REVIEW AND ANALYSIS 49 under-population of the historic core followed. As with so many places in postwar Britain, there was a strong political appetite for renewal and regeneration programmes. The doyens of post-war planning, Sir Patrick Abercrombie and architect Derek Plumstead, produced A Civic Survey for the Royal Burgh of Edinburgh in 1949. This masterplan for the city proposed wholescale clearances of working-class areas. The scale of the transformational vision was breath-taking. Most of the Old Town with the James Craig’s first New Town were gone. Urban motorways were to be rammed through the Waverley Valley. Leith was to be cleared and turned into a new industrial area. Inner suburban areas cleared. It was on a large-scale and certainly was not adaptive. However, as the appetite for urban replacement was still ripe, fresh awareness was entering in the planning lexicon. In 1970, led by Scotland’s architectural advisor Robert Matthew, a known modernist, a conference was organised to highlight the decay and plight of the neo-classical New Town. The three types of transformation identified by Perez de Arce underpinned this emerging awareness, especially the need for transformation of inhabited buildings. This shifted the political agenda and led to state aid being made available for the care and conservation of Georgian Edinburgh. A publication under the same name became a bible for conservation professionals and enthusiasts alike in Edinburgh and in many other cities with Georgian architecture. In 1995, Edinburgh was inscribed as a World Heritage Site covering the Old and New Towns together with Dean village. This signalled the end of renewal and replacement as the urban norm and reaffirmed the direction of travel towards a conservation-led, adaptive reuse approach: in the new norm, repair and the recycling of the historic environment were strategic objectives, and planning tools now included the recognition of intrinsic cultural values and the reinforcement of character. One can see many examples and approaches to transformative care and reuse. There is perhaps no better example than Charlotte Square, the One of the longest-running preservation battles in the World Heritage Site is finally coming to a conclusion, with the lease of Thomas Hamilton’s spectacular Royal High School to a preservation trust in 2023 and now a Heritage Fund grant for its conversion to become Scotland’s new National Centre of Music (Photo: Jonathan Taylor) Greek Revival architecture dominates the vista up Princes Street towards Calton Hill: the inscription of Edinburgh’s Old and New Towns together with Dean village as a World Heritage Site in 1995 signalled the end of renewal and replacement as the norm. (Photo: Jonathan Taylor) pinnacle of neo-classical Edinburgh. Long since one of the most desirable addresses in the city, it was built for the elite of the day. Over a relatively short period of time, it changed
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