Fay Young

Welcome back to Edinburgh: you’ll have had your tram?

Berlin town planning with a purpose

Some homecoming.  For a week we explored the most exciting city in Europe. We rode trains, trams and buses to the centre and one sunny day we took the train in the other direction to discover the public housing estate that was inspired by Britain’s first garden cities. We marvelled at the plain good sense of building a housing estate on a train line. What a pity Edinburgh lacks that kind of civic imagination. Or generosity even. You’ll have had your tram Leith?

On the outskirts of Berlin, we walked through autumn trees to see an estate that houses 15,000 people.  Onkel Toms Hutte, designed almost 100 years ago by Bruno Haut and Hugo Haring, could almost be a council estate in Britain if it wasn’t for the bright colours and gardens of mature trees softening, screening and separating the blocks of houses and flats. No litter on the ground. No shutters on the shops either.

But the best part is that these houses are not cut off from the rest of Berlin. Unlike the bleak housing estates that ring almost every British city, Onkel Toms Hutte is connected by a public transport system that really works.

U bahn trains run every five minutes taking people to work, study, play or shop in the city centre. Or just mooch about as we did, wandering from the Bauhaus to the Botanics, going to the theatre and art galleries, rummaging in shops, talking politics in the bar; blurring the line between East and West Berlin.  We could get from the quiet suburb where we were staying with friends into Alexander Platz (a distance of maybe 10 miles, Berlin is a big city) in just over 30 minutes and our tickets could be used on buses and trams too.

Ah, trams.  The point about trams which often seems overlooked in Edinburgh is that they are designed for growing populations in crowded urban environments; they carry more people than buses, they speed through the traffic.  In short, they are fast. Leith Walk is long and congested with buses as well as cars. Sometimes buses sit nose to tail and at rush hour they crawl, crammed with people.  Adding more buses will increase congestion without  solving the transport problem. Leith needs the tram.

I am glad to find the Caledonian Mercury politics writer, Hamish Macdonell, urging city leaders to find the brains and balls to complete the tram line so that it runs as intended from Newhaven to the airport. It’s not exactly the Utopian vision of the early garden city planners but its a hell of a lot better than the council’s present cowardly cop-out.

Green ‘ampelmann’ says go in Berlin

Add comment October 13th, 2010

Island dreams and reality

On summer holidays we dreamed of living on the island.  We picked drift wood on the beach to fire the old Rayburn for the evening meal.  When wind battered the cottage at night we poured whisky and listened to the radio crackling news from the mainland. It was all part of the dream (not the dram as I typed by mistake just now) that lingered even when we went home.

After a week without cars, telly or telephones, the mainland seemed too full of noise and people. Even Mallaig felt metropolitan. Back in Edinburgh, walking the boys to school on grey pavements we had happy memories of  wild Canna where children had rocks and sandhills and fields to explore, free from traffic, free from television and (best of all) free from parents and their fears of predatory strangers.

But while we nursed the dream, John Campbell brought us down to earth. You can’t escape reality on an island where childhood freedom comes to an end with secondary school. The boat which took us home also carried away the children when they outgrew the old stone primary school by the beach. In those days the nearest secondary school was at Fort William,  a long boat and train journey away. Now there is one in Mallaig but   once children leave the island they tend not to return to bring up their own children there.

John and Margaret had no children of their own though they took a keen interest in the children of the islanders who have kept the school going sometimes with a single pupil.

In the end John gave his island away. Without heirs he did not want it to become a playground of absentee landlords. Which of course is why Ray has been going back to Canna, revisiting our island dream as he researched the book that is launched today.  His story of John’s life does not duck realities of  hardships that faced John and Margaret in their long life on Canna. But I am glad to say it is also full of  dreams and the spirit of adventure that took them there in the first place.

Now read on…The Man who Gave Away His Island is published by Birlinn today.

Add comment September 1st, 2010