Edinburgh: From Enlightenment To Chronic City

Local government in Scotland's capital is broken.

Image by brilliant Edinburgh artist Norrie Harman

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.'“
-Jane Jacobs

In Muriel Spark’s brilliant Edinburgh novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie we are told that Sandy, one of Miss Brodie’s girls, her ‘set’, knew “there were other people’s Edinburghs quite different from hers, and with which she held only the names of districts, and streets and monuments in common.” The reopening of The People’s Story is a positive moment. It is great to see the only museum in the city which tells the stories of workers and communities back open to the public. It is also a positive for the whole city that Edinburgh Council reversed the decision to close the museum. In the most top down of cities, The People’s Story tells our Edinburgh’s stories from the bottom up.

Last week the Council’s Culture and Communities Committee voted in support of an officer report which recommended a seasonal opening model. This model (5 days opening in winter and 7 days rest of the year) guaranteed The People’s Story stayed open beyond the emergency funding agreed at the full Council last month. The report the committee was considering was an update on a broader piece of work on the transformation of the museum and galleries operation across the city. A thread running through the report is the references to “the telling of Edinburgh’s story”. This “vision” is to be “transformed”. But we are never told what story of Edinburgh the Council are trying to tell.

The Council has recently agreed to spend £500k on Edinburgh 900. A celebration of the 900th anniversary of the city becoming a royal burgh. Privately councillors and officers will admit this project has been a disaster. The starting point seems to have been to spend the money on a logo design and signage and a few events in the expectation this would leverage in some corporate funding. It has not. Which is unsurprising because there seems to be very little thought went into why the Council are doing it. What is the purpose? What outcomes for citizens can be expected? How are these outcomes to be measured? And, crucially for our discussion, how does Edinburgh 900 fit into the ‘telling of Edinburgh’s story’? It will surprise nobody who lives in Edinburgh to know the Council do not have answers to any of these basic questions.