todays article which is a BOO HOO...plea from the Chamber of Commerce on behalf of their Property Portfolio Group manger Manish Chande the developer behind Caltongate.

Call for planning shake-up as Capital tops the protest table http://news.scotsman.com/politics/Call-for-planning-shakeup-as.3645665.jp#2350032

Nimby - The word was first recorded in 1980, but for a British audience it was the late Nicholas Ridley, an arch Thatcher-loyalist, who brought it to wider usage, in the late 80s. As environment secretary, Ridley had no fear in appearing abrasive. He was, after all, the man in charge of the poll tax.

Here`s to 2008, the year of the NIMBY

Yesterday I read something in a newspaper which actually lifted my spirits. Someone has articulated so well the 21st century meaning of the word NIMBY...a term much loved by the multi million PR and development industry behind the needless destruction of our countryside, villages, towns, cities.....in the name of progress and the elusive promise of increased wealth and status for all.


Above is former Council planning leader Trevor Davies who clearly did not like NIMBIES like the SOOT campaigners who sang carols when he entered the Caltongate Developer Mountgrange`s Christmas Champagne Bash in 2006.



This blog will be updated everyday where possible, with current news in the run up to the important date the 6th of February when all the Caltongate applications go before the City Of Edinburgh Council`s Planning Committee.




Nimbyism should be applauded, not despised
Published: 04 January 2008 The Independent by Terence Blacker:

from the article -


"There are certain well-used contemporary clichés which are more than lazy verbal shortcuts. They represent clichés of the mind and the heart. Substitutes for thought, they are weapons used by the spin-merchants of commerce and politics. They simplify complexity and smother debate.

A perfect example lies in that brutally neat little word, "nimby".

"Perhaps it is time to look beyond the cliché and ask, in the manner of the old Persil ads: what is a nimby?

The truth is that the values a nimby defends were, until very recently, those which most environmentally-minded people would support. The nimby believes that to contribute to a better world a person should start with the one area over which he or she can have some influence: the local community and landscape."

"Action in a person's own area is rarely glamorous – it involves work and application – but, the nimby believes, it is worth more than any number of warm words about the state of Planet Earth."



"The nimby protects the small against the big. Those with a threatened "back yard" (a sneering phrase which can be used to describe most of Britain) will know just how powerful the outside forces of profit, politics and populism now are."


"When big business and big politics are trying to discredit anyone impertinent enough to question their motives, there are more crooked clichés."

"Opposition, it is said, comes from "a vocal minority of local people". "

"Any planning department that dares to question whether an area should be transformed is described as "sluggish" or "clogged up". "

"In the face of this prejudice and propaganda, it takes courage to be a nimby."


"In the meantime, anyone brave enough to speak up for them around the country deserves gratitude not sneers. The nimby is one of the unsung heroes of these very odd times."

Read Full Article Here

http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/terence_blacker/article3307548.ece