Edinburgh divided over plans to redevelop historic Royal High School

Edinburgh planners will this month rule on controversial proposals to convert the city’s former Royal High School into a high-end hotel.

The £75m scheme has sharply divided the Scottish capital as it struggles to balance conservation and development. 

After being rebuffed by councillors in 2015, developers have submitted revised plans to add two large new modern wings to the 1829 Greek Revival building that helped give Edinburgh the moniker “Athens of the North”. 

Opponents say the scheme threatens an iconic landscape central to Edinburgh’s listing as a Unesco World Heritage Site. 

“It has become a very important test of how we view our heritage as a nation,” said William Gray Muir, chairman of the Royal High School Preservation Trust, which wants the largely unused site to be converted instead into a music school. 

The music school proposal has drawn support from cultural leaders, including author Alexander McCall Smith and violinist Nicola Benedetti. 

But David Orr, chairman of the developer Urbanist Hotels, insists the hotel scheme is the best way to preserve a building by celebrated architect Thomas Hamilton that has struggled to find a role since the school moved out in 1968. 

The revised proposals scale back the size of the planned western wing by nearly a third, reducing its impact on historic views but also cutting the number of bedrooms the hotel can offer to 127 from 147, Mr Orr said. 

“Our proposal is truly conservation-led. We are not damaging the centrepiece Hamilton building,” he added. 

Developers say the hotel on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill would allow unprecedented public access to the historic building, create 250 jobs and add £35m a year to the Scottish economy. 

Critics have compared the proposed new wings to sticking “Mickey Mouse ears on the Mona Lisa”, but Mr Orr said the additions would be of high architectural quality that would contribute to a landscape already much changed since Hamilton’s day.

“Calton Hill has constantly been an intervened, civic, important space,” he said. “What we are proposing is entirely in keeping with that.” 

But opponents, including state agency Historic Environment Scotland, conservation groups and the Edinburgh World Heritage charity, say the hotel would still damage the character of the building and its setting. 

They say the Hamilton building was carefully placed in open space against the hill to create a “rus in urbe” setting that had an illusion of countryside within the city. 

Such objections have fuelled support for the rival proposal to use the site as a new home for Edinburgh’s St Mary’s Music School, which would not require a new western wing. 

Reports commissioned by the hotel’s backers have cast doubt on the financial viability of the school plan and the work required to turn the building’s former assembly hall into a concert hall. Engineering firm Arup said excavations would expose the building to “considerable residual risk of movement and damage”. 

Mr Gray Muir, however, insisted that the preservation trust, which is supported by the charitable Dunard Fund, has “total confidence” it can raise the £35m needed to convert the site and that Arup’s engineering criticisms are “completely wrong-headed”. 

Councillors gave planning permission to the music school scheme last year, but this would be rendered irrelevant if the revised plans for a hotel are approved at the council’s next meeting on the matter, which has been set for August 31.

If the council rejects the hotel plans, the developer is expected to appeal against the decision to the Scottish government.

Mr Gray Muir said approving the hotel would effectively turn the site into a museum, rather than a part of Edinburgh’s cultural life. 

“This is about how we view our children, how we view our heritage and whether we think our heritage is just something to sell or something to build our future on,” he said.