THE former head of Edinburgh City Council's development company has warned the capital will live to regret ditching the firm's controversial plans for an underground shopping mall on Princes Street.
Ian Wall, who quit as chief executive of EDI earlier this year, said the ditching of the "Galleries" scheme earmarked for Princes Street Gardens was the biggest regret of his tenure in the post.
He said Princes Street would continue to slide "down
market" because of the lack of suitable retail space and said Edinburgh was likely to end up with Scotland's equivalent of The Bridges centre in Sunderland.
More than 100 shops were envisaged along most of Princes Street, but the initial plan was fiercely opposed by the city's heritage lobby and thrown out after a public inquiry – then revived when EDI won an appeal at the Court of Session.
Despite leading architect Allan Murray winning an international contest to design a scaled-down scheme, it was unofficially shelved by the city council four years ago and the plans were never revived.
Mr Wall – speaking just days after picking up a lifetime achievement award from Scotland's national architecture centre, the Lighthouse – insists the "beautiful" Galleries scheme should still have gone ahead.
He said: "It would not only have improved the East Gardens enormously but it would have transformed Princes Street and created the opportunity to restore it to a proper regional shopping centre, instead of which it is slowly descending into a tourist-tat street.
"As high-quality retail shifts out of Princes Street, as it is consistently doing, it will continue to move downmarket and we will end up with the sort of street that the Bridges has become.
"The scheme was defeated due to an unwillingness to acknowledge what was really happening. There is a gut reaction in some circles to oppose change.
"There was a need to tackle this problem comprehensively but it hasn't been done, so we will reap what we sow."
Mr Wall stood down from his post at EDI earlier this year after a reported falling-out with senior figures in the new council administration.
Yesterday, The Scotsman revealed plans by a Belfast-based developer, Deramore, to create a new 100-bedroom hotel and a modern department store on the site of two listed buildings on Princes Street.
The development would be the first major scheme to go ahead on Princes Street since the demise of the Galleries project.
The full article contains 415 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
