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“As unthinkable as to bulldoze Arthur’s Seat”: the thread about the 1980s scheme to infill Wardie Bay

I like to be asked questions about some matter of local history or knowledge, because they usually create a “happy accident” whereby I go down a particular rabbit hole and end up finding a tangent to follow about something I never knew about. Today was one such case, I found something I could hardly believe: a 1987 scheme by Forth Ports to fill in Wardie Bay! In case you didn’t know, Wardie Bay is that pleasant little haven of sand, sea, seals and (sometimes) sun, which has become increasingly popular in the last few years as a sport for swimming and other water sports. I wrote about the origins of the bay and its name on this thread.

“Wardie Bay”. CC-by-SA 2.- Mick Garratt

Forth Ports, the harbour authority for Leith and Granton, created a subsidiary company – Edinburgh Maritime Ltd. – with Glasgow developers GA Group, to front this outrageous, £400m scheme. The overall architects were Hind Woodhouse, with individual large buildings by RMJM and Cochrane McGregor. It was all backed by the Scottish Development Agency.

Architect’s model of the proposed “Edinburgh Maritime” development, this is a version with a pleasure “loch” between the shoreline and the infill, accessible from Newhaven. The Scotsman, July 1989

Their plan would include the infill of most of Granton Harbour, the Victoria Dock and much of Western Harbour at Leith, and everything inbetween – i.e. Wardie Bay. This was to “reclaim” 500 acres of land from the Firth of Forth, and would have obliterated the coastline from Seafield to Granton. 8,000 jobs were promised (from where, it was not said), with 1,895 houses, offices, a cinema, an industrial zone, new supermarkets and cultural attractions such as a Granton marina village planned. It was said without a certain amount of chutzpah that the site would rival San Francisco’s or Sydney’s waterfront and be 5x the size of the Glasgow Garden Festival.

The scheme was met with much scepticism, and local outrage. The Wardie Bay Action Group, chaired by John Horsburgh QC, was set up to resist the scheme.

Wardie Bay is a recreational asset equivalent in value to Holyrood Park. In both cases their accessibility is th emajor factor in their value to the citizens. To infill Wardie Bay is as unthinkable as to bulldoze Arthur’s Seat.

The above quotation comes from a £3,000 counter-report they produced in 1988, for which the below artists impression was also commissioned. This shows an 80 acre “loch” between the sea wall and the new development, and which would have retained the harbour of Newhaven, accessible to the loch. It is not clear if the loch was connected to the sea or not.

Artists impression of the Wardie Bay infill scheme. Scotsman, November 1989

In August 1988, Edinburgh Maritime tried to sweeten the deal with plans for an Opera House, but it farcically collapsed when the Trust for an International Opera Theatre for Scotland made their public announcement too early, resulting in back-pedalling counterstatements being issued by Edinburgh Maritime Ltd.

The Scotsman – Tuesday 23 August 1988

By 1989 however, Lothian Regional Council had made it be known that they would refuse the plans on the basis of the strong local opposition, so they were hastily redrawn to exclude Wardie Bay. But they still included Granton Harbour and parts of Western Harbour. It was this scheme that was approved in May 1990 and that led to the Ocean Terminal development (which for years has sat half empty, and is about to be partially demolished), to the Scottish Office at Victoria Quay and to the infilling of the western portion of Granton Harbour, of Leith’s Western Harbour. The planned boom in housing on these latter two sites has only materialised in fits and starts, and their painfully slow housing projects are still incomplete 30 years later. Multiple “marina village” ideas have come and gone for Granton, and there has never been a flourishing of industry on the western side.

The infill schemes for Granton Harbour and Leith Docks that were approved by Lothian Regional Council in 1990. The Scotsman, May 1990

We have a lot to thank the Wardie Bay Action Group for in their successful counter-campaign. Planned in a fit of late-1980s capitalist optimism, multiple economic downturns since the 1990s would probably have created nothing more than a vast foreshore wasteland had it gone ahead, with none of the projected “benefits” being realised.

Stall of the Save The Bay campaign by Wardie Bay Action Group. Photograph from Newhaven: Personal Recollections and Photographs published by City of Edinburgh Council, 1998

It was, however, never quite clear just where the money was going to come from to develop the scheme as originally planned. Environmental destruction aside, it was a project for which there was no real need. There were vast swathes of brownfield land around Granton and Leith that wouldn’t require expensive reclamation, and more pressing investment needed in the existing housing schemes in this area. The privatisation of Forth Ports in 1992 saw the authority turn its attention to instead acquiring the competition and focussing on land-banking its existing reclamation.

This was not the first such proposed act of mass environmental vandalism proposed for the Forth. Some 60 years previously, a scheme was put forward to construct a vast tidal barrier across the estuary just upstream of North and South Queensferry. Fortunately this came to nothing, but you can read about it over on its own thread.

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