I am fortunate in being able to say that I love the place in which I live. Not everyone has that good fortune, particularly in a world in which the large conurbations in which more and more of us live become increasingly impersonal, polluted, and, in some cases, downright dangerous.
In Scotland we have little of that. Our large cities are not perfect, but they are still manageable. Glasgow and Edinburgh are expanding and one day might meet in the middle, but they are a far cry from the boundless mega-cities that have become a reality for so many. Edinburgh – and the other large Scottish cities – remain good places to live.
And as far as Edinburgh is concerned, the word is out. According to a recent report, Edinburgh is now the most popular destination for Americans looking for somewhere to live after fleeing the United States. These refugees from the dramatic souring of a country are looking for a congenial place to pitch their tent, and are opting in increasing numbers for the Scottish capital. This should not surprise those who live in or know the city. If you are searching for a relatively small city, brimming with artistic activity, with a hinterland of hills, a few miles from the coast, and close to other major cities (but not too close), then Edinburgh ticks the boxes.
But it is not just the obvious factors that make Edinburgh a place with which it is easy to fall in love. There are other cities that are just as beautiful in architectural terms. There are other European cities where it is as easy to imagine that one is inhabiting an opera set. What distinguishes Edinburgh from many other places is a certain harmony and balance that is implicit in its structure as a town. There are hills that give salience to the setting: flat cities, rising from a featureless plain, rarely holds our interest; Edinburgh goes up and down, surprises us with sudden vistas, gives plenty of scope for shifts of light and mood.
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And then there is the divide between the Old Town and its Georgian off-shoot. That works perfectly: in the Old Town one is faced with a cityscape off short horizons, of closes, and niches. Then descend the Mound or venture onto North Bridge, and you have the New Town before you, laid out in all its gorgeous regularity. It is a perfect combination. Some cities leave their past behind them as they expand and mature – old buildings are destroyed or dwarfed by the bland constructions off modernity. Edinburgh’s Old Town lives cheek by jowl with the neo-classical flowering of the New Town, which is, in a way, the calculated embodiment of reason in stone. If one is ever in danger of forgetting about the Scottish Enlightenment and what it meant, look about you at the conscious attempt that Edinburgh made to recreate the ideals of classical Greece. There is even an unfinished Parthenon on Calton Hill – a poignant monument to causes everywhere that run out of money or are unfinished for one reason or another. Edinburgh is slightly eccentric. It is, in so many senses, architectural and otherwise, a spiky place. If you are looking for bourgeois contentment, look elsewhere. There is a quality of sharpness to Edinburgh. In the past it may have been a bit on the prim side – think Jean Brodie – but it was never dull, nor bland.
Mind you, there is a rider to that observation. In the days when Glasgow picked itself up by its bootstraps and launched the Glasgow’s Miles Better campaign, there was a bumper sticker to be seen on Glaswegian cars, professing that precise message, and accompanied by a smiley face emoji. I remember seeing the Edinburgh response on a local car, alongside a rather haughty nose in profile was the message Edinburgh’s Slightly Superior. The old rivalry still persists, but it is usually not much more than a good-natured joke. People in Edinburgh still love Glasgow and concede that the sense of humour, and of fun, is rather stronger over there. Glasgow, it must be admitted, has more than its fair share of the crac.
There are dangers. Edinburgh is a work of art that we have rather miraculously inherited. It could have been otherwise – a disastrous nineteen-sixties plan to drive a motorway through its centre and make multi-storey car parks of its gardens was narrowly avoided. But dodging one bullet does not mean that there are not others on their way. Edinburgh must remain a lived-in city – it must not be ruined by the tourism that its beauty attracts. That danger seems to be becoming more evident – and more brazen.
The High Street – or Royal Mile – has already been wrecked by the tartan-tat shops that have been allowed to spill out onto pavements. Air-B-and-B will do the rest, even though moves have been made to close that stable door. These short-term lets make life hell for people living on the affected stairs; they destroy whole communities; they force people who cannot afford to buy flats in Edinburgh to move out of the city altogether. They allow landlords to make a lot of money at the expense of everything that makes a city community possible. Housing should not be for large-scale commercial exploitation – it should be for people, for families, for those who do the jobs that keep cities going.
Edinburgh risks being hollowed out by tourist-focused developments and by the mushrooming of student accommodation. A concomitant of these trends is the destruction of its character as a real city, and its replacement as a Disneyfied conglomeration of bars, German markets, and big wheels. A tartan nightmare, shallow and garish, is just round the corner unless the sheer volume of tourist traffic is tamed.
There is a limit to the influx of visitors that any city can take before it buckles under the strain. Lok at Barcelona; look at Venice. Will the well-behaved residents of Edinburgh take to the streets against tourism as has happened elsewhere? Unlikely, perhaps, given the nature of this city’s inhabitants. Put it this way: the residents of Edinburgh are slightly concerned.
Alexander has a new novel out in June, The Lost Language of Oysters – A Professor von Igelfeld Entertainment (£16.99hbk, Abacus). He has also contributed an introduction to Campaigning for Edinburgh: The Cockburn Association 1875-2049 (£25pbk John Donald).
His various series of novels set in Edinburgh include his Isabel Dalhousie novels, The 44 Scotland Street novels and the new Perfect Passion Com
