RECENTLY comedian Jason Manford created a brief controversy when he stated on social media that even if he sold out all his gigs at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe he would still make a loss. Such was the cost of renting a flat in the city in August. While Manford’s complaint was specific, it speaks to a larger housing crisis in Edinburgh. A crisis which is particularly acute in the Old Town—James Connolly’s Edinburgh.
In 1894, James Connolly stood for election in the St Giles ward. The constituency including the Cowgate. Connolly’s campaign focused on local issues with housing featuring prominently. Demanding new housing with rents capped to cover building and maintenance costs. He also opposed plans for more one bedroom flats arguing: “What is wanted in the slums is more fresh air, more sunshine, more elbow room, larger houses with more apartments and cheaper rents.” Addressing the constituency’s Irish population directly he said: “Perhaps they will see that the landlord who grinds his peasants on a Connemara estate, and the landlord who rack-rents them in a Cowgate slum, are brethren in fact and deed. Perhaps they will realise that the Irish worker who starves in an Irish cabin and the Scots worker who is poisoned in an Edinburgh garret are brothers with one hope and destiny.”
Connolly’s early campaigning on housing was part of a broader movement in the Old Town at the time, which included people like Patrick Geddes. They argued the area should be improved for the people who lived there. Not for people to be cleared out and the area then improved for others. This work of improving the buildings and surrounding areas should be done for local people, but also by local people. Instead of more overcrowded housing, Connolly said it would be better to create ‘either an immense playground for the children, with wash-house and drying-green for the inhabitants in general, or else, another public garden, planted with such trees and shrubs as would grow there.’
Changes
One of the things I have always loved about the Old Town is how dynamic and cosmopolitan it is. Always changing. The buildings and the people. Some of the change I liked. Some not so much. But there was always a familiar feel to it. I have no time for nostalgia and clearly there have been improvements in health and living conditions. But recent changes are of a different order and have altered the experience of the city, for the citizens, for the worse.
The people running Edinburgh today no longer see their priority as being to provide services for the city’s residents. They view their role as targeting inward flows—of people and investment. Edinburgh, they tell us, is a ‘Global City.’ Competing endlessly with other ‘Global Cities’ they boast of ‘selling’ Edinburgh to the world. This has led to the prioritisation of growth over all else. Growth in the number of residents, of students, of tourists, of profits. The changes to how the city is run and who it is run for are damaging the experience of the place for local people and for visitors. Inevitably this boosterism has led to growths in other areas too. Child poverty, homelessness, drug deaths, mental health problems to name a few.
Today an increasing amount of public space is becoming private space—every inch to be closed off and monetised. Large parts of the city centre now resemble gated complexes. Spaces that were previously open to all are now the private preserve of the privileged. Both open space and old buildings are replaced with cold, vertical glass boxes, which cast vast shadows over the streets and seem to look down, sneering at those below. Architecturally the city has had a facelift. But it looks like it went to Turkey to get it. It looks vaguely like what it is meant to be, but not convincingly so.
The problem here is not just that the latest feats of architectural engineering do nothing for the aesthetics of the city. Edinburgh’s Old Town increasingly resembles what anthropologist Marc Auge calls ‘non-places.’ Crowded with people, busy people, coming and going, unconnected consumers. This is a break from the culture of place developed over time. Built on everyday reciprocal interactions and relationships. In my adult lifetime almost all the tenements would have been council housing for working class families, now almost none are. Social and family networks, of solidarity and support, are displaced. The settled population has been replaced with a transient population. Of short-term let accommodation, students and properties bought as investments not homes. Housing now owned by private equity firms and other absentee investors.
Where once this area was home of Irish immigrants it is now home to many new immigrants from all over the world, part of what Alain Badiou calls the ‘nomadic proletariat.’ You see the middle class still need nannies for their children and waiters for their tables. It is easy for us to understand the political and economic forces at play here. For the other great growth in Edinburgh is low paid, precarious work and high rent, poor—and also precarious—housing. Our ancestors would understand that.
Sense of loss
For the Irish community this loss of place is profound. A large percentage of Irish families in Edinburgh will have had family members who lived in the Old Town at one point. Many of our parents and grandparents were born and died in the area. Many of us were born here. So the area is part of our personal, family history and also our communal, social history.
For a city so obsessed with its own development and expansion it is remarkable how it deliberately ignores and erases previous phases of development and expansion. The canal, the railways, the roads, the buildings. That is to say all that made today’s development possible. They were all built by someone. This erasure is because all development is simultaneously a destruction. Edinburgh is a city of Empire. The built environment reflects this. Its history is the history of the dominant, the exploiter. So it should not surprise us that our working class history, of the Irish, the immigrant, the marginalised, has been erased. We come from the other side of history.
There’s another reason this loss of connection to place should matter to us. It echoes an enduring question for the Irish in Edinburgh. Is this our home? And if so, what does it mean to lose it? Part of our identity is formed by place, where we were born, where we grow up, where we consider home. For the Irish in Edinburgh, our claims to authentically be ‘of Edinburgh’ were always challenged. This challenge was compounded by our class position in the city—‘the low Irish.’ Failure to address these issues in a serious and comprehensive way undoubtedly feature in our displacement and subsequent erasure. If the city doesn’t speak of this history who will? Who will speak for our dead, our ghosts?
In 1892, Connolly’s mother, Mary, died in Alison’s Court on the north side of the Cowgate. Alison’s Court is long gone. Despite a local campaign to see the council owned land and adjacent buildings developed for the public good it was sold and it recently became the site of a Virgin Hotel. If you plan to see Jason Manford’s show during the Edinburgh Festival according to the hotel website a set lunch is £35 and the chef’s menu comes in at £75 per person. All served in the hotel restaurant which is unironically named, ‘The Commons Club.’ A one-bedroom suite, for one night, in August will cost you £1565. Situated directly opposite the Cowgate’s oldest building—the 16th century Magdalen Chapel (above)—Richard Branson’s shiny, soulless, overpriced hotel stands as the perfect metaphor for what Edinburgh is becoming.
Jim Slaven lives in Edinburgh and is a member of the James Connolly Society. His book, Solidarity Not Charity, will be published later this year
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