Recording the changing cityscape on Edinburgh Collected

One of the main purposes of our website Edinburgh Collected is to not only to help build our digital collections, but to give people the opportunity to add their own images and memories to the site.

People put on pictures of their ancestors, school and childhood photos, others put on images of the ever-changing surroundings of their own neighbourhood.

One of our members of staff has been out and about and has taken some great photos of the demolition of the former Royal Bank of Scotland building in Dundas Street. You can see them all in a new scrapbook on Edinburgh Collected.

Demolition of former Royal Bank of Scotland building -2022

This building built in the Brutalist architectural style in 1968, had lain unoccupied since 2018 and is now in the process of demolition as part of a new development.

As many of you know, Edinburgh is a constantly changing city and at any given time there are what seems like dozens of building projects going on. So – can you help us record the changes in your area on Edinburgh Collected, our online community archive? Have a look around at any changing shops, buildings and street scenes and help us capture these views before they are lost forever.

City Garden event at Central Library

The City Garden Project is a proposed urban greenspace project to improve the quality and quantity of ‘little green spaces’ across Edinburgh. So much space in the city is under used, from grass-desert parks to concrete traffic islands, the forgotten shoreline to featureless street
corners; this project is about revealing their potential for creative and green space uses!

Come along to the Central Lending Library on 30 September any time between 12 noon and 3pm and meet the team from HERE + NOW, the landscape and design studio behind the City Garden project. You’ll be able to see examples of their previous projects and find out more about the City Garden idea. Most of all they’d love you to share your ideas for a City Garden Project and how you’d like to activate unused spaces. You will be able to mark places which could be a potential City Garden you know of on a map. This can be everything from a vacant or abandoned area to a neglected street corner.

Why not drop-in and help make Edinburgh an even greener city!

 

Go with the Flow at Morningside Library

Morningside Library are currently displaying the work of local photographer David Pike.

Flow is a collection of photographs representing David’s experiments with still life, harnessing wild inaccessible landscapes of Scotland and America.  David seeks to capture landscapes as they slowly unfold using tradidtional methods rather than digital processes.  Shooting on film,  David then hand prints each negative onto traditional fibre based papers using wet dark room techniques. What you see is what was created through the camera and not digitally altered in anyway.

Of his process David said: “”I choose to work with film because it helps me to slow down, to think how I visualise the final print before I even get the camera our of it’s bag. Sometimes I just sit for a while or walk about in the scene I want to photograph, thinking about what is it that makes this place special to me and how I might represent it. I lose all sense of time when I am in ‘flow‘  I once waited nearly 4 hours in Yosemite National Park high on a mountain in exactly the same spot, waiting for the clouds to highlight the power of the Half Dome  mountain”

You can see the exhibition in the community room upstairs in Morningside Library until May 31.

Check out David’s work at www.photographydavidpike.com