Date: 09 September 08
Author: Caroline Ednie, Web Editor
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Ian Wall, former Chief Executive of The EDI Group, the influential development and investment company that he helped set up 20 years ago, has been awarded The Lighthouse Achievement Award 2008.
Ian began working in Edinburgh 22 years ago when he first joined the city council’s economic development and planning department. Since then he’s played a major part in the regeneration of the city and helped to build the EDI into a highly successful company that has delivered significant benefits to the city. Key EDI projects that were instigated by Ian include Edinburgh Park; the redevelopment of Wester Hailes town centre; the Gyle Shopping Centre and the regeneration of Craigmillar. Ian also helped to set up a successful joint venture between The EDI Group and North Ayrshire Council.
His other longstanding interest, principally the way in which scientific endeavour has the ability to improve people’s lives, led to the creation of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, the first festival of its kind in the world, and which has since been copied worldwide.
Ian also has a long track record of involvement in the arts and has been Chair of WASPS for the last five years. In addition he is also currently Chair of the Scottish Urban Regeneration Forum; and on the board of Edinburgh International Science Festival and Executive of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry (SCDI) amongst others.
Ian recently retired as Chief Executive of the EDI Group, and in this exclusive interview with Web Editor Caroline Ednie, he looks back over his career as well as looking forward to the future.
CE: Now that you’ve recently retired as Chief Executive of the EDI Group, how do you view your legacy over the past twenty years?
IW: Its not MY legacy, it’s the legacy of loads of genuinely wonderful people that I’ve worked with over the years. I’ve worked with so many clever, capable and enthusiastic people who are committed to creating great quality buildings and places, whether they are landscape architects, engineers, or architects. If I have to describe a legacy, I hope that I have demonstrated that it’s possible - both in the public and private sector - to produce decent buildings.
My objective has always been to see the creation of a building as a social process, not just in terms of the teams involved in building it, but in terms of the people who are going to live in it or who’re going to work in it. How will they perceive it, use it, live in it? And if you see a building in that way then the building doesn’t even stop at the site edge. Engaging with their site and their surrounding environment is very important. I’d maybe describe this process as ‘total social building’.
The Achievement Award’s citation describes you as an ‘Inspired Client’? Would you describe yourself in these terms?
I don’t like this emphasis on the individual. What I have always tried to do is build buildings that are of social value and beauty and if that makes me inspirational…? It’s not about trying to be special. It’s just what we need do.
I’ve always thought that the point of work was to create something good. People who work in the business of making buildings are more fortunate than most as they are able to create something worthwhile. In that sense I’m fortunate in having a creative role.
But the great majority of architecture doesn’t have a ‘client’ except in a bureaucratic sense – both in the public and private sector. They’re middle ranking executives who may have the sharp suits and the right words but they are only reporting to committees or boards whose only concern is to make money, and they produce essentially rubbish. In Scotland we probably have the best planning advice on urban layout, design, detail, quality of buildings and so on. Yet consistently nearly every building that’s produced is poor.
The EDI has grown steadily over the past 20 years, developing land and property either on its own or through joint ventures with developers, landowners, local authorities and other public sector bodies. The company also manages property assets worth over £70 million. Do you think you would have had the same success in the current economic climate, in the throes of the so-called Credit Crunch and anticipated recession?
The early nineties was a difficult time too, and there was a recession then. But EDI is now commercially and financially very strong and it’s currently in a strong position to make an important impact. If you look back at the work the EDI has done, you are looking at very large swathes of the city that have been changed, mainly for the better –certainly in projects such as Edinburgh Park; Wester Hailes; and Craigmillar on the outskirts of Edinburgh; and the Tron area in the city centre.
All of these projects began with the high aspirations. If you don’t aim very high you’re never going to get anything good. It’s a complex and unpredictable business, so we inevitably compromise. If we aim for something great, we can produce decent, honourable and attractive buildings.
Edinburgh Park is one of the first major schemes of the EDI Group and is seen by many today as having set the bar for subsequent contemporary office developments?
Edinburgh Park started as a social analysis of how the nature of office work was changing. Until around 30 years ago office workers were essentially working in the same way as in the time of Dickens, with a desk and paper and a pen. Now of course each desk has been highly capitalised with computer equipment. We anticipated this with Edinburgh Park, which is essentially made up of ‘white-collar factories’. Many people laughed at us at the time and thought we were stupid.
One of the important things that we did at Edinburgh Park – and at South Gyle Business Park – was to create parking bays separated by trees, hedges and artworks. I think that this clearly showed that it was possible to create office spaces and car parks that were habitable. The trees and hedges not only look beautiful but they provide shelter from the sun in the summer, and the fierce Edinburgh winds. They are purposeful and beautiful.
Edinburgh Park just looks like a sea of trees now, with the buildings appearing through them, and that was the intention. We’ve got a huge hedge there with the intention of creating something similar to the Meikleour Beech Hedge (the Meikleour Hedge in Perthshire is currently 30 metres/ 100 ft high and 530 metres/ a third of a mile long. The trees were planted in 1745 and are now officially recognised in the Guinness Book of Records as the highest hedge in the world. Legend has it that following the death of her husband Robert Murray Nairne at the battle of Culloden, Jean Mercer of Meikleour allowed the hedge to grow towards the heavens in a tribute to his memory.)
One of the great strengths of running a long-term scheme like Edinburgh Park is that you can revisit your first solution, improve upon it, and enrich it. If you start off on the right foot with a good scheme, it’s easier to get right. You can make very successful commercial schemes with much better surface car parking. There doesn’t have to be seas of tarmac. I was hoping that the planning departments might use this model for future private developments, but they haven’t.
Lochside View office building in Edinburgh Park by Bennetts Associates
Edinburgh Park
Pentad Building, South Gyle Business Park by Page and Park Architects
Wester Hailes town centre has often been cited as a key exemplar of urban regeneration?
For years developers kept asking asked me if we could spare ten acres at Edinburgh Park to build a multi-screen cinema. I kept saying ‘no, but you can build it in Wester Hailes’. They’d all read Trainspotting so had some warped idea of what Wester Hailes was all about. Finally one of the operators cracked, and within six weeks they were out-trading Kinnaird Park on the other side of the city. There have never been any problems since.
Now the town centre has a bingo, off-licence, and library as well as the cinema, in fact it’s now become the leisure centre for the whole of the west of Edinburgh. Wester Hailes has become much more of a vibrant centre, because it trades at night.
This scheme was about analysing the social circumstances and then bringing about something good. And it has been profitable. Everybody won. What it needed was a genuine sense of making a better city and not just allowing more acres of tarmac to happen.
The regeneration of Craigmillar is one of the most ambitious developments that the EDI Group has undertaken? Can you describe how this is currently taking shape?
Craigmillar has adopted ‘Shared Space’ principles, where the streets are returned to everybody to use. There are no pavements, and there are no roads, there is just space which everyone uses. Starting with this principle makes a big difference to a scheme, partly because it makes it safer and engenders neighbourliness.
The quality of its urban design is high. Urban design once done properly will last forever, the marks they make last forever. This is true of any site. Buildings are the second part of the equation and they quite often change, as they get amended and extended, and as the landscape matures. But if you don’t get the urban design right on any sizeable scheme, then you are finished from the beginning.
We had an interesting debate with road engineers when we were designing two new schools for Craigmillar. The engineers stated that we needed safe routes for school. But we said ‘no, what we have to design is an environment where all the routes are safe. When you are creating somewhere from scratch then you should make everywhere safe for children.’
I met Hans Monderman (the Dutch pioneer of the Shared Space urban design approach) and I was struck by what he said, ‘that if the only place in a housing estate where your children are safe is the little play area, then you’ve failed.’ It will take time to get used to, but the way that the roads are designed will make it difficult for cars to go fast.
Shared Space is commercially attractive because you use less land because the roads are smaller and the shared spaces are smaller, so it’s cheaper to build, and makes for a better environment. What you get is bigger gardens, and more units. The prices for houses there will be better than anything else in the city, and the quality of the design is high.
At present, elsewhere in Scotland, trying to get planning applications through on the basis of shared space adds months onto a project, which private developers can rarely afford. Nobody in the private sector wants to be a pioneer, but we hope Craigmillar will help to speed up the process of its adoption.
Craigmillar Regeneration
A joint venture between the City of Edinburgh Council and The EDI Group
Image courtesy of PARC Craigmillar Ltd.
There is a misconception that the work of the EDI is limited geographically to the Edinburgh and Lothians area?
The EDI has also forged a successful joint-initiative with North Ayrshire Council. North Ayrshire Ventures Limited (NAV) was founded in 2000 and the two office buildings that we produced in Salcoats and Kilwinning, have been occupied by firms that have created 300 new jobs, in an area of the highest unemployment. These were the two biggest commercial investments in the area in the last thirty years, and have had quite a ripple effect.
Ardrossan Harbour Health Centre by Reiach and Hall Architects
A development by NAV (a joint venture between North Ayrshire Council and The EDI Group)
There is also the misconception that the EDI has a special relationship with Edinburgh City Council. In reality, however, all we have done is pay the council large sums of money since receiving the original £5 million which was loan stock and on which we’ve always paid interest. It wasn’t even a shareholding investment.
Of your achievements to date, is there any one of which you are particularly proud?
When you are working, there are highs and lows. But it’s work. I don’t see it as achievements. I’m proud of what we did, in balancing different things such as: cost and value, social benefits, time, long term maintenance, and a whole range of things that so called clients today don’t really care about. They just go around producing buildings as quickly and as cheaply as possible with the attitude that it’s someone else’s problem if it looks ugly or if it’s expensive to maintain. It doesn’t matter what type if building it is. You can even produce good supermarkets if you tried.
There are periods when it is easier to do some things than others, but at the end of the day it’s a case of, to quote, “pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.” I’ve always naturally been an optimistic person. When you get knock-backs and schemes go pear-shaped or lost entirely you try and understand why, so that you don’t repeat the same errors. And then you just get up and start trying again.
If I have to identify one thing that I’m particularly pleased with, it’s the Edinburgh International Science Festival. It’s now a world wide social movement. We invented something that nobody had thought up before, and so successful has the idea been that there isn’t a continent in the world that doesn’t have science festivals now. I feel a certain amount of pleasure in having created this. Famously at the end of Citizen Kane – although I don’t want to create any analogy between Kane and myself – the ‘Rosebud’ scenario does demonstrate that it’s often the little things that give us pleasure. At one Science Festival I organised, with poet Robert Crawford, a series of talks and readings on science and poetry. Robert later turned it into a book on science and contemporary poetry, and now people will be reading it in places I can’t imagine. This, I am proud of.
I’m also particularly pleased with the work that we did with the Edinburgh City Council housing department and the Edinvar Housing Association in creating housing for the homeless. We produced just short of 100 units of very high quality over the past 12 years.
It doesn’t actually cost any more to provide good quality schemes, it requires commitment and energy and determination. But instead the country is being littered by the disappointments created under the PFI regime. Any country that believes that the way to produce civic buildings like hospitals and schools, with their main criteria being the means of financing it, has clearly got the wrong end of the stick.
Do you have any regrets?
There are two schemes that I regret we didn’t do. One was the Princes Street Galleries. There was a beautiful scheme, the result of a European wide architectural competition, which was set beneath Princes Street. It would not only have improved the east gardens enormously but it would have transformed Princes Street and created the opportunity to restore it to a proper regional shopping centre, instead of which it is slowly descending into a tourist tat street. That is a matter of regret because as high quality retail shifts out of Princes Street, as it is consistently doing, it will continue to move downmarket and we will end up with the sort of street that the Bridges has become. The Bridges used to be a major shopping street, and what you get now is very downmarket retail and tourist tat.
The scheme was defeated due to an unwillingness to acknowledge what was really happening. There is a gut reaction in some circles in Edinburgh to oppose change. Part of our analysis was based on what had been happening in Princes Street. For the past 20 years, planners had granted planning permission to retail warehouse schemes on the edge of town as big as the total square footage of the centre of the city, and clearly shoppers were starting to go elsewhere. So, in order to get them back we needed to provide something additional and better. You can’t do that in Princes Street itself because the upper parts of the buildings are much more valuable as residential and commercial units. The underground solution was ideal as shopkeepers don’t like natural light - there is no natural light in shopping. So it was a good use of underground space and all linked together with the gardens. The scheme that won was absolutely beautiful and would have restored Princes Street to a centre for shopping.
If there’s one thing that has been fundamental to my own practice, it’s to see buildings as social products, not as architecture, not as structures, or planning. And Princes Street and the social processes operating in it are being brought downmarket at a rate of noughts. Creating a good public environment (often promised but yet to be delivered) but filling it full of second rate shops is not a solution. There was a need to tackle this problem comprehensively but it hasn’t been done, so we will reap what we sow.
My other regret was not putting the Scottish Parliament on Calton Hill. This would have certainly provided a much better solution than the one we’ve got. In city design terms you never put the most important buildings at the bottom of a hill. Putting it on Calton Hill with Waterloo Place as a grand entrance boulevard (which it is already) and producing a new national public square in front of the Parliament Building, would have made a great ensemble. It would have been a great combination of buildings and a great urban setting.
In Scotland we don’t have a national square, the nearest we have to one is George Square in Glasgow. When our Olympic medallists come back, where do we all go to celebrate? There is no established civic space in the capital. Our scheme created a national square. When we win the World Cup, that’s where the football team would parade!
The Princes Street Galleries and Parliament projects I regret not only because of their exemplary design schemes but also in terms of their social impact, which would have been enormous.
Certainly one of the things I want to do over the coming years is to do more work on the nature of the public realm in Scotland. It’s not expensive to create good public realm spaces, and I’d like to see, over a period of years, the quality being raised.
And what else can we expect from Ian Wall in the future?
I’m only 59 I’ve got at least 20 years in me yet!
Part of the way to change society is to change ideas and attitudes and the best way to do that is through intellectual as well as practical means. Having created physical examples of good schemes without making losses, maybe what I can do now is help influence the intellectual climate. But I don’t have any illusions about this being the solution.
I am currently the Chair of WASPS and we are involved in a number of key projects including redevelopment of The Briggait in Glasgow. We’ve also just bought two buildings in Kirkcudbright, and we have ambitions to improve our geographical coverage, which is currently patchy. With the exception of a single studio we have nothing in the Highlands and Islands and we need to rectify that. The role of WASPS is to provide good quality cheap accommodation to artists all over the country, and I’m keen to build this up over the coming years.
I’m enthusiastic. All the things that I am currently involved in – WASPS; The Science Festival; the Scottish Urban Regeneration Forum; the Scottish Council for Development and Industry - I do them because they are important, and if you think they are important you put time and effort in.
What does the Achievement Award mean to you?
I’m not interested in looking back. What I’m proud of, if anything, is what I’m going to do next It’s about the future not the past. That sounds a bit ‘Pollyanna-ish’, but that’s what the Achievement Awards means for me.
Old Fishmarket Close, part of the Tron Square Regeneration, Edinburgh by Richard Murphy Architects
A Buredi development (joint venture between The EDI Group and the Burrell Company)
Ian Wall at the Tron Nursery, Edinburgh by Allan Murray Architects
A Buredi development
Images courtesy of Pagoda PR
