Colin Campbell: Questions to be answered over ‘Thunberg Avenue’
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An artist’s impression has been produced by the council of how Academy Street will look in future.
Pretty picture sketches of plans for Inverness? There have been so many over the years if I’d collected them all I’d have enough to open an art gallery. Many have been altered, modified again and come to nothing. They’d hang well in what I’d call the Gallery of Unreality.
The latest one transforms Academy Street into what looks like a tree-lined French boulevard. There’s a happy cyclist but there are virtually no people around. What’s it meant to be? The Champs de Elysee during Covid? Or maybe it’ll be renamed Greta Thunberg Avenue in tribute to the campaigner with her devout teenage following who believes getting rid of cars, industry and millions of jobs is the solution to all the world’s problems.
The Academy Street artistry, and proposal for radical change is, needless to say, highly contentious.
Many if not most shop and store owners seem dead against it, believing it would lead to a loss in trade. They’ve just emerged from the financial ravages of the virus. To say their views should be respectfully listened to and comprehensively absorbed as they try and put things back together again is an understatement.
Inverness Councillor Jackie Hendry wrote a lengthy letter to this paper extolling the virtues of the planned changes.
It focused heavily on the health benefits it would bring. Academy Street was in the headlines last year when Friends of the Earth signalled it as one of the most polluted streets in Scotland. Pollution is not a good thing. And over time it could be detrimental to health. But we’re talking about people walking along a street for a few minutes, not living next to a Chinese steel factory.
Where’s all the traffic going to go? This has to be a huge challenge for the council transport department. Are they up to it? They’ve produced the pretty picture drawings. Next up should be a road grid with convincing detail that removing cars from Academy Street isn’t going to result in monumental traffic jams and foul-ups in every other direction.
The debate will continue. And the council should actually listen to contrary opinion, particularly from the traders, rather than press ahead with what they want to do and ignore views they find inconvenient. Too often that’s been their track record of the past.
Jackie Hendry is the wife of Inverness MP Drew Hendry. The MP and a newly formed group of which he is chairman recently produced a “Vision for 2035”.
Nothing would ever change unless clever people planned ahead. The creation of the North Coast 500, as the most impressive example, was a stroke of pure genius. String a few remote rural roads together and brand them determinedly as a must-see global tour destination? As I say, genius.
But a vision for Inverness in 2035? Even acknowledging the good intentions behind it, it’s too far into the future and seems far fetched.
The document produced was full of aspirations and bountiful, galloping optimism. Amid all the welcoming city greenery and the pristine streets and the generally fabulous surroundings we can look forward to I noted in particular: “A long-standing commitment to new housing – both affordable and social rent – will ensure every family has a safe home to live in.”
Oh really? Try telling that to the housing department or convincing people currently on a waiting list stretching from here to Hadrian’s Wall. And that’s without all the thousands of EU migrants Drew Hendry and the SNP want back in under “freedom of movement”.
The future of Academy Street should be resolved before 2035, we must hope. But whether or not in two or three years time we actually are looking at a tree-lined boulevard there rather than a pretty picture drawing of one very much remains to be seen. But the artist’s impressions and grandiose plans for the future will keep on coming, as they have for so many years. Fanciful, flawed, or foolhardy, there’s never been any shortage of “visionaries”.
Colin Campbell is a retired journalist in Inverness.
