Lewis Macdonald

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Creativity is the Key

Lewis Macdonald - MSP

Nothing ever stays the same, and words are no exception. The original meaning of genius is a spirit: it survives best in the story of Aladdin and the genie of the magic lamp. The modern meaning of genius, on the other hand, is a person of quite exceptional creativity or intelligence, and the best answer to a problem is quite likely to be an ingenious solution.

The meaning of locus, the Latin for place, has changed less over the years: it is the root word for location, locality and local. What we want for Aberdeen City Centre is the most ingenious local plan we can find.

We do not need to produce a genie from a magic lamp, but we do need to think creatively about how to make the most of what we’ve got. We also have to recognise that anyone seeking to reshape a precious locality has to work with the grain of local opinion, which means recognising that Aberdeen City Centre is not just another development opportunity. It is the beating heart of the wider City and region, providing homes, jobs and leisure for thousands of local people.

That is important, because we live in a democratic society. In such a society, it is not the genie or even the genius who must prevail; it is the citizen. What is done with our public assets and our public realm must be done with the consent of the citizen. A successful City certainly needs active and creative leadership; but real leaders will seek to persuade the citizens, rather than disregard their views and do what they want anyway.

Two hundred years ago, rich and powerful men in Aberdeen drove through a vision of change which formed a whole new axis for the City, building a strategic route from the Bridge of Don along the new roads of King Street, Union Street and Holburn Street to the Bridge of Dee. Their efforts were supported by a generation of architects who had access to cheap and plentiful granite, and who showed considerable genius in its use. Their creations are with us to this day.

Those rich and powerful men bankrupted the City. That mattered a bit less then than it would now, because the financial solvency or insolvency of the municipal corporations of the day had a direct effect on relatively few people, but, nonetheless, it damaged the good name and reputation of Aberdeen as a whole and took many years to put right.

Municipal corporations were reformed and made accountable in the nineteenth century, and grew into town and City councils with a huge range of social and economic responsibilities in the twentieth. Aberdeen City Council today is the main provider of primary and secondary education, social services and public infrastructure, with a workforce of thousands and an annual budget of hundreds of millions. Whatever this generation does to improve our City, bankruptcy is not an option.

The Union Street axis of the early 1800s remains the key to the City Centre to this day. Few other British cities possess such a broad and elegant boulevard, running straight as an arrow for a full mile from east end to west, disguising the natural contours of the land with viaducts so imposing that many of its citizens don’t even know they’re there. Union Street remains one of Aberdeen’s most precious assets.

It is unusual for a City to have its main street within easy walking distance of both a busy commercial harbour and a user-friendly beach, a mile and more of golden sands between the green acres of the links on the one hand and shallow sea with safe summer bathing on the other. Aberdeen has made its living from that sea, directly or indirectly, since the burgh was founded over eight centuries ago. Any vision of the City’s future has to encompass the links, the beach and the harbour too.

Remaining true to the history and the vital spirit of Aberdeen is critical. Nostalgia, on the other hand, runs the risk of holding us back. Many people of a certain age still think of Union Street first and foremost as the home of celebrated local shops like Esslemont & McIntosh and Watt & Grant’s. But Union Street will never again be the only place to shop, any more than Aberdeen Beach will be the summer destination of choice for sun-seekers from Glasgow or Aberdeen Harbour will be the heart of Scotland’s deep-sea fisheries.

Spain now leads the way in the beach holidays market, while Peterhead is where the white fish are landed. Much of Aberdeen’s shopping is now done in shopping malls to the north and south of Union Street, or a mile or two away at Berryden, Kittybrewster or Bridge of Dee. There is no point in wishing those malls and retail parks had not been built, just as there is no point in pining for the sunny days when there was no room to play football on the silver City’s golden sands.

Aberdeen has done better than many regional Centres in keeping most of its shopping in the City itself, even if it is more widely dispersed now than a generation ago. In spite of edge-of-town supermarkets, Aberdeen has not faced out-of-town shopping competition on the scale of, for example, the challenge to Glasgow from Braehead. When Union Square opened for business last year, its commercial objective was not to take business away from Union Street, but to have local consumers spend their disposable income in Aberdeen rather than taking it off to Dundee or Glasgow, or ordering the latest fashions on-line. None of that competition from outwith the City is about to go away.

If we accept that Union Street remains the key to the City Centre, but that it will never again have a monopoly on local retail spending, we have to think seriously about what else can restore its sense of pride and purpose. We are not the first City in Scotland to think seriously about this issue in recent years. Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee have each seen the City Centre become the focus for the cultural life of the City and its regional hinterland. It is time for Aberdeen to head in the same direction.

Edinburgh is a world City, because of its architectural heritage and because of its festival culture. The Castle Rock has been there since time immemorial, but the globally-famous festival and fringe came from a good idea for ending the age of austerity after the Second World War.  Earlier resistance to proposals for over-development preserved Princes Street Gardens as the green heart of Auld Reekie.  In the age of festivals, they provide a natural stage at the heart of a theatrical City.

Glasgow’s reinvention as a City of culture has been more recent than Edinburgh’s, but in some ways is even more striking. Glasgow’s Miles Better was the defining slogan, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and the Burrell Collection are the heavyweight cultural attractions, but the City’s creative range continues to grow. Think, for example, of Celtic Connections, a winter music festival that now generates hours of television coverage and attracts folk musicians from around the world.

Dundee is another City dealing with post-industrial challenges and looking for new ways to make a living in the world, but it too has reinvented its City Centre as a stage for the expressive arts. Dundee now has an arts quarter, a short walk from the busiest shops. It has its own repertory theatre and its own contemporary arts Centre, and it is about to become the Scottish second home of the mighty V&A. We need look no further than our nearest City neighbour to see what a creative future for Union Street might look like.

One of the most striking features of Union Square when it opened was the stage it provided for performers in the fantastic space facing outwards onto Guild Street. Coming off the train from Edinburgh on a Thursday evening to find the Red Hot Chilli Pipers entertaining a thousand-strong audience was an unforgettable moment. One of the most ingenious additions offered to Aberdeen City Centre in recent years was the Peacock Contemporary Arts Centre designed for Union Terrace Gardens. Its genius was not just in the outstanding quality of design by a world-class architect. It was in locating cultural creativity right at the heart of the City, where it most belongs.

As an elected representative of Aberdeen  and the North East at Holyrood, I  have had many opportunities to consider how Aberdeen is perceived elsewhere in Scotland and further afield, and to discover what other cities do to promote themselves in a fiercely competitive world. Only the most exciting cities will attract the most creative people. Aberdeen has many outstanding qualities, as anyone who lives here already knows. But Aberdeen needs to compete much more effectively in the quality of our cultural life.

This is not because of a lack of creative spirits, appreciative audiences or active promoters. Annie Inglis and Alan Franchi are two exemplars in the recent past who showed by their life and work that the human capital is here aplenty. But the City as a whole has not yet embraced the potential for the creative arts to put us on the map and to draw in yet more creative and expressive people, with all the possibility they bring of generating yet more activity, excitement and interest in the City. That is the next great challenge ahead.

It may be that the Peacock plan to enhance Union Terrace Gardens has gone for good. But we have to think very carefully indeed before we try to turn back the clock on Union Street by transforming the last green glade in Aberdeen City Centre into a multi-storey car park with some bushes on top. Instead we should focus on what we can do to enable a creative Aberdeen, and think about how we use not only Union Terrace Gardens and the wider Union Street area but also our links, our beach, our harbour front and our public parks to that end.

There is a lot more to say about the future of Aberdeen City Centre. A lot needs to be done, in improving the pedestrian experience, the physical infrastructure and connectivity across the City, to name but a few. We should start by seeking to achieve a reputation, not just for graceful granite and engineering excellence, but for expressing the human spirit in ways that resonate with the human experience, whoever you are and wherever you’re from. Whoever can make that happen  will be truly a local genius, and a local hero too.

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