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The Herald Scotland
2 days ago
- Business
- The Herald Scotland
Naked City: The fightback of Edinburgh's Westside Centre
This wee al fresco aroma emporium greets you at the entrance to Wester Hailes' Westside shopping plaza. I've seen a lot worse in gateways to an urban shopping centre across the UK. The Westside, formerly known as the Plaza has attained semi-legendary status in the day-to-day lives of the local citizenry. It was opened in 1974 at a time when these retail malls were beginning to appear across the UK, driven by how seductively they appeared in American television shows. Within a decade though, some of them slipped into a state of decrepitude, often characterised by anti-social behaviour public drunkenness and drug-taking. They were where you went if you were dodging school or attempting some casual shop-lifting. This one in Wester Hailes suffered more than most, not helped by retailers upping sticks at the first hint of economic decline. The wider Wester Hailes community meanwhile had become fixed in the public eye as an exemplar of social deprivation throughout the 1980s and locals began to avoid the Plaza as the dealers and jaikies moved in. It forced the old Scottish Office to intervene in 1990 with the establishment of the Wester Hailes Partnership to address urban decay. It included £17m investment in the shopping centre and its change of name to the Westside Plaza. And then, in a bizarre legal dispute, one of Scotland's most senior judges intervened to force a major supermarket to stay in the Wester Hailes shopping centre. Safeway had wanted to pull out of the Plaza but Lord Penrose blocked the move. It seems that this was the 'anchor' retailer whose presence had enticed other retailers to invest in the centre. The landlords of the property had sought an injunction to prevent Safeway from walking away, knowing that it would start a domino effect. Since then its fortunes have ebbed and flowed. It's recently been placed under new management and had another name change to the Westside Centre, 'Plaza' perhaps having become one of those words now forever trapped in the 1990s like 'bling' and 'chillax'. Read more in the series: New ownership has come with a cash injection of around £4m and regrettably, the inclusion of the word 're-imagined' which really ought to be banned, along with 'hub'. Indeed this errant pair of inelegant locutions appear on the first page of the website which tells the locals about their 'community hub re-imagined'. You've got to admire the enthusiasm. I'd been advised not to raise my expectations but if I'm being honest, this is a fine retail emporium, and far better than others I've inspected throughout Britain. Westside Plaza shopping centre (Image: GordonTerris) Okay, so there are several units and outlets which seem always to be a feature of malls in edgy conurbations. Here we have your Wow Desserts sitting beside Farm Foods. Why are there always dessert emporium in places like this? I don't want to cast any aspersions on the business model, but few of them remain extant for long, so you can draw your own conclusions. The British Heart Foundation is handily placed adjacent to it, though. Providing some stalwart reassurance though, is Gregg's, the kenspeckle and ubiquitous taste of no-nonsense Cooncil cuisine and none too terrible at that. So it would be rude not to grab a wee steak bake, so I do. And there's your mobile phone shop and your pawnbrokers. And there's a proper Deli here too called Daisy's selling good artisan gear that would stiff you for double the price if it were on Byres Road or Morningside. And at a ladies' 'House of Wax' table of unguents and applications (I know not for what) I hear an outbreak of authentic, working class Edinburgh cadences. A lady is complaining to the security guard about some heavy-handedness by the police in her street the previous day. 'Making a 'fuckan nuisance eh themselves, eh?' There are hard 'a's and hard 'u's where I expect simple Glaswegian I's to be. Two elderly gents called John and Noel are having a 'hing', arms folded over the top-floor balustrade. 'I'm originally from Ireland,' says John, but I've been here more than 40 years and couldn't imagine being anywhere else.' He's pleased with how the Westside looks now. 'It's had its challenges, but it's looking smart and clean now. I like Wester Hailes, there's a good community spirit and I think it's fighting back.' The single most depressing feature about this tidy two-storey shopping complex is the half dozen or so empty retail units. When you see them in working class neighbourhoods you rage at the insouciant iniquity of casual capitalism and the inability of local authorities to stop them. Read more: The Bank of Scotland abandoned this place last month. In neighbourhoods like this the banks never hang around once they sense not much more money is to be made. It's as though, having squeezed every last penny out of hard-pressed communities: their high-interest loans, their mortgages then these people have no more value. No matter that elderly people might still need them and God forbid they might be asked to extend some leeway when the jobs disappear and the energy bills soar. I meet Georgina from nearby Longstone and her friend who very politely and firmly that 'ladies like me shouldn't be giving their names to strange men like you.' I like her. A lot. I tell Georgina that her pal's right, and that on no account should she be talking to any journalists ... other than those from The Herald because we're founded on respect and good manners and we know our place. They both like the West Side too and suggest it's improved greatly in the last few years. I feel bound to re-visit Gregg's to source something light for my lunch. There are healthy-looking wraps with chicken arrangements from the Mediterranean and the Far East, which I've never seen in any of their west coast outlets. It's not quite alfalfa crepes and skinny decaffs, but their presence is noted even if they remain unconsumed. Kevin also toured Wester Hailes High School meeting head teacher David Young (Image: GordonTerris) There are cafes, a couple of outfitters and of course a handful of male and female personal grooming shops. There's a tendency to dismiss their presence as indicators of something fleeting and insubstantial. In places where there's not much money though, it becomes even more important to look your best and feel good about it. It's about self-respect and caring for yourself. Kevin McKenna is a Herald writer and columnist and is Scottish Feature Writer of the Year. This year is his 40th in newspapers.
Daily Record
27-05-2025
- General
- Daily Record
What should a person do if they find Loch Ness Monster?
The Nessie Contingency Plan, drawn up by NatureScot, is a real guide for what to do if the monster ever appears For nearly a century, people have been scouring the dark waters of Loch Ness near Inverness in search of the legendary monster. Strange humps have been spotted gliding across the surface, and eerie sounds have echoed from the depths below, yet Nessie herself has never been definitively found. But what if, against all odds, the Loch Ness Monster actually turned up? As it turns out, authorities in Scotland are already prepared. A set of official guidelines, known as the Nessie Contingency Plan, was quietly drafted years ago by the government's nature agency, NatureScot. It sounds like something straight out of The X Files, but the document is real, and it outlines exactly what would happen if Nessie were to surface. A NatureScot spokesperson told the BBC: 'The Nessie Contingency Plan was produced back in 2001, at a time when there was a lot of Nessie-hunting activity on the loch. 'We were regularly being asked by the media and others what we would do if or when she, or he, was found. 'The code of practice, which was partly serious and partly for a bit of fun, was drawn up to offer protection not just to the elusive monster, but to any new species found in the loch.' Under the plan, any new creature discovered in the loch would be subject to scientific investigation, including a DNA sample, before being safely released back into the water. Crucially, the creature would also receive full legal protection, just like native Scottish species such as golden eagles and wildcats. That means if Nessie were real, it would be illegal to harm, kill or even capture her. Concerns for Nessie's safety aren't new. Back in 1938, a senior police officer wrote to the Scottish Office warning about a group of men intent on hunting the creature 'dead or alive'. The party, he said, was allegedly having a special harpoon gun made and planned to descend on the loch with 20 'experienced men'. The legend of the Loch Ness Monster stretches all the way back to the Middle Ages. According to ancient lore, it was Irish monk St Columba who first encountered a mysterious beast in the River Ness, which flows out from the loch. But the modern version of the myth only really began in the spring of 1933, when Aldie Mackay, manageress of a local hotel, reported seeing a whale-like creature thrashing through the water. The Inverness Courier picked up the story and its editor, Evan Barron, cemented Nessie's name in pop culture by describing the creature as a 'monster'. Since then, sightings have trickled in with remarkable consistency. The Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register has logged 1,161 reports since launching in 1996. There were three sightings last year, and already one for 2025, a pair of humps said to be gliding across the loch. Over the decades, eyewitnesses have described everything from a creature with crocodile-like skin to fast-moving shapes that defy explanation. Many have tried to solve the riddle. The Loch Ness Investigation Bureau conducted multiple searches throughout the 1960s and 70s. Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Then in the late 1980s, Operation Deepscan brought more than 20 boats equipped with sonar technology to sweep the loch in a bid to detect large underwater animals. And then there's Steve Feltham, arguably the most committed monster hunter of them all. He gave up his job, sold his house in Dorset and moved to the shores of Loch Ness in 1991 to dedicate his life to cracking the mystery. Some researchers believe Nessie might not be a monster at all. In 2019, a team of scientists from New Zealand analysed environmental DNA from water samples across the loch. Their conclusion? There was no evidence of giant reptiles or prehistoric creatures like plesiosaurs. Instead, they suggested the sightings could be explained by something much less mythical: giant eels.
New European
12-02-2025
- Business
- New European
The wasted legacy of North Sea Oil
Where does the money for these things come from? Why is Shetland doing pretty well, thanks, while Croydon has declared itself bankrupt three years running? Shetland is able to provide generous facilities – and also to dole out regular grants to local charities and community services – because half a century ago it did a very good deal. The man largely responsible for negotiating it, county clerk Ian Clark, died last July. Clark was an 'astonishingly hard nut', remembered Robert McCrone, who was one of the civil servants in the Scottish Office working on North Sea oil. 'I think he probably pushed his luck a bit far on occasions, but he actually did a splendid job for Shetland.' McCrone attended a seminar organised by the Science Museum a quarter of a century ago whose purpose was to understand how the decisions were made about how to exploit North Sea oil and gas. By that time, it was understood that fossil fuels might be superseded, but that seemed a long way off: the first British offshore wind farm had yet to start producing electricity. All the witnesses who spoke at the event were men. Most are now dead, and the rest proved impossible to track down, as I discovered when I was researching North Sea oil for an episode of the Jam Tomorrow podcast about postwar Britain. (A history of Concorde had the same problem: the sole surviving witness from that seminar was Lord Heseltine, who sent his regrets.) Yet the further it all recedes from living memory, the more important it becomes to understand why the discovery of oil seemed to have had so little tangible impact on the lives of most Britons. We struck lucky. But we never quite seemed to acknowledge it. The story started in the early 1970s, as it became clear that North Sea oil would need to be piped ashore somewhere on the Shetlands. The islands suddenly became the object of fierce interest from oil firms and construction companies. The Treasury was not prepared. McCrone remembers a very senior official asking whether the Shetlands were one island or two (in fact, 16 of them are inhabited). 'Because Shetland on most maps is stuffed into the Moray Firth, nobody actually knew quite where it was.' They soon did, flying into an airstrip grazed by sheep and lit by paraffin lanterns. Clark, whom one Shell executive complained was harder to deal with than Colonel Gaddafi of Libya, did a fine job in ensuring there would be just one oil terminal, at Sullom Voe, instead of each company building its own. But he wanted more than that – and because the government needed the Shetlands' cooperation so badly, he got it. To compensate Shetlanders for the new terminal, Clark negotiated a deal whereby the Shetland Charitable Trust would get annual payments from oil companies. By the turn of the millennium, when the payouts stopped, it had received over £81m. Judicious investments – the trust uses four fund managers, including Baillie Gifford and BlackRock, and has invested in Shetland's district heating scheme and the Viking windfarm – mean it now has around £400m in assets. The Shetlands prosper from their good fortune and are likely to continue to do so, even if North Sea oil and gas production ends and Sullom Voe is decommissioned. A one-off deal by a local council is easy to dismiss as exceptional. It was: it required an Act of Parliament. But it wasn't only Shetland that benefited from the oil rush. The Treasury did, too. While taxes on North Sea fuels bring in relatively little revenue now, they used to be much higher. In the mid-1980s they accounted for more than 3% of GDP. The potential scale of the windfall was apparent by 1977: 'God has given Britain her first opportunity for a hundred years in the shape of the North Sea oil,' James Callaghan, then prime minister, told the Commons. Margaret Thatcher was concerned: 'My worry is they aren't going to use it for expansion at all. They're going to use it rather like a person who's won the football pools… just for living on,' she told Panorama . What did Thatcher use it for after she won power in 1979? The taxes and royalties weren't hypothecated, of course, and it is impossible to say exactly how the Conservatives would have managed the economy without them. But the surge in unemployment in the early 1980s, along with a cut in the top tax rate from 83% to 60%, made big demands on the Treasury. Nor was the effect of the oil boom wholly positive. As McCrone pointed out, it pushed up the exchange rate, which contributed to the high unemployment of the early 1980s. 'So North Sea oil revenues were paying for the unemployed to a very substantial extent,' he says. It wasn't quite what Thatcher or Callaghan had wanted. 'Bizarrely,' says Jon Gluyas, a professor at Durham University who worked for BP after he finished his PhD in 1981, 'the day Margaret Thatcher walked through the door of Number 10, the UK became a net exporter of oil and gas.' At peak production, the revenues made an 'absolutely enormous' contribution, he says: profits were taxed at 95% through a complex combination of different measures. 'The UK was buoyed, like the Middle East has been, by being extremely productive.' Unlike many countries, however, the government decided to scale back its direct involvement in the sector. It privatised the British National Oil Corporation (BNOC) and sold off its stake in BP. Well before those decisions, though, was the question of issuing licences for oil exploration. How much should firms have to pay? Drilling rig Sea Gem in 1965 The oil platform Graythorp II being floated away on its journey to the North Sea, 1975 Labour energy secretary Tony Benn visits the Thistle Alpha oil platform in North Sea, north-east of the Shetland Islands, May 1978 Workers on the Drill Master oil rig at Stornoway, 1980 Photos: Colin Davey/Evening Standard; Historic England Archive/Heritage; Central Press/Hulton Archive; Express/Getty Nothing, it turned out – partly because no one knew how much oil was under the seabed. As for gas, it was even more of an unknown quantity. Later, oil firms were accused of underestimating North Sea reserves, something they vehemently denied. 'That was probably the first big mistake that was made in the North Sea,' Colin Robinson, now an emeritus professor at the University of Surrey, told the seminar. 'Because the licences were given out for free, instead of being auctioned as they could have been, it meant that the government realised afterwards that there was going to be a problem of trying to realise what they thought was rent or excess profits from the North Sea.' There were other missed opportunities. Alastair Morton was the managing director of BNOC during the late 1970s. He later oversaw the building of the Channel Tunnel. 'The will to look at oil as something that was of important political economic interest disappeared.' At one point he tried to strike a deal to hold oil in reserve for the rest of the European Economic Community – something they were keen to do after experiencing a series of oil price shocks. In exchange, Britain would not have had to pay into the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). 'I was making good progress with the idea until the Foreign Office had a fit,' he said. The question of whether Britain would have left the EU if our financial obligations were smaller is one for the counterfactual historians. In the early years of Euroscepticism, the alleged greed and wastefulness of the CAP was a common source of resentment. You can at least say that the £350m on the side of the Vote Leave bus would have lost some of its impact. Just as with the current windfall tax on oil companies, ministers were trying to keep the price of gas down for the public and simultaneously extract as much money as possible from wealthy firms. So Thatcher's approach was to raise taxes on oil companies during her first term, but also to try to make exploration cheaper. She regarded BNOC as a bureaucratic brake on enterprise. In 1982 it was split in two, and the oil exploration and production sector part-privatised before BP finally took it over in 1988. It could all have been very different. Plenty of people who had to work with BNOC agreed with Thatcher and saw it as government red tape getting in the way of making money. But for others it was a missed opportunity. They looked across the North Sea to Norway and saw the clout of its national oil company, Statoil, and the way it invested in processing plants and championed the country's oil industry. Why couldn't Britain do that, rather than leaving it all to the multinationals? 'It would have concentrated the mind of the British public on how important oil was,' said the petroleum economist Peter Odell, who died in 2016. 'And we lost opportunities in Europe… Norway realised, unlike this country, the importance of the commodity for its wellbeing.' Eventually, Statoil was part-privatised and merged with the Norsk Hydro firm, and is now called Equinor. But perhaps the biggest regret for some politicians was Britain's decision to spend all the proceeds of oil rather than investing them in a sovereign wealth fund like Norway's. Although it is called the Government Pension Fund, the money invested in it from 1996 onwards – all $1.74tn, which you can watch fluctuate in real-time on the Norges Bank Investment Management website – is not paid in by individual Norwegians. It comes from oil revenues and is only invested abroad. Each year the government takes out a sum that is no more than the fund is expected to grow in the same year. Yet it still amounts to around a fifth of Norway's budget. A British sovereign wealth fund could never have been as generous as Norway's, because their population is so much smaller than ours and our operating costs are higher. The introduction of the windfall tax in the UK meant that both countries now levy approximately the same tax rate on oil. But for a certain type of lefty economist, Britain's failure to plan for the time when the oil and gas would run out will always be unforgivable. 'We did think a great deal about an oil fund,' said McCrone. 'But the whole idea was dropped immediately when the government changed in 1979… What the government did was to set up the Scottish Development Agency.' That was trivial stuff as far as many Scots were concerned, and no one was (and sometimes still is) more resentful than the Scottish National Party. Draw a line east across the North Sea from the Scottish border, superimpose British oilfields, and you can see why. During the 1970s and 1980s it stuck in the craw of many Scottish nationalists that much of the oil wealth would end up being spent by Westminster. 'It's Scotland's oil,' ran party ads in 1972, picturing proud, despondent Scots. 'So why are there so few jobs for Scots? Why do we have the worst unemployment rate in industrial Europe? Why are so many Scots old folk cold and undernourished?' In the early years, 'North Sea oil was managed by Westminster and the Scottish Office in Edinburgh in a muddled and naively non-commercial manner,' said Sir Iain Noble, who admitted to trying to rip off a Sullom Voe crofter by buying his land for a song, before having an attack of conscience and doubling the price he paid. Scotland, and especially Aberdeen and the Shetlands, did benefit from the oil boom. So did the rest of the UK. But it was overwhelmingly Scotland that saw the hard work that went into extracting it. What this meant, as the historian and SNP politician Christopher Harvie has pointed out, was that as far as most of the English were concerned the oil came out of nowhere. Rigs and pipelines had no place in the collective political and cultural imagination. Most of us have never seen a North Sea platform, let alone been to one. the Piper Alpha disaster in 1987, when a platform exploded and killed 167 workers, was shocking not just for its horror, but also for the realisation that so many men lived in such remote and inhospitable places. The men – and it is overwhelmingly men – who are responsible for getting oil and gas out of the seabed are never celebrated or pitied as miners were. Disaster, when it happened, was further away and felt less visceral. As Harvie wrote, 'the impact of the oil on the British metropolitan intelligentsia and its imagination was practically zero.' Again, Norway had a completely different attitude. It opened a museum in Stavanger celebrating its oil and gas, and considers decommissioned rigs – which, once dismantled, usually leave no trace above the waves – part of Norway's industrial heritage. Hardly anything is left of Frigg, a Franco-Norwegian rig that at one point provided a third of the UK's gas, but its history and way of life, even down to details of the food the workers ate, is documented online. Peter Iain Campbell is a Scottish photographer who spent a year working as a steward on rigs and documenting the workers and the structures where they lived. I asked him what it was like for the people who had worked on the rigs for decades and knew that the era of North Sea fuels was nearly over. 'It's a difficult transition. It's harder for them because they've become so used to that world.' Relationships built up over many years were coming to an end. As for the rigs themselves, 'I'm simultaneously haunted, overwhelmed and in awe – you know, disturbed by them… seeing these platforms and drilling rigs in a condition where they've endured 40 years of the North Sea climate and those conditions. 'I like to have this more meditative approach photographically, because there's no doubt the effect the burning of fossil fuels has had on our environment.' The dream of a sovereign wealth fund is over. The Shetland Charitable Trust, no doubt conscious of how much it has benefited from fossil fuels, now wants to generate all the islands' electricity from wind. Empty oil and gas fields are an ideal place to store captured carbon, and some North Sea workers will be encouraged to retrain in that industry. Next year it will be half a century since Queen Elizabeth opened the Forties oilfield. Britain is moving on. But for the Shetlands, one man's stubbornness continues to pay off. Ros Taylor hosts the Oh God, What Now?, Jam Tomorrow and Bunker podcasts, and is the author of The Future of Trust (Melville House)
