scotsman's steps
on public art
The next savour session will be taking place online with Jo Thompson, garden designer, glass ceiling-smasher,
creator, at 7pm BST on 19 June - a week today! As with all savour sessions, access is free if you’re a paying subscriber. Get your gardening questions ready, and we’ll see you next week.
There are so many wheelie suitcases at Edinburgh Waverley station. So many suitcases on wheels and so many steps. So many accents and languages and guide books and train announcements and dings of the bells of passing trams. Here we are, spewed out against the cry of a bagpipe, on the brink of a decision: Old Town, or New Town?
Many people leaving the station won’t yet know the difference. They have hotels to check into and food to find and photographs to take and ghost tours to walk. In the process they pass a staircase that will elevate them from the crooked labyrinth of the Old Town into the grandeur of the New Town. A staircase that is a kaleidoscope of marble.
The Scotsman Steps are, technically, considered a road. They are among the many shapeshifting, solid things in Edinburgh, the same way that Princes Street Gardens used to be a loch filled with sewage and is now a place where young women take photos of other young women against a backdrop of rhododendrons, from beneath jackets to shelter from the drizzle; or how whole forgotten streets exist beneath the Royal Mile, and while to walk the city is to see endless swooping arches and bridges, there are many more yet that are hidden from view.