Mark Chalmers

Preface: I wrote this piece in November 2011, when the winning proposal was revealed after the conclusion of a design competition.  As it explains the back story behind the Gardens fiasco in my previous piece, I thought it worth uploading here.

The current proposals for Union Terrace Gardens in Aberdeen are a perfect demonstration of Mark Twain’s belief that, “History doesn't repeat itself - at best it sometimes rhymes.”  They are the latest in a long line of unbuilt, and unbuildable, schemes which chime down the decades.

Lying to the north side of Union Bridge, there have been many proposals to gentrify Denburn Park and the Gardens.   At the moment, they look similar to Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh: a linear park with mature trees, grass and flower beds, part of which is shaped like an amphitheatre.  In both cases the gardens lie in the city centre where the higher edge is a busy city street, and the lower edge a railway line.  The grassy slopes are well used on sunny summer afternoons, although at night they tend to be deserted other than by a few dossers and drinkers.

Most previous schemes relied on roofing over the Aberdeen-Inverness railway line and Denburn by-pass: the top level becomes a park raised up to the same level as Union Terrace to make access easier; part of the gardens remained sunken, with the railway running under that; and finally the suppressed Denburn flowing in a culvert beneath it all.  As it happens, these proposals have been rejected several times, just like the original idea by Tom Scott Sutherland was before the war.

The first modern-era scheme came from Gordon Cullen, the well-known urban designer who came to Aberdeen in 1985 when the Scottish Development Agency invited his consultancy, Price & Cullen, to undertake a study of the city centre.  The brief was to examine Union Terrace Gardens, with a view to roofing over the railway line and the Denburn Link road, as well as increasing the size of the city’s “green lung”, and remaking connections across the valley of the Denburn.  Cullen’s recommendations were rejected, but his ideas were seized upon by Ian Wood.

In fact, re-shaping this area has become something of an idée fixee for Ian Wood, a local businessman.  His first attempt to transform the Gardens came in 1987 under the guise of the Aberdeen Beyond 2000 campaign, where a committee of local business and civic interests attempted to masterplan the city centre to promote economic growth.  Wood was chairman of the group, but Aberdeen Beyond 2000 failed to gain much traction, so nothing was built.

Gordon Cullen’s and Aberdeen Beyond 2000’s failures were followed by the Aberdeen City Centre Partnership’s unsuccessful 1991 “Heart of Aberdeen” scheme, promoted by a mixture of business and public figures.  A few years later came the £30 million Millennium Square project of 1997, which once again proposed to irrevocably alter the Gardens – but a Lottery bid for funds to create a giant glass-roofed winter garden alongside Union Terrace came to nothing. 

By now you can tell that a pattern is developing … yet Wood’s preoccupation wasn’t forgotten.  He was interviewed by Jeremy Cresswell for the book “North Sea Oil Moguls” in 2005, and spoke about his ambition, a massive collective enterprise to improve the city – “When I was chairing Grampian Enterprise, I saw the revamp of Union Terrace Gardens as one thing that might have a huge impact.  It’s that scale of enterprise that’s lacking.  It might still come.”

The latest iteration of the “City Garden Project”, known until recently as the “City Square Project”, was launched by Ian Wood at a press conference in November 2008.  He pledged £50 million towards the new scheme to redevelop the Gardens, although that only meets part of the anticipated cost.  In fact, on the City Garden group’s own figures, the project will cost £140 million.  Much of that will come from “Tax Incremental Financing”, which means that increased business rates will pay for it.  That must raise anxieties amongst Aberdeen’s hard-pressed businesses.

The project has taken three years to reach this point, where a design competition has yielded six schemes.  Now, the extent of the proposed transformation is clear.  There is the serious matter of destroying the city centre’s only green lung, and chopping down many handsome trees: each of the six schemes reduces the extent of greenery in order to form large areas of hard landscaping.

In several schemes, the gardens become more like Castle Terrace in Edinburgh, creating a “plaza” on top where farmers’ markets, carnival jugglers and political rallies can do their respective piece.  Yet the north-easterly aspect of Union Terrace is ill-suited to public gatherings, and creating a vast open space will open the Terrace up to the biting wind which howls in from the North Sea.  The sunken form of the current gardens provides very necessary shelter.

If you’re dead set on creating a City Square, you should first consider that Aberdeen already has a large urban plaza, at the knuckle of Union Street and King Street, and it was the hub of the city’s life for hundreds of years: the Castlegate.  The City Garden scheme aims to create “a civic space for major outdoor events, gatherings, festivals and concerts”.  Perhaps the Castlegate could be better utilised?

Creating a “cosmopolitan city centre café quarter” is another aim of the City Garden Project, yet nearby Belmont Street has innumerable coffee shops.  The proposal also aims to create “an inspirational building to house art and artists, sculptures and sculptors, dance and dancers, music and musicians.”  Yet just across the road from Union Terrace Gardens lie His Majesty’s Theatre, plus the city’s art galleries. 

It is also telling that Peacock Visual Arts had a scheme to build a new gallery in the Gardens: it had received full planning permission, secured £9.5 million of funding and was scheduled to break ground late November 2009… before being rejected by the city councillors once Ian Wood’s proposals broke cover.  It seems that a realistic prospect was sacrificed for an unbuildable vision.

The City Garden scheme certainly doesn’t have broad support - a majority voted “no” in the public consultation exercise - yet at the launch of the project in 2008, First Minister Alex Salmond said: “I cannot emphasise more strongly that for anything like this to happen and to be able to harness public funds it has to have the support of folk in the North-east, and Aberdonians in particular.”

Perhaps the final word should go to Professor Robin Webster, whose students looked at the Union Terrace Gardens “problem” many times.  Webster wrote a letter to the P&J, “The schemes propose an all or nothing approach, whereas some more modest links across the road and railway, along with redesigned graded access from the perimeter, could resolve the problems without sacrificing the gardens themselves.”  Judging by other letters to the local papers, it seems that many Aberdonians hope that this proposal will go the way of previous schemes…

Postscript:  And so it came to pass.  On 22nd August 2012, Aberdeen City Council rejected the Ian Wood scheme by 22 votes to 20, and the day after, Wood retracted his offer of £50m.  You can be sure, though, that the scheme will resurface some day, in another form…

It’s summertime on the east coast of Scotland.  The weather is close and muggy, yet with nothing on TV but repeats of Reg Vardy’s “Genocide on the Buses”; the cinemas screening a Disnae film featuring a grumpy Connolly Rex and three miniature ginger John Gordon Sinclairs; and the capital full of a desire for comedy - but empty of streetcars - it’s time once again to look north of the Central Belt.  That's where the real news is breaking…

I’ve written before about the awkward relationship between Dundee and Aberdeen: with experience of both, I can’t help but compare them.  Comparisons are invidious and all that... but the two share the same rivalry as Edinburgh and Glasgow, and despite only 60 miles’ worth of Scotland lying between them, their advocates believe they are a world apart.  Experience teaches that they’re not, yet today’s developments in the Union Terrace Gardens fiasco have shown up the gulf between their ambitions.

An industrial bypass
A recent trip along the North Deeside Road at Peterculter, in the city’s western suburbs, revealed that the former International School is still standing empty, having been decanted to make way for the Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route.  Despite many expensively-won compulsory purchases, and despite the glittering prize of Mr Trump’s “best golf course in the world” as a destination just beyond the planned new Don crossing north of the city, the AWPR is no further forward.

It’s ironic that the International School, with a terrific range of modern facilities, and sitting on a beautiful wooded site in the Dee Valley, lies empty while nothing happens on the by-pass – whilst inner city state schools crumble.

I have an ongoing project which relates to the Modernist factories strung along Dundee’s Kingsway, and the recent demolition of NCR’s former cash machine plant at Gourdie was another waypoint along that journey.  The bypass itself is working fine, but the empty factories which have been demolished over the past few years (two NCR plants, Low & Bonar’s head office, Valentine's greetings cards factory, Bonar Long transformers), and the empty units which still stand (William Lows’ former HQ, William Halleys) tell their own story. 

The city still needs industrial regeneration, to balance the arts, cultural and educational work which is going on: the newest hope is that wind turbine manufacturing will take root in the docks.

Retail
Both the Overgate in Dundee, and Union Square in Aberdeen, appear to be doing OK, despite the double dip recession... but while the Murraygate and High Street in Dundee have been pedestrianised and prettified, the granite mile of Union Street in Aberdeen is still sorely in need of regeneration.  Over the past few years, retailers such as Jaeger, Mothercare, Bruce Millars’ music store, and E&M’s department store have shut down or moved out.  Charity shops and estate agents have taken up some units, but there are many rental voids... which leads you to suspect that the focus in Aberdeen is wrong.  Perhaps folk have been distracted by Union Terrace Gardens.

By contrast, folk are starting to accept that the efforts of Mike Galloway, the city development director in Dundee, are improving the waterfront.  Acceptance is grudging, because the city centre has been in chaos for months as the approach roads to the road bridge are realigned, and Tayside House is demolished.  However, setting aside those grudges and the agendas of provincial politics – I reckon that eventually Galloway will be mentioned in the same breath as Mackison (who laid out the Whitehall Crescent area) and Thomson (who built the City Square and eastern suburbs Taybank and Craigie).  All three prove that you need someone wearing a big hat named “city architect, planner, engineer or development director”... if you want cohesion in urban design.

Culture
The DCA - Dundee Contemporary Arts centre - emerged when Seagate Printmakers’ Workshop outgrew its premises, and various agencies clubbed together to build a set of galleries, studios, cinemas and a restaurant on the Nethergate.  When Aberdeen’s Peacock Printmakers tried to do the same thing, commissioning a new gallery in the “Trainie Park” on Union Terrace, their plans were derailed by Ian Wood.  The ongoing circus surrounding Union Terrace Gardens does Aberdeen no favours at all, and in fact the decision taken todayby the city’s councillors to finally kill the scheme (which was what prompted this article) took far long to happen.

Similarly, while Dundee’s McManus Galleries recently re-opened after a thorough revamp by Page & Park, Aberdeen’s Art Galleries on Schoolhill are tired and badly in need of refurbishment – but plans seem to have stalled, once again lacking funding.  As with Peacock, there is a lack of money but perhaps underlying that is a lack of will to make things happen.  Finally there is the V&A, and despite scepticism in the city at the marketing campaign which has wiped out the “Beanotown”-style marketing of Dundee in an attempt to market the city to the more sophisticated international art clique, the project has gained some traction. 

Its real test may be to attract revenue once it’s been open for a few years.

Energy
I wrote elsewhere about Conran Roche’s 1989 scheme for a North Sea oil visitor attraction in Aberdeen: called Bravo, it was intended to be built off Beach Boulevarde, but fell victim to all the usual funding problems, and a downturn in the oil industry.  The private sector were reluctant to foot the entire bill, far less seed capital, but the council didn't have the means to kickstart the project.  Now it seems that Son of Bravo, the Aberdeen Energy Futures Centre – designed by RMJM, is heading the same way for the same reasons.

The fear must be that when the oil industry winds down, it will leave nothing of value or merit in Aberdeen – apart from the Piper Alpha memorial.  Here is a scenario worth considering: when natives crow about how well the city has done over the past 35 years, Aberdeen’s detractors usually scoff and ask what will happen when the oil runs out?  The truth is that new fields continue to be discovered, so the oil may last for another 35 years; yet it’s possible that demand will fade before the oil does.  The world has shifted against carbon, after all, and all the new hydrogen fuel cell, wave power and solar PV technology hasn't been developed to no avail.

Against that background, moves to invest in alternative energy through fabrication plants at Dundee and Methil seem prescient.

Media
Although no-one would have expected it even ten years ago, the newspapers in both cities are now owned by Dundee’s DC Thomson, the famously patriarchal yet anti-union publishing company.  They attract fierce loyalty among their employees perhaps because, as George Rosie wrote, sentimentality lies at the heart of their appeal.  To their credit, Thomsons rescued Aberdeen Journals from a lingering death of falling circulation and plummeting standards of journalism – and perhaps it’s better to have a Scottish-owned media rather than relying on the Murdoch press.  Thomsons are in the process of retrenching, having closed their West Ward printworks in Dundee: it isn’t inconceivable that their facilities in Aberdeen will also reduce.

Contractors
W.H. Brown Construction went into administration a couple of days ago: it joins a list of large Dundee contractors who have gone bust in the past few years.  A previous article mentioned Charles Gray, and since their demise Taycon, Torith and several others have gone, too.  This tells its own story about the state of the construction industry, although other far older firms such as Melville Dundas failed during the “good times”… as did firms in the land between the two cities, Burness of Montrose being the most notable example.

In Aberdeen, you only have the choice between three large contractors: Morrisons, Robertsons and Mansells (formerly Hall & Tawse).  One is technically an Inverness firm, another from Elgin, and Mansells have recently closed down much of their operations in the city, including the well-regarded Hall & Tawse joinery shops.  Thankfully, the smaller contractors in the area, such as Bancon and CHAP appear to be weathering the storm better.

Envoi
The four best-known development proposals of the past decade have all been vigorously opposed: the by-pass (Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route); the Peacock-sponsored Arts Centre; the various Union Terrace “City Gardens” schemes; and Trump’s golf course at Menie.  Another contentious scheme is Stewart Milne’s move to relocate Aberdeen Football Club from Pittodrie to a new stadium at Westhill – which has failed more than once to gain planning approval and stumbled again this week.

All this perhaps hints at a deeper psycho-social issue, not unique to Aberdonians, but part of the Scots mindset: the self-fulfilling “doomed to failure” prophecy.  So many things are dismissed as “just a load of shite” ... now, make it thus.  Perhaps allied to that, the opposition to each scheme has a nasty habit of resorting to ad hominem criticism: witness the personal attacks on Donald Trump, Stewart Milne and Ian Wood from the respective “anti” campaigns, and more recently the online petition by the “pro” side to unseat the council leader Barney Crockett because his administration voted against the City Gardens.  They have gone beyond criticisms of policy into claims of incompetence.

The point I make is that in Dundee, the V&A gained lots of public support and while there were critical voices, no-one that I’m aware of tried to block it or petition against it.  Similarly, the Waterfront regeneration hasn’t been subject to planning appeals or court injunctions.  Yet (for the sake of balance) Dundonians are just as thrawn, and given the chance will drive potential investment away from the city before it evens arrives – such as the Ford motor parts factory which hadn’t even been built when the unions began arguing about working practices.  The men from Dearborn, Michigan were perturbed, and if I recall correctly, the factory was built instead at Bridgend in Wales.

The central paradox in considering Dundee and Aberdeen appears to lie in the relationship between wealth and action: while there are many wealthy individuals in Aberdeen, the city council appears to be too broke to make things happen.  It has closed down swimming baths, ice rinks and libraries, and doesn’t have the cash to build grand projects such as Union Terrace Gardens, far less doing the essentials.  Seemingly unrelated to that, property and land prices in the city seem to be holding up well.

Dundee, on the other hand, is looked down upon by some as being a poor place (“you’ve only got one shoe”, being a favourite jibe of football crowds).  Yet redevelopment goes ahead, regardless of the fact that property and land prices haven’t held up that well.  Perhaps, despite the fond belief of Aberdeen’s capitalists that the American model of success based on extraction and consumption still holds, a city also needs belief in its own capacity for reinvention.  Stewart Milne appeared on TV tonight bemoaning the fact that the council lacked vision: in fact, it lacks money and underlying that is a deeper lack of self-belief.

In case you’re wondering, the dragon and the leopard are Dundee’s and Aberdeen’s respective crest bearers on their civic coats of arms.  If it came down to a square go, I suspect the dragon would “take” the leopard.  While comparisons may be invidious, they’re easier to resist than civic stereotypes…

Cumnock and the Doon Valley badly need a new impetus.  If you can leave the M74 motorway for the A70, you soon pass through Glespin, with its wall of grim sheds which lie derelict after use by Ramages as a distribution centre.  Next comes Muirkirk, its boarded-up shops with empty lots between are book-ended by dereliction: and at 5pm on a March Saturday, the main street is patrolled by wee neds, who are friendly enough but wander across the road with blithe indifference to the coal trucks that hammer up and down it.  Many miles later, Cumnock has a number of local government buildings, which contribute a higher than average amount to the local economy, the story of so many post-industrial communities.

Yet there is tremendous mineral wealth here still: the road passes several large opencast coal mines.  They feed a railhead at Killoch, on the site of a deep mine which Thatcher’s government shut down; nearby is the site of the Barony Colliery, another superpit of the 1950’s which was closed prematurely, and stripped of everything bar its “A” frame headstock.  It is a token left in a wasteland.  After Killoch, you can leave the A70 and turn southwards at Drongan, and head towards Dalmellington, passing the gates of yet another opencast.

You quickly leave what civilisation there is behind … the scruffy houses on the edge of town give way to fields of sheep with grubby coats, then a few miles later, the Dalmellington road climbs into the uplands, and evidence of former coal mining activity is everywhere.  This is not the couthy Burns country of Valentines’ postcards, but one of the poorest and most run-down areas in Britain.  Where I’m headed lies in the dead heart of East Ayrshire, and would surely be a stopping-off point on a modern version of Edwin Muir’s “Scottish Journey”.  This area certainly fits Muir’s characterisation of a country becoming lost to history: East Ayrshire takes in some of the oldest industrial landscapes in the world, yet today most are derelict.

A few miles further, and you reach Patna.  Looking south-eastwards along the main road from the bank of the River Doon, you spot an old furnace clinker bing and a couple of tall chimney stacks.  These remind you why people settled at Patna: it’s located on the very edge of the Ayrshire coalfield, and coal, fireclay, iron ore and limestone all lay nearby.  Coal mining thrived in this area, and brought in its wake ironworks and brickworks: the Dalmellington Iron Company built Dunsakin – a few miles south of Patna – as an ironworks in 1848, and in due course it became part of Bairds & Dalmellington, in 1885.  In Patna itself, its cluster of Victorian buildings sit on the river, and beyond lie streets of inter-war maisonettes, built for the miners and ironworkers who once worked for Bairds & Dalmellington. 

The ironworks at Dunaskin had three good decades, but by 1921 demand had dropped due to competition from Lanarkshire, and this was compounded by the fact that the iron smelters at Dunaskin were old-fashioned and in need of serious investment.  A strike put the “tin hat” on matters, and the ironworks shut.  The furnaces were demolished in 1927-8, then a few years later, the site was redeveloped as a brickworks.   The nearby Dunaskin Washery was retained to serve nearby collieries, and other ironworks buildings were adapted, such as the iron furnaces’ blowing house, a handsome Georgian affair which became the location for the brickmaking machinery: a conveyor fed ground clay from the mills at the back of the site.  The brickmakers built a transverse-arch kiln in 1928, then added a 24 chamber Belgian Kiln, built in 1935 by William Cleghorn of Newmains. 

The brickworks became part of Scottish Brick Corporation around the same time that the coal industry was nationalised, but by 1976, the brickworks had suffered the same fate as the ironworks, and two-and-a-half million bricks lay stockpiled, unsold, before the works shut down.   A decade on, plans were laid for an industrial museum: ten years later again, a heritage centre was developed to tell the story of the industries in the Doon Valley using the remaining structures on the site.  It suffered from its remoteness, and in 2005 the museum failed after the local council withdrew its funding.  Patna is a remote place, so low visitor numbers should have come as no surprise.

Apparently Scottish Coal still have a right of reversion, and the site could end up being developed for opencast: meantime, the buildings lie abandoned and have decayed dramatically.  Nearby Patna has nothing to live for, either.  As an exercise, I tried and failed to find accommodation here: the hotels in Patna lie boarded up, there are hardly any B&B’s within a 20 mile radius, and those which I phoned weren’t interested in opening.  They merely gave me the number for someone else, who then did the same.  It’s clear that tourism is not the answer: yet rather than hold these places up as examples of blight, candidates for the next Carbuncles, or have government officials refer slyly to areas of high SIMD (the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivations, the latest euphemism for poverty), something radical could be done.

These worn-out towns and villages should be bulldozed.  They’ve served their purpose.  They were built to serve the ironworks and deep mines of the Ayrshire coalfield, but those have gone, so folk should be resettled where the work is today.  Scottish Coal have several vast opencasts in this part of Ayrshire, so perhaps a new energy-based town could be created, becoming a centre of excellence for clean coal and biomass technology.  Coal comes in by rail, as do trees from economic forestry in Galloway: power is generated, raw materials are processed, research jobs are created, a cluster of companies builds machinery to capitalise on the results.  Anderson Strathclyde disappeared when the deep coal industry died; but Terex succeeds because surface mining needs earthmovers, and so forth.

Alongside renewables like wind and wave power (which have many detractors thanks to their inefficiency and visual impact); Scotland has hydro power (although development came to a halt in the 1960’s when the vested interests of landowners took over from the interests of all); nuclear stations (again, heavily criticised for their environmental impact); biomass and coal provide a fourth leg (both decried as dirty power, mind you).  There is no such thing as a perfect source of energy – every method we have can be attacked for its impact, so it makes sense to spend money and create jobs in trying to improve the efficiency and reduce the impact of each one.  Perhaps carbon capture and storage, alongside desulphurisation and ground remediation, could be further developed here?

A new town would have a powerful reason to exist, whereas at the moment, money is spent in trying to improve old housing, schools and facilities in dying communities.  The Coalfields Regeneration Trust has granted cash to East Ayrshire in the past, but you might never fully solve the environmental, educational and health problems in these towns unless you catalyse new jobs.   Yet playing Devil’s advocate – surely moving entire communities smacks of Statism, and the failed socialist planning of the Fifties and Sixties?  No, because firstly Scotland’s government has pinned its hopes on energy sector jobs – offshore oil service jobs in Aberdeen, platforms and wind energy in Dundee and Methil, putative attempts at carbon capture at Longannet in Fife.

Secondly, there is no long term future here as things stand, because the small towns of East Ayrshire only exist historically thanks to the coal and iron companies which sponsored them.  All these communities are in some sense “artificial”, and it would be the most natural thing to the men who built them to see them wax and wane as we draw on the resources of the land which lies around them.  Building a new town which lived synergistically with new jobs might be the stimulus East Ayrshire needs.  Meantime, Dunaskin is slowly rotting away, one of few relics left of the Scottish ironmaking, and Scottish brickmaking, industries.

All photos copyright Mark Chalmers.