Aug 212012
 

‘What lies beneath?’ is a question which should be asked about Union Terrace Gardens, not least by those who wish to build underground structures there.  Aside from the roots of 250-year-old trees and rich soil which helps prevent city centre flooding, we have the now underground Den Burn.  Jake Williams shares his thoughts.

The stairs of Rosemount Library in Aberdeen used to be lined with framed pictures, either photos or line drawings, of Aberdeen from bygone times.
The one that I remember was from sometime in the 1800s, showing Union Terrace Gardens before Union Terrace Gardens was there. It was a view looking north from the Union Street bridge, but there was no park, no theatre and no railway line.

Three decades later, the accuracy of my recollection isn’t guaranteed, but I remember looking at a row of cottages on the right where Belmont Street is now, and another row on the left where Union Terrace is now.

The houses all had long thin gardens with drying greens right down to the Den Burn, which flowed straight down the middle of the picture, and there was a hump-backed bridge and a few wee wooden bridges over the burn. Union Bridge was opened in 1805, and the railway was built about 1867, so the picture must have been drawn between these dates. The gardens were laid out about 1879 [I got the dates from Wikipedia].

The name of the Den Burn is perpetuated by the street and the health centre named after it, but the existence of the burn itself is nearly forgotten, having been underground for most of its length for the last 150 years.

It starts somewhere near Westhill, passes Woodend Hospital, and I believe it still runs through the back gardens of the big houses in Rubislaw Den. Near Queen’s Cross it is in a deep stone-lined channel, visible from some of the streets and lanes around Osborne Place.

One summer about 1980, during a dry spell when there wasn’t much water in the burn, my pal Chris and I went an adventure. We scrambled down into the wee canyon where the burn ran along the side of the Grampian TV studio at  Queen’s Cross and walked downstream in our wellies.

Soon the burn went  underground and we carried on with torches. It was like the films where the heroes are journeying through a city’s Victorian sewers: a tunnel of red bricks arching over our heads, with enough headroom to walk upright.

they must have built the brick tunnel right up to the side of the bridge

Here and there were ladders going up to a heavy steel manhole cover, and we could keek through the keyhole and try to work out where we were, from a limited view of the upper part of some building. We weren’t tempted to try and push up the cover, as we were probably in the middle of the road.

We must have crossed under Rosemount Viaduct and under Spa street and down round the back of the theatre, because we looked out from the keyhole of a manhole and saw trees: we were in between Union Terrace Gardens and the railway.

A little further on there was a bit where the roof of the tunnel was different.  Instead of red bricks, it was old stone masonry. It was the hump-back bridge that was in the picture on the library stairs. When they covered over the burn, they must have built the brick tunnel right up to the side of the bridge, left the bridge as it was, and carried on the tunnel from the other side of the bridge.

We didn’t go much further. The  water was getting deeper and moving faster and we didn’t fancy getting swept off our feet and into a cold wet grave somewhere near the harbour.

I went into the library recently to ask about the old pictures of the Denburn valley. They have a few pictures but not quite like I remember.  One is looking from the north towards Union Street, and it does show a wee stone bridge over the burn, but it looks more graceful than the bridge in  the tunnel, more of a sweeping curve than a hump-back.

Maybe there were two stone bridges? The library’s internet archive www.sivercityvault.org.uk has a few pictures, too.

The proposal to fill-in the gardens for another shopping centre may never come true if they can’t raise the necessary millions, or if there’s a  change of political power in the council. My proposal for improving the gardens is to exhume the Den Burn from its tunnel, and let the old stone  bridge see daylight again.

Reference:

http://www.silvercityvault.org.uk/index.phpa
also photos 691 , 747, 748, 891 from www.silvercityvault.org.uk

Feb 032012
 

January and February always seem to represent a low time in the year. Christmas and New Year have been and gone and there seems little to look forward to. The days remain short and the nights long. It’s usually raw cold. Unwelcoming. The opening months of the year always cause something of a gloom to hang over Mick Miller’s household. Bung in a global recession for good measure and things seem pretty bleak. Then it got worse. What’s up, Mick?

The post arrived on Monday and out of the two-for-one pizza offer junk mail fell a gaudy catalogue.
Only it wasn’t a catalogue – it had “VOTE” written on it. Promotional blurb for the City Gardens Development.

How profoundly depressing. The front ‘cover’ illustration is of some futuristic landscape from another place.
Only on closer inspection it isn’t. It’s Aberdeen, or, more accurately, a version of Aberdeen which can only have be conceived in cloud cuckoo land.

Real people, in a REAL garden.       

It’s lurid, horribly-coloured, glib and vacuous. It is pervaded by a complete sense of the unreal. Semi-transparent people wander aimlessly inside a cartoon-flowered version of reality. Children trample unrestrained, yet the flowers survive.

Out-of-scale human forms laze in some sort of airborne meadow whilst below them, in a throwback connection to the real world, trade waste bins lurk ominously. A woman of Amazonian proportions accesses a laptop whilst sitting on surprisingly unbending grass stems. The remnant spire of the Triple Kirks emerges from a scrubland of low growth stock image shrubbery.

It all looks vaguely ill-tended, neglected, as if within this futuristic vision lie the discards of the past. Or perhaps its a tacit admission that should, god forbid, this monstrosity go ahead, there is just no way that the upkeep will be affordable. Delving deeper, the background is found to comprise of a realigned His Majesty’s Theatre and a hugely-inflated and decapitated William Wallace. A victim of the guillotine perhaps?

But the history, like the whole of this charade, is just plain wrong. Landscape dressed up as farce. A cityscape for Anywhereville. Inaccurate. Disjointed. A cut-and-paste pastiche.

Opening up, things don’t improve. A drab labyrinth of pathways which look like bridges over a motorway, criss-cross manicured lawns and monoculture grasslands. In one image the sun sets….or does it rise? Either way, it’s in the wrong place. What on earth, if we are still on earth, is going on? This is lazy work, a Standard Grade project gone catastrophically wrong. Everything is confusing.

The front page image shows a gaudy flower bed appearing to lie on a lower level of the structure. Moving inside the pamphlet the same floral, er…..’bombshell’, is miraculously elevated. Or is it that those bloody bins are just absolutely HUGE? I’m confused, disturbed even.

   I’m going to have a lie down, maybe I’ll feel better and ‘it’ will all have been a bad dream. Only it won’t. It isn’t.

In the sunset image, an oddly-inclined piece of lawn totters precariously into the largely obliterated Denburn valley. In Woody Allen’s Manhatten, a character in a TV show is observed to have a toupee so badly-placed on his scalp that it looks like it has been dropped on to his head from a great height in an uncontrolled way.

This elevated savanna has the same feeling about it. There will be a need for avalanche warnings in the snowy depths of winter.

In another image, a pipe band plays beneath a Formica-lined dome with random cut-outs that give the feeling that the design is based on half a panelled football booted around Pittodrie of a Saturday afternoon. Below this, a winter scene shows people so cold they have started to vapourise as, it would appear, has the Formica football, associated terraces and denuded trees, miraculously large for such a recent planting.

A lone child in a blue jacket has something so contagious that the populace in the foreground seek to distance themselves as quickly as possible. Is he the cause of the vapourisations? Oh I get it – we’re on the set of War of the Worlds and soon tattered clothing will rain down upon us from the sky. I know that was the only good bit. It all has an apocalyptic feel. I’m going to have a lie down, maybe I’ll feel better and ‘it’ will all have been a bad dream. Only it won’t. It isn’t.

Aberdeen is a beautiful city, notwithstanding some recent disastrous architectural additions. It doesn’t need or deserve such ill-thought out attentions as this abomination.

Union Terrace Gardens are an integral part of what allows Aberdeen to maintain its architectural, cultural and civic dignity. The Gardens need some tender loving care, but they don’t need annihalation by the ‘solution’ that this tacky pamphlet proposes.

A heartfelt plea. Please, people, don’t let this thing go ahead. Make sure you vote to retain Union Terrace Gardens.

Local Food? – Yes Please!

 Aberdeen City, Articles, Community, Environment, Information  Comments Off on Local Food? – Yes Please!
Mar 252011
 

By Ela Nowakowska.

Being a student often means we have to watch the pennies closely. Cruising through supermarkets looking for bargains and discounted produce that will feed us until the next chunk of the student loan arrives.

It is hard to associate with the industry behind the mass-produced Cornflakes and the cheapest chicken breast with the camouflage of glaring lights in pristine warehouses.

But it does not have to be this way.

Taking a step back and giving our food some thought is not actually that hard and Aberdeen is a great place when it comes to local produce. Located by the sea it offers a wealth of seafood and fresh fish as well as regionally grown vegetables and fresh dairy products.

We do not even need to leave campus to make the make the most of the shopping opportunities available through the Veg Bag scheme and the associated student organic Fairtrade Shop. Both are outcomes of ingenuity and have led to regular weekly shopping opportunities for not only the university students and staff but are also gaining recognition from the surrounding community too.

Every Tuesday at Alfies Café, Butchart Centre, between 12 and 2pm all are welcome to purchase a bag of ethically and organically grown fruit and vegetables delivered from Lembas farm located just south of Aberdeen (lembasorganics.co.uk). The student shop (campus Chaplaincy on High Street, every Wednesday 12-2pm) obtains its stock from the Green City co-operative in Glasgow, which specialises in the wholesale of organic and ethical foodstuffs such as pulses, snacks, flour, coffee and many others. And they are all dirt cheap!

As far as real grocers in Aberdeen are concerned, do not waste your precious time trying to find one – you will not. But do not fret for there are several decent spots where you can get you hands on fresh local produce. That includes a little weekly farm stall on The Green (take the steps down from Union Street, beside the Thorntons Chocolate shop) where every Friday you will find vegetables, plants and eggs produced locally on a farm near Dyce.

D Nicoll Fishmonger on 243 Rosemount Place is a lovely little shop where you cannot only grab some fresh mackerel or a few tasty little sardines but also get your free-range eggs and some hand-made preserves, all local and on a small and unpretentious scale. If you fancy something a little closer to home then why not use the fishmonger who comes to you? A white van appears on the university campus every Thursday with all the fishy basics you can think of, at very affordable prices too!

A great way to support local producers in and around Aberdeen is to visit the Farmers’ Market

There is another fishmonger in Aberdeen, located in the indoor market on Market Street where you can get the sense of what shopping in this merchant city would have been like several decades ago. The people behind the counter know their trade well; they’ll be able to advise you on the best fish for your Indian Korma and home-made fishcakes.

While at the market, why not pop across the hall to the butcher’s stall which has  plenty of regional meats of high quality. Surely you are already dribbling at the thought of your Friday night Bolognese with a bottle of well-chilled lager on the side. This stall also offers fruit and vegetables so you can purchase your five-a-day here too.

Aberdeen hosts a number of good quality butchers providing succulent, delicious, local meat including Laidlaw (1-3 McCombies Ct), Thomson’s Quality Butchers (8-10 Market Street) and A&M Butchers (49 Justice Street) just to mention a few.

A great way to support local producers in and around Aberdeen is to visit the Farmers’ Market, which takes over the cobbles of Belmont Street twice a month (every first and last Saturday of the month). Here you will find fresh local vegetables, free range eggs and cheeses. Often you will also come across a lovely bakery unit with a rather satisfying selection of artisan breads, buns and oatcakes…mmm…get those scrumptious cheeses and a bottle of bramble wine from the regional Cairn O’Mohr Winery (East Inchmichael,  Errol,  Perthshire PH2 7SP) for your weekend treat.

For more local food questions and queries contact the Climate Change Project at c.lampkin@abdn.ac.uk.

 

Clock Ticking For Triple Kirks And The Peregrines

 Aberdeen City, Articles, Community, Featured, Information, Opinion  Comments Off on Clock Ticking For Triple Kirks And The Peregrines
Mar 252011
 

In January 2011, Richard Pelling posted a blog entitled Triple Kirks Nonsultation?’ about what was going on at The Triple Kirks site. At this stage, the plans for the site had already been subject to intense local criticism, inspired a poem and had even received a bit of a national mauling in Private Eye (Eye 1279, page 16). Richard now brings us up to date.

In February,  Stewart Milne Group (SMG) submitted an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) screening option request to determine if they would need to carry out an EIA prior to submitting plans – to which we of course made comment.

It turns out that given that the site is less than 0.5 hectares in size and “does not fall within a sensitive area”,  no EIA is required.

So, the presence of the Schedule 1 listed Peregrine Falcons on site apparently does not merit any special attention and no study of the potential impact on them is required. Sad.

While on the subject of the majestic Peregrine, it is worth pointing out that the registered address of SMG is, ironically, Peregrine House in Westhill. Want more irony? Of course you do! One of the items cited in the Corporate Social Responsibility section of the SMG website is Protecting our Native Birds.

With the pesky matter of the requirement for an EIA out of the way, the plans for the proposed development were duly submitted to Aberdeen City Council in March.

Now on the aforementioned Corporate Social Responsibility section of the SMG website, I was pleased to read the following :

“Protecting our Heritage – Historic buildings are a vital part of this nation’s heritage, and one particularly close to our heart”.

So in line with this statement, would the final plans represent a volt face, meaning that Archibald Simpson’s Triple Kirks site would be treated in a sympathetic manner? Would the soaring A-listed spire now be afforded the respect it deserves? Nae chance. Perusal of the application on-line – P110303 – reveals that they look remarkably similar to those being peddled during the nonsultation exercise – quelle surprise.

Surely the site deserves more than the bland and insipid glazed shed that that some would say desecrates the Triple Kirks site and detracts from the surrounding historic streetscape? Why bother to give a building A-listed status if it can be treated with such disregard? Please check out the plans and then make your comments on the application – you have until 31st March 2011 to do this.

Remember that if you commented in the initial nonsultation exercise or in response to planning application P110056, you need to do it all over again for this one – P110303 – in order to make your views known.

If you have concerns on the impact on the spire, it would also be worth contacting Historic Scotland directly – I’m sure they will have something to say in response to seeing the plans anyway – but it’s good to let them know that you care about the fate of the Triple Kirks spire (Historic Building No. 19940).

As for the fate of the Peregrines, if you are worried about how this development may impact them it is certainly worth contacting Scottish Natural Heritage to express your concerns. The SMG website shows that they have apparently been funding some RSPB projects in Scotland, so could this mean that the RSPB may be reluctant to stand up for the Triple Kirks falcons? If you are an RSPB member perhaps you might consider dropping them an e-mail to ask them to fight for the falcons.

Anyway, whatever you feel like doing, please do it … the clock is ticking on Triple Kirks! So as the saying goes, act now or forever hold your peace.

As a footnote, it was nice to see the Rosemount Review report that :

‘ Rosemount Community Council rejected new plans to develop the derelict Triple Kirks site last night. The community council concluded that the new designs were “not in keeping with the area”. ‘