trams to vacantville
The issues at Leith’s failed luxury land reclamation project at Newhaven’s western harbour – Platinum Point – continue with news that the first stage of council house residents from the blighted brutalist Leith Fort scheme up the road are to be welcomed into brand new flats (i.e., single-breezeblock rabbit hutches) opposite the bankrupt development during early 2010. Naturally PP’s residents association, now cynical due to the shaky-in-reclaimed-sand property developers and their ripoff factors, see this as yet another blow for their negative-equitied designer-hell-on-Forth fog-flats, once a much-cited prestigious stopping point for Edinburgh’s new trams.
The debate should not be with either the mortgaged-to-the-hilt; nor the sometimes, er, rather limited life-expectations locals – it should be with, as usual, the sub-par but well-connected architects, aesthetics-free town planners, overambitious developers and thoughtless toon cooncillors, who always as a cabal fail to equate housing with community. This crash of social groupings will only benefit the crass Asda megastore plonked between them – and of course the cctv manufacturers – and police overtime. lower image: Jamie Reid
