Director's Notes June 2009

Last week saw the opening of the EWH funded learning space at the Museum of Edinburgh at the launch of the Old Town Festival. It was a simple and delightful event – a mug of coffee in the courtyard of Huntly House, attended by local school children, councilors and those involved in both the festival and the museum, and a fair scattering of other important folk. We were regaled with tales from the chairman (an 18th century equivalent of a taxi driver), then from our Chairman, Charles McKean, Councillor Deirdre Brock and Donald Smith, Director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre.

The learning space itself is a lively little room in the museum, well equipped with materials to keep your children busy and involved on rainy days. The immediate challenge will be keeping it well stocked and fresh. The longer term challenge is much greater. This is the first step on the long road to giving every school child in Edinburgh the opportunity to explore the World Heritage Site and relate it to their heritage. The next step will be pulling together an online toolkit for teachers to incorporate into the curriculum for excellence. Other steps are underway to ensure that the heritage and history of the city centre remains relevant and accessible to all Edinburgh, such as our support for the excellent Scotland Street Tunnel Youth Project. We’re excited by the prospect and promise of this grass roots scheme and look forward to seeing how we can use World Heritage Status as a tool for inclusion.

As I walked towards the learning space, my eye wandered on to the museum’s displays, including James Craig’s plans for the New Town. This is but a tiny bit of the mass of wonderful documents and plans within the city’s archives that are yet to be opened out to the public – another long term aim for us must be to encourage and enable this to happen.

These aims and ambitions are emerging as we define our plan for the next five years or so. This should be completed by the end of the summer and will give us a framework in which to flourish and take opportunities as they arise. One of these which is at present occupying us is the Energy Efficiency Design Awards. EWH’s conservation funding programme is a brilliant vehicle for bringing together disparate groups of private owners, and we feel that an important part of ensuring the building stock of the WHS is in a good state and relevant for the next 50-100 years is to ensure that once repaired it is as energy efficient as possible.

We are currently applying to EEDA for a grant to apply simple and replicable measures to a B Listed tenement in private ownership (previous work has been to tenements in the single ownership of a housing cooperative), as well as one or two possibly more complex measures. Whether we win funding for this venture or not is a moot point – calculations show that we can achieve a 70% reduction in carbon emissions from a building type classed as “hard to treat”. Changing perceptions such as these is going to be a major challenge, given the level of funding that Government seems willing to throw at the problem and the relative vacuum in terms of ways of achieving this level of reduction that are benign to the architectural and historic interest of the buildings. It is only right that we should be at the forefront of working out the best way of achieving such reductions.