Union Terrace Gardens

Apart from mentioning it briefly on my Facebook page, I’ve kept reasonably quiet about the proposed redevelopment of Aberdeen’s Union Terrace Gardens. The letters page of the Press and Journal has seen more activity on this particular topic that any I’ve known in recent times.

For those of you who don’t know the area, UTG is a green space at the heart of Aberdeen, situated in the valley of the old Denburn (long since covered over/filled in). The gardens share the valley with the fairly-recently constructed Denburn link road and the Aberdeen to Inverness railway line. Imagine Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh and you’ll get the picture.

Currently there are two plans for redevelopment of the area. The first was the new Peacock Visual Arts centre, which already has planning permission. This seemed all set to go ahead until an Aberdeen tycoon, Sir John Wood, stepped in with an offer of £50 million to build a new civic square. This is the project that has the backing of Aberdeen City and Shire Economic Future (ACSEF).

Two other options remain. The first of which is the idea of leaving the gardens as they are (my own personal preference), or a combination of the the two ideas. Build the new arts centre in the gardens (a plan which largely leaves the gardens as they are), and then cover over the road and railway lines to create a new space there.

I would be happy to see the arts centre go ahead. The development seems sympathetic to the gardens, will improve access to the area for those with disabilities and will also provide a focal point in what has been deemed an “underused” space (although I seem to remember it was hardly underused when the weather was good, albeit a rare occurrence in Aberdeen!)

The City Square project, on the other hand, will cost far more than Ian Wood’s £50 million, so the extra money will have to come from somewhere (have you seen the state of Aberdeen City Council’s budget?). It will obliterate the only green space left in the city centre and will eventually provide another shopping centre and multi-storey car park! To put this in context, Aberdeen has just seen its latest retail monolith, Union Square, open up within the city centre, while the main shopping street, Union Street, continues to die.I have to say, looking at the website for the City Square, that the photographs of the area showing the “present day” view are entirely misleading and fail to show the gardens at all, instead focussing on the road and railway.

Let me clarify that I no longer live in the city, but I spent many years there in my twenties. I’ve spent many a long afternoon in the gardens and I feel that it is just so wrong to get rid of them. There are so many other things that could be done with the City. To begin with, I was under the impression that moving the City Council headquarters into Marischal College was a precursor to having St Nicholas House flattened. Was it not intended that this was to become a civic square? Look at the Castlegate – it’s square, isn’t it? And it’s crying out for something to make it rather more useful.

If we wanted to truly open up the city centre, then I have a further suggestion. Get rid of the St Nicholas Centre. Removing this bit of concrete would provide a public space, open up views to St Nicholas Kirk. By all mean, keep some small shops, have cafes etc. I’m quite sure the retailers there could move elsewhere on Union Street.

Without wishing to be pessimistic, I can see to a certain extent that the fate of UTG is already sealed. Or it will be unless those who oppose the plans for the new square get off their arses and make a fuss. Chaining ourselves to the trees when the developers move in is pointless.

More Snow

I’m sick of the sight of the stuff. Okay, so we officially had a “white Christmas”. Whoopty-fucking-do. I didn’t put any money on it at the bookie’s, so it makes no odds (as it were) to me. We’ve had a few mild-ish days, which tends to lull one into a false sense of security, and then…

BANG! More fucking snow.

Any snow happening here is a poor indicator of what’s actually going on in the rest of the country. We can have a “light dusting” of snow here, but in the town, some seven miles inland, it can be anything up to four inches. Or 10cm, for those on metric. Go a couple of miles further inland and it doubles. It’s almost exponential.

Trouble is, we tend to be last on the list of places to be gritted. This morning I had to into town for a doc’s appointment, and had some trouble getting on to the main street in the village. Once I hit the main road, there were few problems, but it seems to be that anyone who doesn’t live on one of the main arteries is not important. Fuck you, council, we pay the same taxes.

I take it all back

I don’t know how it happened, but after a re-start the option to enable the restricted drivers appeared. I had to manually install the compiz settings manager, but I now have my desktop effects back!

I agree with this…

“Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu’s Karmic Koala”

I managed to install this by upgrading, without siginificant problems. However, ever since I installed 9.04 I’ve been plagued with the problem of my laptop’s fan running constantly at high speed. This wasn’t resolved in the new version, so I decided to perform a clean install instead.

To begin with, using the partitioner in the installer was a bit of a trial (it didn’t show the actual extended partition that contains the others). I ended up manually running gparted to set up the partitions and then re-ran the installer. Having said that, the rest of the install was fault-free, although I made the mistake of importing my windows account… beware that this copies all your documents and music in the process (I don’t see the point of doing this when I can simply mount my Windows music foder.

My problems began when I rebooted into the upgraded OS. Everything was perfect, but I don’t have any desktop effects and the option to install the restricted graphics drivers simply isn’t there. It means that I now have to do a big of digging to solve the problem. While I quite like problem solving, it’s an issue that would put off someone who was perhaps trying Ubuntu for the first time.

I don’t want to criticise too much. It’s a good OS (and without the desktop effects it is very snappy) but I’ve yet to see it work straight out of the box, and for that reason I shall be spending a little cash to upgrade my Windows installation from Vista to 7.
Technorati Tags: ubuntu, karmic koala, windows

The Saltire has hit the fan

I’ve just read Lesley Riddoch’s comment in the Scotsman about the forthcoming Scottish Parliament debate on the release of the Lockerbie Bomber, Megrahi. In the comments that follow it has been suggested (without a link or anything to back it up, it has to be said) that it was the British Embassy that supplied the flag-waving Libyans at the airport with their Saltires. If this true, it adds an interesting twist to the story.

Seriously, though, my own opinion on Megrahi’s release is somewhat divided, but I’m satisfied that the decision made to release him on compassionate grounds was not taken lightly. If the guy was indeed guilty of the crime he was convicted of, I’d be content to let him rot in jail, but I’ve never been completely convinced that he was the perpetrator. We went from having no idea who committed the crime to suddenly having a country to point the finger at, and an appropriate scapegoat. It all seemed a bit too convenient.

I find it significant that his appeal has been dropped. Why? Surely you can release someone on compassionate grounds and still allow them to appeal their conviction? Or is it because allowing the appeal to go ahead would reveal a basket of dirty linen that certain parties would rather not have aired in public. Again, it seems rather convenient.

And now the Americans want everyone to Boycott Scotland, a website that stinks of hypocrisy. This actually made me laugh. I quote:

Freeing a terrorist in order to further ties with the tyrannical Libyan regime of Muammar al-Gaddafi and to further the commercial interests of British Petroleum in that region is repulsive and sickening

And bombing a country back to the dark ages under the pretence of going after so-called weapons-of-mass-destruction (still elusive after all this time) whilst furthering the interests of various American contractors isn’t “repulsive and sickning”?

And, had I not already finished eating my cornflakes, I would no doubt have choked on them:

You have shown to the international community that your government and the United Kingdom as a whole will stop at nothing to pursue the neverending and relentless acquisition of oil revenues.

There’s a saying I once heard about “people” and “glasshouses”…