PLANNING applications rarely make headlines for the right reasons.

Attention gathers around the controversial ones - a tall building, the loss of a familiar place, a conversion that seems out of keeping - and public debate often collapses into a simple line-up: for development or against it.

The reality, seen from inside [local heritage body] The Cockburn Association’s planning work, is less tidy than that.

It comments on a wide range of applications every year.

Some, it supports outright. Some, it objects to.

Many get a more mixed response: welcome for part of a scheme, a request for more information on another part, a suggested change somewhere in between.

People sometimes ask what the Association is actually looking for.

The honest answer is less about taste in architecture than about evidence and understanding of place.

A good application isn’t simply one that proposes an attractive building - it’s one that helps everyone, not just planning officers, understand why this proposal belongs on this site, and what it adds to the city around it.

Almost always, it’s about values and vision.

That starts with clarity.

Applications should explain what’s proposed in language residents can easily follow, with drawings and visualisations that show accurately how the development will look from the streets and viewpoints people actually use - not just the angles that flatter it.

Reports written in unnecessary technical language shut people out of a conversation they have every right to be part of.

Good applications also show they understand context, and context here means more than the buildings next door.

It includes topography, views, movement, history, biodiversity and the way people really use a place, day to day.

A location inside the World Heritage Site carries different responsibilities from one on the edge of the city.

A listed building requires a serious assessment of what makes it significant, not a box-ticked heritage statement.

A development visible from Arthur’s Seat, Calton Hill or the Castle needs to show, with real evidence, how it protects the views that make those places recognisable around the world.

None of this rules out change - it just insists that change be informed by an honest reading of the place it’s landing in, and guided by the architectural ambition which has characterised the city to date.

Evidence carries the argument either way.

Applicants are increasingly expected to provide specialist assessments - transport, ecology, daylight, accessibility, safety for women and girls, heritage, drainage, climate resilience - and these shouldn’t be read as obstacles placed in a developer’s way.

They’re what allows a fair decision to be reached at all.

When that evidence is missing - no verified view study, an incomplete heritage statement, a cumulative impact nobody has actually totted up - the problem often isn’t that the scheme itself is bad.

It’s that there isn’t enough on the table to say either way.

That’s why so many of The Cockburn Association’s responses ask for more information rather than object outright: good decisions need good evidence, not just a strong opinion.

There is much at stake given the resource investment fro all parties in the chain.

Design quality matters too, but rarely in the way people expect.

The best buildings are often the least conspicuous - proportions that feel right without announcing themselves, materials that will weather decently in 50 years rather than look tired in five, entrances that welcome rather than intimidate, ground floors that keep a street alive rather than turning a blank wall to it.

Good design, oddly, often draws the least attention, precisely because it looks like it should be there.

Sustainability now sits alongside all of this, rather than after it.

The most sustainable building on a site is the one already standing: sensitive reuse retains embodied carbon, keeps local character intact, and gives an old structure a working future instead of a demolition date.

Underneath all of it is a simpler test: does the application take the people who’ll actually use the place seriously?

Accessibility, safety, the daily experience of neighbours and local businesses; these aren’t afterthoughts bolted on at the end of a design process, they’re part of what ‘good’ means in the first place, and is it fit for the future?

Our society is changing, how are new buildings and new building purposes supporting communities today, and long into the future?

Not every application will please everyone, and it shouldn’t have to.

Reasonable people disagree about scale and design constantly, and that debate is healthy.

But the strongest applications make the debate easier rather than harder: they explain their reasoning in the open, they bring real evidence, and they help residents understand not just what’s proposed, but why.

For over 150 years The Cockburn Association has pushed for exactly that: not resistance to change, but insistence that change be done well enough to earn its place in our UNESCO World Heritage city.

James Garry is assistant director of The Cockburn Association. This article first appeared on the website of the Association - here - for which grateful thanks.

Image details: bottom of Broughton Street; copyright Mike Wilson

UNTIL recently, a walk down the Union canal towards Fountainbridge could hardly avoid the sight of an abandoned and derelict church located on the southern side of the canal, tucked behind the tenements of Viewforth.

But the building - once an eyesore - has been painstakingly refurbished and restored so that since 2024 it has been home to four families who might otherwise struggle to find suitable housing in the capital on their incomes.

These households, together with residents in the block of ten new-build flats in what was once the church car park, are now paying a ‘mid-market rent’ (MMR), making the sort of difference to people’s lives that prompted one of the families to describe taking up a tenancy with us - at Lar Housing Trust - as “life-saving”.

Typical monthly rents for a two-bed property in the area stand at around £1,500 compared to Lar’s £860.

Refurbishing properties is become something of a thing for Lar, a not-for-profit housing charity.

We are currently in the process of refurbishing the historic former naval barracks at Port Edgar and have planning consent in place to redevelop the former car factory at Madelvic in the Granton area of the city.

Both sites have long been abandoned and have been in a state of considerable disrepair. Similar completed projects include the transformation of an empty former office block at Westwood House on Gorgie Road into 49 flats, as well as two developments for the Edinburgh Health and Social Care Partnership for people under their care with specialist housing needs.

Saving old and derelict buildings also helps people put down roots in their own communities, breathing life into overlooked areas and vastly improving local amenities.

But what makes the Union Canal church and Lar’s overall development work an example for others to potentially replicate is how it was funded.

The idea for Lar was formed by the housing team at Scottish Futures Trust (SFT), of which I was part before joining Lar, and involved a pathfinding finance model of loan-funding rather than grants.

At Lar’s launch ten years ago, the aim was simply to prove the concept of an alternative funding model could work.

Credit to the team at SFT for the vision to try something different and the Scottish Government civil servants and ministers for their bold approach to adopt this, despite the idea being untested and unconventional.

Loan funding is, of course, repaid, unlike grants, which means it returns to the public purse and can be re-used to finance further development. The net cost, therefore, of a Lar home is also considerably cheaper than its grant-funded equivalent.

There are too few developers in the housing sector in Scotland with the means or the risk appetite to tackle such complex regeneration projects, but one of our strategic goals is to help save Scotland’s built heritage - because of the certainty our funding model offers, we have been able and willing to take on those risks.

Tackling derelict and often listed buildings takes time, requires a flexible approach and time to react to unexpected situations.

We have enjoyed the benefit of cheap government debt of £55 million at our launch blended with commercial finance of £65 million later secured from Scottish Widows/Bank of Scotland.

The government loan has provided the necessary conditions to take on these projects without raking up finance costs and, consequently, rents.

The upshot of this funding model also makes refurbishment an alternative option to new-build, with the added benefit of saving our tenants an average £3,616 a year in rent.

We have been able to achieve this for our tenants because of our forward funded model and the financial certainty this allows. There is a growing demographic of people who neither qualify for social housing nor can afford private rents. Lar’s model addresses their needs.

If this sounds potentially too good to be true, the reality is that our tenants have collectively saved over £10 million in rent against market rates, on top of which they have a home for life should they want it. Lar does not operate a short-term model for tenants and our homes will remain within the charity sector in perpetuity. Our model should provide a blueprint for repurposing derelict and empty buildings for Scotland’s housing sector.

Mikko Ramstedt is chief executive of Lar Housing Trust

Main image details: copyright Lar Housing Trust; the old Viewforth church, copyright Mike Wilson

IMAGINE, if you will, a small, northern European city – a capital – which has a thriving economy and is sufficiently interesting to host an ever-growing tourist industry.

It’s small enough to get about on foot. However, if you want to, you can use the metro, tram, buses and even ferries with a single ticket. Bikes are not just tolerated but encouraged – there are 150 km of dedicated lanes.

You’ll have guessed by the reference to ‘metro’ that I’m not talking about Edinburgh.

It’s actually the Finnish capital of Helsinki, which has about the same metropolitan area population numbers (1.6m) as the South East Scotland Transport Partnership’s eight-council area of influence.

I could, though, have been talking about another Scandinavian capital, Sweden’s Stockholm, a slightly bigger city region which I’ve also visited, that also has a user-friendly, integrated system of getting from A to B – despite being built on an archipelago.

Comparisons, of course, are invidious. And it’s not going to be all perfect: check out the brilliant Helsinki Complaints Choir (yes, it’s a choir that sings specially-composed songs about various local complaints) which Edinburgh could do worse than copying.

However, I would argue that part of the problem lies in the fact that, unless you’re working in the specialist transportation sector, you’ve probably never heard of the South East Scotland Transport Partnership, or SEStran for short.

And if you think you’ve heard of SEStran at all, you’ve probably got it mixed up with Sustrans, the UK-wide charity now rebranded as Walk Wheel Cycle Trust.

Confused? I hope you won’t be…

There has always been - throughout Scotland’s changing local government history - a tension between big and small. We might like the idea of the village mayor being able to sort things out for people - as we romanticise about France - but some things can only be considered at scale.

The current system of 32 local authorities was introduced 30 years ago, succeeding a previous nine regions (by far and away the biggest being Strathclyde) and 53 districts.

Partly the reason behind that was political: the regions in Scotland and northern England had become big enough and powerful enough to be a thorn in the flesh of the then (Conservative) administration at Westminster; a history lesson more recent governments - at Westminster and Edinburgh - will not have missed.

In November, current Scottish Government First Minister, John Swinney, hinted at what might begin to emerge over the coming years, when he talked about regional economic partnerships - as reported, here, on the Scottish Government website.

Significantly, he commended the Glasgow city region’s partnership approach of existing structures: “… a far better approach than the imposition of so-called Metro Mayors”.

Like Glasgow, Edinburgh is part of a ‘city region deal’ (CRD) - here - which, from 2018, is scheduled to deliver £1.6bn over 15 years, jointly funded by the UK and Scottish governments.

It sees itself as providing investment in a broad remit of ‘innovation, skills, and infrastructure’.

The Edinburgh and South East Scotland City Region Deal covers six council areas: Edinburgh, the Lothians, Fife and the Scottish Borders.

Regional economic and spatial planning bodies and partnerships run on similar boundaries: health boards don’t, as they operate on the old regional council lines.

My interest in all of this has been mainly transport - having worked until I retired at the end of last month, this year as a consultant to SEStran.

SEStran’s boundaries are wider than the City Region Deal, also taking in Falkirk and Clackmannanshire.

That slight disconnect between the various organisations tells you something, as to whether Edinburgh is being thought about as an emerging metropolis.

Included in the package of CRD funding is the long-awaited work to improve matters on the city bypass.

So, there is the CRD and then there is also SEStran - which is the regional transport body, created by statute in 2005.

The two haven’t always co-operated well together, although recent joint working on how to deliver SEStran’s (statutory) Regional Transport Strategy is encouraging.

Clearly, transport is only one part of the jigsaw. We shouldn’t, for instance, have a commitment to higher density housing in Edinburgh while allowing car-dependent low-rise housing to be built in the Lothians.

The best of housing design that we are beginning to see in Edinburgh should be championed elsewhere in the region.

There should also be a co-ordinated approach to tourism, if only to ease the pressure on the centre of Edinburgh.

You can’t plan for the future if you don’t have the data, and ‘Edinburgh by Numbers’ is exactly the sort of document that’s needed.

It’s an annual publication and the most recent - the 19th edition (here) - was published just a few weeks ago.

Interrogating the data, and using it to create a clear plan for a mass transit system that delivers for the region, could make a crucial difference as the south-east Scotland economy continues to heat up.

Imagine the hothouse atmosphere were all these strategic debates to be taking place under the one roof. Perhaps the creation of a single, regional mayor is not going to happen, for the political reasons I’ve outlined; however, leadership is key to this.

This was a lesson I took from some research I did for SEStran a few months ago on the English city regions and how they delivered transport.

An officer I spoke to at Transport for Manchester said that Greater Manchester as a unit of local government had been 20 years in the making, and that strong leadership at political and official level had been crucial to it.

‘Manchesterism’ will of course have its supporters and detractors, and I can’t imagine our current First Minister being an uncritical fan.

However, in Glasgow, a model is emerging. Glasgow City Region and SPT (SEStran’s equivalent in the west, albeit with greater functionality) have now been entrusted to jointly deliver the Clyde Metro project.

In our own region, SEStran has been tasked with looking into the feasibility of mass transit in the region (currently, the project is called SEStransit).

Imagine, then. Imagine, if you will, a small, northern European city – a capital – which has a thriving economy, and is sufficiently interesting to host an ever-growing tourist industry. It’s small enough to get about on foot.

It’s a city where employment, health, and housing sites are planned and delivered in a way that allows people to move around the metropolitan region with ease and at a reasonable cost.

It’s also a city comprising a series of tram lines that go far beyond the city’s inner core, and connects with tram trains in its southern suburbs.

A city where freight delivery, from its ports along the river estuary, happens seamlessly and easily.

Where there’s even a ferry across the river to carry workers into the city from the northern part of the metropolitan area. Where buses and trains are integrated.

And where one ticket does everything.

Imagine it’s called Edinburgh.

Andrew Ferguson is a former lawyer and now a musician and writer.

Image details: copyright Mike Wilson

MY friend, Isabel, and I had lost ourselves in talk as we strolled the northern boundary of Leith Links, pausing by the cricket pavilion to duck a sudden hailstorm.

“Nearly June,” we muttered, watching the white pellets bounce off the turf.

When it cleared, we pushed onto the Restalrig railway path and branched off towards Seafield.

We had hoped to take the beach all the way to ‘Porty’, but a high tide had other ideas.

The road, meanwhile, was busy and featureless. And the ‘Seafield Stink’ was thick in our nostrils.

As cars swept past at an unsettling pace, I made my position plain: “This is why I take the paths.”

Filmmaker, Werner Herzog, is believed to have once said that “the world reveals itself to those who travel on foot”.

I think about that often when looking for quiet routes through Edinburgh; a search for calm in a congested city, a way to step off the obvious routes and find corridors that feel private, sheltered and purposeful.

Something about them feels both deliberate and accidental, shaped by history but available to anyone willing to look.

Of Edinburgh’s core paths, the old railway lines are the finest; the easiest way to traverse the city and the richest in character.

These narrow industrial corridors, once used to move freight and passengers, now sit like seams from another era threaded through the modern city.

Many were formally converted into public footpaths by the city council during the 1980s, but they survive as traces of the city’s industrial past.

Built to take something somewhere, they now take people somewhere.

Walking them is a way of reading history, while moving through it.

You can see where routes diverge, meet and reconnect, and begin to understand the logic that once shaped this place.

Old infrastructure repurposed for everyday life, including former stations at Corstorphine and Trinity, is one of the things that keeps drawing me back.

Railway paths often feel warm and sheltered.

Lined by trees or hedgerows and quieter than exposed open ground, they have a built-in directionality that makes them easy to follow.

In winter, they hold the cold a little longer; in summer, the shade is welcome and the light falls differently.

That steadiness matters. Some years ago, when things were personally not going well, the railway paths came into their own.

They felt welcoming and safe: places that would take me somewhere and bring me back.

That is exactly what you need when you are trying to think something through.

Walking these routes is about more than movement. It is the sensory details that mark time and offer comfort: blackberries ripening along a bank, wild garlic in spring, the way autumn leaves settle and low light catches a sheltered burn.

Those details make each walk a lived experience rather than simple exercise, and their accumulation is why I keep returning.

I have also been writing about these paths: less detailed history, more emotional response.

The feelings and sensations of walking, the way a route can shift your mood before you consciously notice.

These excursions into ‘psychogeography’ have given me permission to let my thinking roam, to imagine routes opening ahead, and to capture the discoveries I still make after years on the same ground.

The places I am most drawn to are dense networks: the North Edinburgh Path Network, riverside shortcuts, burns, and hidden glens.

The Burdiehouse Burn Walkway, which takes you through picturesque Ellen’s Glen, is a particularly under-appreciated route.

The gentle Figgate Burn from Duddingston towards Portobello is another.

These are well-used paths that rarely make guidebooks but are rich in atmosphere and easy to reach.

The routes often connect in unexpected ways, creating journeys that feel like private discoveries even when walked by locals every day. Finding something that has always been there but largely overlooked brings a particular kind of satisfaction.

These paths are one of Edinburgh’s great assets.

They preserve fragments of the city’s industrial past while offering quiet, useful routes for everyday life; a generous gift from the past to the present.

They make the city layered and surprising: even when popular spots are crowded, something peaceful is usually only a short walk away.

A different Edinburgh sits just off the main routes.

To walk these paths is not to turn your back on the city, but to know its other faces.

And I will keep walking them because, after a lifetime on this ground, Herzog’s promise holds.

Keep your eyes open and the world keeps showing itself.

Charlie Ellis is an Edinburgh-based researcher, writer and EFL teacher, who covers culture, education and politics.

This article first appeared in The Leither magazine, here, for which grateful thanks.

Image details: copyright Charlie Ellis

THREE weeks ago, I wrote about Craigmillar - for the think tank, Enlighten (here).

For the past year and a bit, I’ve been doing a bit of pro bono work there.

As I remarked, it’s been a life-enriching experience, and I’ve genuinely found the people and the place to be inspiring.

As a child, I’d be driven through Craigmillar with dad to visit ‘granny’ in Newcraighall.

Even then, with Craigmillar a relatively new entity, it looked tired. Meanwhile, visiting Newcraighall was like stepping back in time.

Roll forward to 1999 and I was the city council leader, and the regeneration of Craigmillar was a huge challenge.

The council had already been working with the local community to establish the Craigmillar Partnership and a formal delivery body, PARC (Promoting and Regenerating Craigmillar) was established in 2001.

PARC worked with the local community to create a masterplan that became one of Scotland’s largest regeneration projects.

The early work of PARC was run by one of the smartest and most consequential figures in Edinburgh’s modern economic renaissance, Ian Wall.

Ian was chief executive of the council’s property development company, EDI.

Importantly, the investment had extensive input from the local community. That masterplan formed the basis of around £200million of investment that has proven to be transformational.

For the article - and indeed also for a column I penned for the Edinburgh Evening News newspaper - I rattled off several statistics to make the case that Craigmillar is no longer the place of depressed and depressing mythology.

By any measure - including unemployment, educational attainment, home and car ownership, life expectancy, drug and alcohol misuse, average income and, importantly, crime - Craigmillar is a ‘good’ place to live, getting ‘better’ all the time.

That’s due, in no small part, by the local committed volunteers who have worked tirelessly to restore the area, such as the Craigmillar and Niddrie Litterbusters group, whose inspiring leader, Miranda Baird, was specifically praised by Prime Minister Keir Starmer when he last year launched the UK Government’s Pride in Place funding.

Organisations like Lyra, which is Scotland’s only performing arts venue for teenagers, is an amazing success.

Sandy’s Community Centre has been at the centre of huge success in tackling the anti-social behaviour that arose in the community on November 5.

And the Venchie is an adventure play facility where kids can be active in a safe and secure environment and can have some of the best experiences of their young lives.

Of course, Craigmillar still has its challenges, but - little by little - it is getting there.

But, in compiling my statistics, in trying to both verify and add to them, I couldn’t believe the ‘evidence minefield’ I was soon about to enter: using sources of information I already knew and also Artificial Intelligence (AI).

My first port of call was the Craigmillar Community Council boundary as set out on the city council’s website (here).

Depending on which source of information you use, or AI, it is possible to come up with several divergent statistics: for instance average household income for Craigmillar at £41,765 which seems to be at odds with the average for Scotland and the UK.

Meanwhile, the unemployment figure was given as 2.67 per cent for the Community Council area, which is difficult to reconcile with a Portobello/Craigmillar council ward figure of over five per cent in separate analysis of the same site.

Unemployment stats from the 1980s were easier to pin down and for that I am grateful to Ian Wall, for a copy of a District Council leaflet from the mid-1980s.

That showed the unemployment rate in Craigmillar and Niddrie was 25.3 and 24.1 per cent respectively, and describes the proportion of ‘long-term unemployed’ as 54.4 per cent and 53.3 per cent - much higher than the figure AI gave me.

When Ian handed me the leaflet my heart both sank (at how ‘bad’ it was all these years ago) and swelled with pride (at how far things have got so much better).

Population figures were similarly tricky to detail, with the Edinburgh council website figure of 22,939 much higher than the 16,500 figure I ended up using.

The difference is most likely the relatively new housing on the Edmonstone Ridge, which might be technically within the Community Council area, but is not what anyone thinks of as Craigmillar.

Some figures, however, were to tally between sources and AI calculation: especially higher education qualifications and car ownership.

The crime statistics were probably the hardest to get. To source police statistics, you must formally submit a Freedom of Information request. Especially hard to get are figures compiled before the relatively recent creation of Police Scotland.

And while the council does record crime figures per thousand residents by ward (and the figures for Portobello/Craigmillar show a drop by 23 per cent since 2018), there appears to be no long-term data to support what one hears anecdotally: that there’s been a huge reduction in crime and anti-social behaviour since the 1990s.

Which leads me to a single, over-arching conclusion: getting easily-accessible statistics on what is happening in our regeneration areas is tortuously difficult.

I remember once speaking at an European Mayors conference in London the secretariat for which was provided by the London School of Economics. I did wonder then why we couldn’t have such strong partnership links with universities and I still wonder it today.

Anyone seeking to understand the full impact of any regeneration effort in Craigmillar, and Scotland more widely, faces a patchwork of statistics - from various sources - that are just very hard to pin down.

We know the intricate details of microscopic processes in human cells, and we’ve studied the farthest reaches of the universe, but our knowledge of what goes on in our poorest communities is vanishingly small.

Our universities should be queuing up to help analyse and learn the lessons from such areas.

Regeneration costs money, often lots of money. If we aren’t able to measure exactly whether we are getting good value for that money, we are all losing out.

Donald Anderson is a former leader of Edinburgh’s city council and is a director of Playfair Scotland public affairs company.

Image details: White House, Craigmillar; copyright Mike Wilson

THE No.13 is one of Edinburgh’s stranger bus routes.

Small, subsidised and run by Midland Bluebird rather than Lothian, it threads its way through corners of the city that most services simply bypass.

A route plan doesn’t do it justice either: it snakes through quieter streets of the New Town - Drumsheugh Gardens and Drummond Place among them - that rarely see a bus at all.

Near the eastern end of the route is Lochend, not a locale that tourists often find their way to.

The park and its loch are well worth the trip, and the area around Meadowbank is changing fast.

Along the way, the little bus passes through brownfield sites that, having been neglected for decades, are now busy with building activity, giving a good picture of a city in the middle of reinventing itself.

While its eastern reaches offer a glimpse into post-industrial repurposing, the western arm is a journey into the city at its greenest and most exclusive, an exercise in ‘rus in urb’, where privilege is measured in acres of quiet, leafy isolation.

Climbing aboard on Hanover Street, we quickly escape the bustle of Princes Street, the small Bluebird 13 weaving almost apologetically between its much larger Lothian cousins.

It clambers down Queensferry Street, narrowly avoiding the visitors heading to Dean Village. Freed from traffic, it then scuttles down Drumsheugh Gardens. A few stops later, after passing the Gallery of Modern Art (it cuts between Modern One and Two), the journey takes a distinct turn.

The bus begins its slow saunter up Ravelston Dykes Road, along the fringes of Murrayfield. It’s here you appreciate the strange sense of access provided by public transport.

For a moment, you are a passenger cutting directly between a major private school (Mary Erskine’s) and two golf courses (Murrayfield and the Ravelston nine-holer), glimpsing through the trees and over the fences.

We pass the dense Ravelston Woods, a genuinely wild-feeling spot that shows how, in just a few stops, the 13 can take you from the tourist trickle towards Dean Village into a dark, sylvan maze.

This part of Edinburgh is resolutely, sometimes startlingly, residential.

Peaceful, yes, but often verging on lifeless: a long, slow trundle through streets where even a smidgen of commercial enterprise comes as a surprise.

After passing along the base of Corstorphine Hill on Craigcrook Road, the bus drifts into a maze of bungalowed back roads. When it finally disgorges onto the waves of traffic on Queensferry Road, the countryside trundle is over.

The 13’s terminus is perhaps the most pointed destination of the entire journey: Craigleith Retail Park.

Around the back of the enormous Sainsbury’s, you can see bare sandstone, the scar of the massive quarry from which much of the New Town was built, including the Greek Revival Old Royal High School.

Now, history is overlaid with a starkly different vision. Craigleith is utilitarian, basic, and utterly divorced from its surroundings. It is a monument to the car-centric, Americanised UK retail experience, a functional bunker within easy reach of affluent, virtually shop-less residential areas.

The retail park raises a question facing modern Edinburgh: what kind of city do we want?

The European model of good public transport and density, or this car-driven, sprawl-friendly design? The latter feels like a failed 1960s vision we’ve somehow kept faith with, a physical embodiment of the UK’s awkward position between two continents.

Yet even Craigleith has a silver lining. It’s one great plus is its position as a nodal point on the old railway path network. From here, you have easy active travel access to Granton, Leith and, through the Roseburn Path, south to Fountainbridge (via the new link at Russell Road / Dalry) and Haymarket.

The 13 bus itself is a key to this network, giving access to the Water of Leith walkway and other green corridors, including at its western tip the Restalrig Railway Path.

This tension is precisely what fuels the stooshie surrounding proposals to run a new tram leg down that very Roseburn Path, pitting the residential preference for untouched green space against the need for high-capacity, climate-conscious public transport. But that is a topic for another time.

The ‘Broughton Spurtle’ newsletter reports that there are once again concerns about the survival of the No. 13, with the question of renewing the city council subsidy due to be discussed in July. It would be a shame to lose it.

The 13 doesn’t just offer a scenic route. It actively connects travellers with otherwise hard-to-access corners of the city. Moving from the Georgian streets of the New Town to the repurposed industrial sites near McDonald Road, and landing squarely in the functionalism of Craigleith, the bus traces Edinburgh’s evolving identity: old brownfield sites finding new life, the suburban sprawl of the retail park, greener urbanism planned for areas like Seafield.

For years, Edinburgh has struggled to manage congestion while preserving its historic core.

Some argue that limiting car access is ruining the city centre; others that the car-driven model is the very thing hollowing it out. Past decisions, from Tollcross to Potterrow, still shape daily frustration.

The real wealth of Edinburgh isn’t only in its stone buildings or its golf courses, but in the connectivity offered by its public spaces, paths and public transport.

The future of the city rests not in catering to the car, but in investing in the routes, both bus and path, that knit the divided city together.

The No.13 is a good place to start.

Charlie Ellis is an Edinburgh-based researcher, writer and EFL teacher, who covers culture, education and politics.

Image detail: copyright Mike Wilson

DEEP beneath Scotland’s former mining communities lies a buried resource capable of heating homes and supporting local jobs once again.

It comes from the same underground workings that once powered industry, shaped towns and villages, and defined local economies for generations.

But this is not coal.

When the mines closed and the water pumps turned off, groundwater flooded the tunnels and workings below ground, absorbing heat from the surrounding rock.

That stored heat, continually replenished by the Earth’s natural geothermal properties, can now be recovered to provide renewable, sustainable and low-carbon heating.

This resource is known as minewater geothermal (MWG), and you may begin to hear a lot more about it considering an estimated 25 per cent of the UK’s buildings are above a mine.

That’s about nine million buildings.

Mining in Scotland stretches back more than 800 years, with coal being extracted as early as the 12th and 13th centuries.

During the Industrial Revolution, demand for this ‘black gold’ surged and mines spread rapidly across Scotland’s ‘Midland Valley’, including in and around Edinburgh.

At its peak, after the Second World War and nationalisation in 1947, Scotland had hundreds of mines, over 400, extracting primarily coal, along with shale, iron and other minerals.

When the mines began to close in the second half of the 20th century, the impact was profound, not least among the communities that grew up around them.

Water has always been a challenge in mines, many of which lie below the water table, where tunnels naturally fill with groundwater.

The first steam engine, developed in 1712, was created to address this problem by pumping water out of the mines, allowing miners to reach greater depths.

Scottish engineer, James Watt, famously refined the design in the 1760s, vastly improving its efficiency and helping to kickstart the Industrial Revolution.

Ever since Scotland’s, and the UK’s, mines began closing, the Mining Remediation Authority, previously known as the Coal Authority, and taxpayers have had to manage their damaging aftermath at a significant cost. Water filling the abandoned workings mixes with minerals and contaminants from the mine and surrounding rock, often polluting local streams, rivers and the surrounding countryside.

The Mining Remediation Authority, is believed to treat over 122 billion litres of minewater each year at more than 80 sites across the UK, including 12 in Scotland.

Sites like Junkies Adit (an Adit being a man-made tunnel) in Dalkeith are especially well placed to transform these long-standing financial liabilities into valuable community assets.

When the mines closed and pumping stopped, the tunnels and workings slowly filled with groundwater.

Underground, this water absorbs heat from the surrounding rock and settles at a steady temperature around 10 °C to 20 °C all year round, warmer than winter air and cooler than summer heat.

That consistency is what makes minewater such a reliable source of renewable energy.

To extract this consistent heat resource, heat pumps are used. But what actually are heat pumps? Engineering marvel? Witchcraft? Or a lot of hot air? I’ll try my best to explain, simply.

Inside a heat pump is a sealed loop containing a specific fluid that boils at a much lower temperature than water.

Heat from the minewater makes this fluid turn into a gas, which concentrates the warmth and passes it into a separate water system to heat radiators and provide hot water.

It works like a fridge in reverse: instead of moving heat out, it moves heat in.

Heat pumps are highly efficient, producing around three units of heat for every one unit of electricity, and a consistent source like minewater at 10–20 °C year-round is far more reliable than air (for an air-source heat pump) in the middle of a Scottish winter.

One or more heat pumps are just one part of a loop system, where warm minewater is brought to the surface, its heat then extracted to warm buildings, with the resulting cooled water returned underground to recharge, ready to be used again. This creates a renewable and sustainable heating system.

From Blindwells (in East Lothian) to Brazil, from Clackmannanshire to Czechia and from Newtongrange to the Netherlands, wherever there is mining, past or present, there is the potential to use minewater geothermal for the heating and even cooling of buildings depending on the climate and season.

The Romans famously engineered luxury geothermal bath houses for pleasure over three millennia ago, but you don’t have to go as far back to find the first example of a successful MWG project.

Early examples can be found in Canada and Germany back in the 1980s but it is in Heerlen, Netherlands, where the idea was put to test on a commercial scale in 2008.

It was the subject of a fact-finding tour, reported by the Scottish Government in 2016 - here.

Since the launch of the Heerlan scheme in 2008, it has been a huge success.

Carbon emissions for heating and cooling in Heerlen have dropped by an estimated 65 per cent, and the system continues to be expanded with a target 120,000 homes to be fed by it by 2040.

Data centres and other industries are encouraged to relocate to Heerlen to vent their waste heat down into the mine workings to further enhance the system. Which they have done. Driving economic and climate success in Heerlen.

Closer to home, there is enormous potential.

In Cornwall, Yorkshire, Wales and in Scotland there are viable proposals to make to turn these liabilities into assets.

But it is Gateshead (here, on the UK Government website) which is the trailblazer in the UK. Since 2018 - as reported here, again on the UK Government website - it has supplied 350 homes, education and office buildings with below-average prices for sustainable heating, with ambitious plans to heat another 5,000 homes.

However, it can not be understated that these can be difficult schemes to implement.

As a report - from the British Geological Survey to an UK parliamentary committee (here) - notes: “In Wales, a test scheme in Bridgend explored the feasibility of using mine water for heating.

“The scheme was initiated in 2016 with the aim of harnessing geothermal energy from the flooded former Caerau Colliery to provide heating for approximately 300 homes, as well as community buildings and a primary school.

“However, development was discontinued due to significant technical and commercial uncertainties encountered during the design and development phase - this project highlights some of the complexities and challenges of implementing mine water heating schemes in the UK.”

It can be like trying to hit the bullseye blindfolded, drilling - at considerable expense - boreholes into the ground, not to mention potential issues with inconsistent flows and the build up of oxidised iron ore.

Mine plans were drawn up decades, and even centuries, ago, long before GPS.

But, that said, there is real potential to deliver cheaper sustainable heating (and / or cooling) and create good jobs.

Corey Boyle is a graduate civil engineer at Sweco, specialising in ‘active travel’. Last year, he was awarded (here) the Princess Royal Award for Emerging Engineers - by the Institution of Civil Engineers - for his contribution to the South Sub Tram-Train student group project at Heriot-Watt University.

This is an edited version of an article that first appeared - here - on the website, Edinburgh Inquirer, for which grateful thanks.

Image details: Now an industrial estate, previously Bilston Glen Colliery; copyright Mike Wilson

This might be an article about France versus the UK, but there are comparisons, surely, between France and Edinburgh potentially worth reflecting on…

FRANCE has built around 300,000 new homes per year in recent years - roughly the same number that successive UK Governments have set as a target but never achieved.

One significant enabler has been the systematic expansion of tramway networks, with new lines opened across French towns and cities over the past two decades, many explicitly designed to enable suburban housing growth.

To examine whether a similar tram-enabled housing model could be replicated in the UK, we took five senior UK policymakers - with direct responsibility for housing, transport and planning [no names, no pack drill] - to visit three French locations where tramways have been used to unlock development: the Panorama district in Clamart (south-west Paris), the long-term transformation of Le Plessis-Robinson (also south-west Paris), and the Capucins development zone in Angers (near Nantes, towards the Atlantic coast of France).

Participants were interviewed before and after the visit, under Chatham House rules.

The aim was to understand how exposure to real places shaped their view of what might be possible in the UK and what barriers would need to be overcome.

Across all three sites, a number of common characteristics were evident.

First, tramways were not treated as add-ons to existing suburban layouts. They were either integrated into, or used to shape, new districts built at ‘gentle density’: medium-density housing capable of supporting high-quality public transport, local services and a strong public realm.

Second, the management of road space differed markedly from typical UK suburban development. Surface parking was minimised or eliminated.

Streets were narrowed and designed as places rather than traffic corridors.

Underground or communal parking was used to reclaim land for additional housing, which in turn helped fund redevelopment.

None of the schemes sought to eliminate car ownership, but all sought to reduce car use by ensuring that daily needs could be met locally and that tram services were frequent and reliable.

Third, tram and housing delivery were not tightly interdependent. Tramways were delivered as part of regional programmes funded through hypothecated transport taxation, while local authorities simultaneously shaped land use, design codes and public realm.

The two systems progressed in parallel, rather than requiring each tram project to be individually justified as enabling a specific housing scheme.

This reduced complexity.

Underlying these physical outcomes was local leadership of powerful Mayors. In all three locations, long-serving Mayors had articulated a clear spatial vision and pursued it over many years.

Policymakers were struck not only by formal powers, but by the clarity of intent.

Before the visit, participants were cautiously optimistic about tram-enabled development but concerned that UK’s more centralised fiscal system and fragmented land assembly would make replication difficult.

After the visit, there was greater clarity about the structural ingredients that appeared to underpin French success:

• Dedicated and hypothecated transport funding;

• The decoupling of transport investment from specific housing schemes;

• Strong local powers over land, roads and design;

• Standardised and lower-cost tram delivery; and

• The deliberate design of road space to favour non-car travel and avoid on-street parking provision.

There was no suggestion that the French model could simply be transplanted to the UK. The two countries have different institutional histories and political cultures.

However, the visit led to increased confidence among participants that, with sufficient devolution of powers and funding, and with sustained political leadership, similar exemplar schemes could be delivered in the UK within the next decade.

This article is the executive summary (slightly tweaked) from a report recently published by the think tank and urban design consultancy, Create Streets, here - for which grateful thanks.

Image details: copyright Mike Wilson

THERE were lots of good ideas swirling around the magnificent main chamber at the City Chambers a couple of Tuesdays back, as a panel debate began to unfold about Edinburgh’s tourism challenges.

And in many ways, the diversity of opinion - among the panellists and including the audience - reflected the patchwork of opinions I encounter in my job on an almost daily basis.

One person’s welcoming of new jobs in the tourism, hospitality or construction sectors is often another’s frustration, perhaps even anger, with crowded pavements and property prices rising ever higher .

The event - hosted by heritage body, The Cockburn Association, as part of a wider Festival of Europe Scotland - heard of residents taking to the streets, particularly in Spain, demonstrating against the impact of high visitor numbers on local infrastructure and the ability to rent or buy an affordable home.

It also heard how places such as Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, are trying to influence the type of tourist (and their behaviour) choosing to visit their town or city.

It was as fascinating as it was wide-ranging.

Positively, over the next few years, I have no reason to believe that visitor numbers to our city (from both abroad and the rest of the UK) will abate any time soon. Even though we have challenges with rising costs, the direction of travel seems to me to be inevitable.

Already, Edinburgh is estimated to be the ninth-busiest tourist destination in the world- in terms of the number of tourists versus the number of locals (as noted on BuildEdinburgh, here).

That is inevitably going to throw up new challenges and exacerbate already-existing ones.

But rise to these different challenges the city must, not least in how it conducts public-facing, grown-up debate as to what to do next. The difficulty is that there are so many moving parts to the tourism question.

The reassurance for local people is that what is usually ‘good’ for tourists is also ‘good’ for them. And vice versa, of course.

Our tourism growth has driven new and fantastic assets for residents to enjoy such as the St James Quarter, the Johnnie Walker Experience, Gleneagles Townhouse, Edinburgh Grand and the raft of new hotels, bars and restaurant venues across the city.

The number of our residents employed in retail and hospitality is rising, bucking trends elsewhere.

If a vennel, close or Princes Street is improved because of tourism, that’s going to be good for all of us.

There’s been a huge amount of private investment recently in Edinburgh’s city centre - an estimated £3bn over the last ten years.

On Princes Street alone, not only is there the ongoing refurbishment of Jenners department store - into hotel, retail and hospitality space, there are Ruby and Zedwell hotels being built and a fantastic Chris Stewart Group development on the corner of Shandwick Place - all products of the tourism sector.

Not only does that represent employment and supply chain opportunities for the local economy, it can also mean the preservation of the city’s heritage (witness the recent approval, at the second time of asking, of a hotel plan for the Rose Street Theatre, which was otherwise facing increasing deterioration).

Often, a building refurbishment or new-build spills over into pavement and other urban realm improvements.

Perhaps that relationship between private investment and city benefit could be better articulated, if not standardised, albeit we now have in place a set levy being charged for overnight stays by visitors, the proceeds of which are already beginning to fund physical ‘improvements’ to the city.

The city’s tourism strategy - and its commitment to sustainability, fair work and ‘net-zero carbon emissions’ targets is a strategy aimed at managed growth.

We have developed a world-class tourism product that is a key economic driver for the city.

We cannot take this for granted and must work collectively as a city to support this managed growth while addressing challenges this growth will have on the city.

The world’s economy is certainly not stable, and we need to continue to invest and support the tourism sector in uncertain times.

Tourism is here to stay (pardon the pun) and we should be proud that Edinburgh is considered attractive enough for people to want to visit, spending both time and money. It means we are doing some things right.

What we need, however, is continued communication between business, resident and heritage groups and not be scared of the tough conversations.

Tourism and its impacts on the city have been a success story over the last decade, we need to support the managed growth over the next decade, ensuring the benefits for residents, business and our visitors are plain for all to see.

Roddy Smith is chief executive of the city centre ‘business improvement district’, Essential Edinburgh.

Image details: copyright Mike Wilson

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