Lording it

10 Oct 2008

john.glenday@carnyx.com

Lord McCluskey, one of Scotland’s most respected legal figures, has escalated discourse on the impact of recent Edinburgh development to a “new pinnacle of hyperbole” say critics with an outspoken attack on the “systematic vandalism” of Edinburgh’s built heritage.

Evoking war time imagery of Hitler’s sacking of Warsaw, McCluskey alludes such destruction to be of equivalence with such schemes as Haymarket and Fountainbridge.

Described as a “rambling polemic” the article, published in today’s Scotsman, evinces the achievements of European cities in a comprehensive reconstruction effort at the end of the war.  Plans, photographs, paintings and memory were all utilised to rebuild the past in exactitude.

No mention is made of the downtown skyscrapers and shopping malls which now dominate the Polish capital.

The Scottish capital meanwhile is subjected to a further drubbing with recent concrete and glass structures derided as “monuments to how callous, how lacking in taste and bereft of respect for our heritage it is possible for a city to be.”

Further claims are made regarding the demolition of “old stone buildings”, precisely which historic structures this is referring to is not divulged.

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