Grassed up: council defends £40,000 bill to returf Gardens

Photo: Emma McDowell

It’s usually the only place in Edinburgh where you can watch a businessman in a sharp suit gobbling a 99 cone like a sunburnt child at the seaside, ice cream smeared across their face and dripping on their double breasted pockets. 

But the lawns of East Princes Street Gardens won’t be playing host to this and other sights until after Easter as work commences to repair the damage to the grass caused by the city’s winter festival events.

Both sections of the garden will be returfed under orders from Edinburgh City Council, after assessments of the grass declared it failed to recover from the impact made by the winter tourist attractions.

Violence against tattooists

It’s unusual to hear of a large tattooed man with a gun being assaulted. But tattooists in Scotland are experiencing an increase in assaults at work.

Produced January 2009 for Edinburgh Napier News

Greek protest march

Exclusive footage of a protest march in Edinburgh showing solidarity for Alexis Grigoropoulous, the Greek teenager shot dead by police.

Published on December 11, 2008 on Edinburgh Rolling News

The Sinking of the Ark

 

Photo: Wikicommons

Despite providing a vital service to Edinburgh’s homeless, the Ark Cafe was forced to close this summer after its annual funding was stopped by the council. The Skinny asked those affected what the future holds…

Over the cacophony created by many people talking in a large uncarpeted room, Bruce Wiseman hands over a bacon roll with a bit of friendly banter. Up to the day I meet him, he had been volunteering at the Ark Café, working from 7am to 12pm, cooking food. Handsome and clean-shaven, neatly dressed and eloquent, he is not your stereotypical notion of a homeless person.

Wiseman is one of the 110 people who depended on the facilities provided by the Ark Trust canteen, which operated to support the homeless and those threatened by homelessness. But these desperately needed services are no longer available after Edinburgh Council withdrew the funding it granted to the Trust at the end of June.

“Before I started volunteering here, I was just a service user. I came in here to get out, have a coffee and a chat. Since I started here, I’ve got my confidence and self-worth back, I’ve got my get-up-and-go back.” Wiseman then confides: “When this place goes I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

For 70 years the Ark Café on New Street provided cheap food, clothes, toiletries, telephone and fax facilities, and housing advice to those on the front lines of homelessness.

All these resources have disappeared since the council withdrew the £167,000 funding the Ark receives per year.