CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » General Edinburgh
"Plan to hire out ‘permanent events space’ on Meadows"
(4 posts)-
Posted 9 years ago #
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I think the vagaries of common good land are such that, as the arbiter, it is for the council to define what is "in the common good".
The Waverley Market (as discussed recently on A. N. Other thread) is common good land. It's probably not everyone's idea of a common good for it to be a shopping centre and definitely nobody's (except David Murray) idea of common good to lease it out at a paltry
£11p a year for hundreds of years. But the council has the final say. Much of the streets and open spaces of the New Town are common good, but it was the council that decided it was "in the common good" to hand it to the unaccountable and unelected body Essential Edinburgh as a business improvement district.It's probably very easy for the council to create a permanent performance space on the Meadows and define it as in the common good by pointing to the money it (might) generate (bearing in mind the council has a pretty miserable record of getting money out of the common good land) and also that it in theory reduces the pressure on the rest of the park.
Posted 9 years ago # -
"Much of the streets and open spaces of the New Town are common good"
I doubt if George Street is Commin Good - in a legal sense.
Pretty sure the squares at each end aren't - or owned by CEC in any way.
Posted 9 years ago # -
I doubt if George Street is Commin Good - in a legal sense.
That's the nub of it. There seems to be no actual definition of what constitutes Common Good, the closest being that "it's on the Common Good" register. There's the problem then that most councils aren't interested in, or resourced sufficiently to maintain accurate and comprehensive common good registers, and it's often in their interest to claim things aren't common good that should be in order to sell them for development (see also Waverley Market, the council tried to was its' hands of it by citing some old acts claiming they had long ago transferred ownership). But... there's a strong argument for the City Centre streets being common good because ye olde burgh of Edinburgh used the common good fund to acquire the land of the original New Town and then feud it out to individual developers to actually get Craig's plan built. (This was before planning regulations existed, so to get something built to a masterplan you had to use feu charters to impose the conditions of the plan on the developer. The same was done by Earl of Moray for the "Moray Feu" and Sir George Warrender for the Warrender Park feu, what we now call Marchmont, this is why the buildings in these areas are so homogeneous and consistent in their appearance). Anyway, if the land was acquired as common good, and has not been struck off of the common good, it is still arguably common good (even if it's not on the current register)
You're right the Squares aren't common good, they're owned by the owners of the premises around the squares. The council leases SAS for £1 a year from the owners, and then subleases it for £1 a year to Essential Edinburgh. It was the council that stumped up the ~£3m to renovate and open the gardens. There was a similar plan for CS, but that fell through recently when (surprise, surprise) the offshore property fund that had promised the millions for redevelopment didn't cough up. The council then followed suit and withdrew its funding.
There's a map of the lands acquired for the New Town by common good on page 2 here; http://www.andywightman.com/docs/commongoodguide_v6.pdf
Posted 9 years ago #
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