I recently managed to get my paws on a copy of the 1949 book produced for the Abercrombie Plan, or to give it its proper title, A Civic Survey and Plan for Edinburgh by Sir Patrick Abercrombie and Derek Plumstead:
Or, in fact, if you want to seem flash (which it most certainly did): A Civic Survey and Plan for the City and Royal Burgh of Edinburgh. Well, ooh.
Very smug I feel too, partly as it included a copy of what seems to be the original advertising leaflet:
A fair chunk of the book does indeed devote itself to a remarkably in-depth survey of the city, covering housing, schools, employment, industry, all the usual, plus:
All presented quite beautifully, it has to be said, with maps of various sorts, and some massively complex and thorough tables that would be gold dust to a social historian, which I’m not.
One other section is given over to a historical overview of the city, written by then City Architect and contender for the best-named architect of all time, Ebenezer MacRae. (I should write something up about him actually, partly cos of the name, and partly because he was a disciple of Patrick Geddes.) People have pointed out that MacRae barely disguises his distaste for the final part of the book, and the whole thing it gets towards, the plan for improvement.
This is really what the report was for, of course, and it goes to some length to demonstrate how outmoded and often substandard the old city was:
Getting to the point, some of the proposals are pretty startling, all with breezy 1940s styling. Here’s what could have been instead of the city end of the Western Approach Road:
Certainly different from what was there at the time:
So far, so what: nobody could really object to that very much. (Well, they could, but y’know.) Here’s a pull-out proposing the demolition and replacement of every single building along Princes Street, though:
A bit radical, though the writers point out that this couldn’t feasibly be done unless over the course of a number of decades. They suggest that it might reasonably be completed during the 1980s.
Princes Street view, as it could have been:
This was the first serious appearance of an overall plan to rationalize the haphazard collection of buildings that is Princes Street, later gone ahead with in the form of the Princes Street Panel’s recommendations. Hence the disconnected series of 1960s & 70s buildings with parts of what would have been a walkway along the first floor exterior; the ongoing project for an overall unified (ish) frontage that was only officially abandoned in the late 1980s. They never did actually explain how the first-floor public walkways were meant to cross the side streets – bridges, steps, or teleport?
Princes Street also would have had a motorway running beneath it:
And the Mound:
They don’t elaborate as to how mature trees were meant to grow on top of a foot-thick concrete roof for an underground motorway, but hey: Edinburgh was to have had an inner-city motorway. (Telt ye.) And here it would have been:
If you can picture an inner ring-road running under Princes Street to the top of Leith Walk, under a massive redevelopment including the ubiquitous theatre/opera house, burrowing under Calton Hill, cutting through the middle of the Royal Mile and off up through the Pleasance, then wandering through the Meadows on concrete stilts, eventually to connect again with the west end of Princes Street, then you’re doing well. Add to that the Mound becoming a subterranean roundabout, connecting by a motorway along Market Street to a roundabout built partly into the (now almost sacrosanct) Old Town ridge:
They really meant it. One curious proposal suggested that Waverley Station should be closed, the tracks placed underground with a small station to serve local needs, and the land turned into a park (apart from the motorways running around). A new station would then be built on the site of Princes Street Station, where the Caledonian Hotel still sits, minus its old railway.
Most of this never happened, or at least didn’t in the form that the plan proposed. The outraged response to the plan killed any chance of it going ahead at the time. It did resurface in modified form (including the inner ring road), and some parts went ahead, most notoriously involving the areas around St James and George Squares; arguably the response to these in turn put paid to any further ideas that the planners might have had, and the conservationists won the field. There was one particular councillor who continued to argue in favour of the inner ring road, complete with the Meadows motorway on stilts idea, into the late 80s, but he was seen as something of a lone crank by that point. Anyway, I’ll leave this for now with a couple of artistic renderings of Greenside and St James Square, demolished almost in its entirety in the 1970s, largely left as a hole in the ground for years, and only fairly recently rebuilt:
(That last drawing ends up making at least that bit of the whole mad scheme look quite nice, but that's artist's impressions for you, I suppose.)
All the world seems in tune on a Spring afternoon, when we're poisoning pigeons in the park.