Argyll and Bute Council’s most pressing responsibility right now and into the future is economic development related to repopulation.
Oban is a still lovely but progressively shabby and patched up town, which will always hope to major on a strong visitor services sector with an increasingly clear focus on activity tourism.
Eleven years ago, the Council granted a 99 year lease on Oban’s North Pier – with the necessary robust access rights – to local entrepreneur, Alan Macleod. On the basis of the lease, Mr Macleod took out a bank loan of £1.5 million, to create the appropriately striking twin restaurant premises that have, singly, graced the North Pier since.
The loan was secured by a charge on the lease; a charge on Mr Macleod’s home in Appin; and personal guarantees issued by himself, his wife and his son, with whom he operates the restaurants, Ee-usk and Piazza, above.
The visual imagination behind the initiative, the quickly recognised quality of the cuisine, the service and the ambience made the business a marked success, driven by word of mouth – and made it a key element of Oban’s attractions to residents and visitors alike. Anyone was safe in recommending Ee-usk or Piazza because of the constant stable standards of food and service that are their hallmark .
Argyll and Bute Council has long been notable for its lack of business nous. Today it is lacking any senior officer competent in economic development, having, a year ago, replaced that particular Executive Director with a specialist in – waste management [which is not an issue here anyway].
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, this hapless but arrogant outfit, in whose unable hands the economic sustainability of Argyll unfortunately rests, is now well into the process of destroying the one stand-out new business success the town has experienced – the North Pier restaurants.
So what is the council doing?
Having failed absolutely to act on the opportunity offered by its own multimillion pound grant to Oban under the CHORD regeneration project, the Council appears to be trying to retrieve the situation by doing something everyone will see them do in the most visible part of Oban – the North Pier.
A highly problematic part of this excursion is that the Council is the developer, the applicant for planning permission, the manager of the processes for planning applications and consents, the defender of the application and the adjudicator deciding whether planning permission should be granted for the scheme.
The outline scheme got permission in a fast-tracked less than eight weeks, regardless of its ill-thought out nature, of the lack of proper consultation with the seriously affected adjacent restaurants business and against a background of documented refusals to supply the Macleods with information necessary for them – and indeed the council and its committees – to evaluate the impacts on their business and on the town.
The North Pier was a tip until the Macleods spent their own money making it attractive and giving people who would never have gone near it, good reason and confidence is using it. Characteristically, the council is piggy-backing on someone else’s vision – and, with this scheme, undermining it.
The good news is that the foundation of the council’s scheme is the demolition of the eyesore that is the so called ‘White Building’ – an ill-built utilitarian shack thrown up against the seaward facade of the Grade 2 listed Columba Hotel.
The bad news is everything else.
This is a council whose modus operandi is to chuck up large but cheaply constructed buildings – like the Corran Halls and the notorious Queens Hall in Dunoon – and not to bother maintaining anything, from Castle Toward in Cowal and the Clock House in Lochgilphead to lifeline roads in daily use.
This time they know they won’t maintain what they build, so they are going for a huge hard-core bus-shelter-cum-gazebo on the North Pier, with some very modest back-office facilities, to be pretentiously called the Maritime Visitor Facility, hard up against the seaward wall of the Columba Hotel in the east and squeezing rear access to the North Pier restaurants in the west.
Genuine enhancement or yet another major blunder?
As currently envisaged, the Maritime Visitor Facility is a circular open space, hard walled, hard floored, no doors – but pierced by wide and open entrance spaces at every point where the wind blows – north, west and south. Its curved walled sections contain inserted continuous hard seating. Its open space is interrupted by the vertical supports for the roof which sits above the structure, keeping rain from vertical access but allowing wind to come in at high level as well as from the three cardinal points of access from the Pier.
At the Columba Hotel end, there is an entrance to a wrap-around service space, partially on the footprint of the old ‘White Building,’ containing three lavatories, nine lockers for visitors to use, a five machine launderette to serve yachts based at the Oban Bay Marina on the Isle of Kerrera across the Bay from the town [?] and an office and facilities for the Harbour Master of the day, who is on site for a 40 hour week.
The facilities said to be intended for the use of leisure sailors at the marina on Kerrera would seem to be a message that the council has no intention of implementing the Oban walk ashore marina in the CHORD project. This is an indefensible selling out of a town that badly needs serious economic development, not a wind blown skate run and a hang out for crusties.
The bus shelter structure is grandly said also to be an ‘Events Centre’ – yet it can offer little more than standing-room in a space where only musical instruments [and certainly the pipes] could be heard in all weathers. Any wind at all will make the spoken voice inaudible and movement like ballet a physical risk.
Elderly people or families with small children on the hard seating inserted in the walled sections will see nothing behind those standing in front of them. And any such event attracting only enough people to sit around the walls will be a thin and pretty bleak experience.
The good fortune of a balmy summer evening, a town-full of visitors, a cruise ship in the bay and a jazz quartet in the bus shelter would create a memorable occasion. However, with Scotland’s weather and the west coast’s frequent strong winds, no business case could ever be calibrated on the coincidence of decent evenings gracing one or two scheduled events in a season’s programme.
The council talks of staging ‘exhibitions’ in the Maritime Visitor Facility. There are only two ways they can do this. Use the walls of the open bus shelter and bolt everything down; or use the wall – of fairly domestic dimensions – in the foyer outside the Harbour Master’s office in the services back-end of the building.
There is – of course – no provision for any ‘backstage’ facilities whatsoever to support those performing at ‘events’. This is all typically pragmatic – tokenist, heartless, pointless provision for visitors, half-arsed, to be frank.
On a good day, people want unimpeded access to the best views. They will not choose to be inside a huge hard-surfaced bus shelter, peering at snatches of views through the open entrances – and the views through the entrance to the north, looking towards the Corran Halls, will be endlessly blocked by cars on that side, jostling for seven fewer car spaces.
On a bad day, people do not want to huddle in a massive bus shelter, battered by the winds funnelled through it from all directions. Oban does offer other places to go. A few might look at the photographs on the wall opposite the Harbour Master’s office – but this is not designed to accommodate a crowd-puller event.
And what of the winter for this gazebo? What of most night times?
Who in the town, with the innocent intent imagined in the proposal, is seriously going to take a stroll onto the North Pier at any part of the day or evening to sit on a hard seat, against a hard wall, peering out at fragments of views? Who is going to be passing who will dart in for cover from the rain?
You can guarantee that what this place will absolutely become, in its better informal moments, is a skateboard challenge - a dash in, a jump up onto the hard seating, a cambered cornering on that surface, a jump down and a dash out and round the front of the Pier, inevitably accompanied by the occasional splash as ambition overtakes ability. There can only be hope that there are sufficient and capable witnesses to these splashes to ensure that the outcomes are not fatal.
Much worse, a place like this, open all hours to all comers and offering no more than a very basic protection against rain – but with the inward curves offering some places to sit which are not all visible to passers-by – will, in the majority of the time when it is fulfilling no formal function, be used by casuals with nowhere else to go.
There will be cans, fights, needles, smokes, cliques. This will be an intimidating place, not a welcoming one. And that reputation will precede it, make it a no-go area for nervous residents and visitors – and knock the bottom out of the high-end restaurants beyond it on the Pier.
Walk-in clientele will feel they’re running the gauntlet of the den. Drive-in clientele will hear the goings on inside it and keep their eyes averted for fear of challenge as they make their way between their cars and the restaurants. Familiars will stop using the restaurants. New clients will be scarce and likely to be one-offs.
Those leaving Piazza and normally likely to walk through the paved alley between it and Eeusk, will take the windy way around the outside of the Pier for fear of who, unseen, might be waiting in the bus shelter in the dark.
It is almost comically ironic that the already daftly named Maritime Visitor Facility is also being referred to as ‘The Gathering Place’.
A ‘white elephant’ would be a godsend compared to what this joint is going to be.
A facility for cruise ship passengers?
The council sees this shelter as useful for passengers on the cruise ships which occasionally visit Oban. It will act as a transit station, offering basic shelter while groups are transferred between tenders and ship, gathering in the wind tunnel for coaches to take them off and deliver them back from scenic trips.
In bad weather, this facility, while offering no comforts, will undoubtedly be convenient but, with three unisex lavatories for so many largely elderly cruise passengers, hardly convenient enough for such a number waiting around. There is allegedly a cunning plan is to lock off the services area when there is a crowd in the bus shelter, diverting everyone to the few public loos at the back of Piazza, across the rat-run. Now that’s what we Brits call ‘service’.
A serious issue for the restaurants and for pedestrians walking on the Pier in good weather, is that the line of coaches to transport the cruise passengers out and back on their trips will be a serious impediment to access. It will be particularly difficult where such events coincide with delivery lorries to the restaurants, as they occasionally will.
The access issue
Alan Macleod’s lease, with 88 years left to run, is ‘heritable and irredeemable’ – meaning that he can pass it on to his son or any other inheritor and that the council cannot cancel it until its time is up.
It gives him the rights to specific access on the road in along the south side of the Columba Hotel; access on the road in from the north Esplanade, opposite the site of the old Argyll Hotel; and 360 degree access around his two restaurants.
The council has the absolute right to vary the delivery of access but not substantially its spaciousness, convenience or utility compared to what he was originally granted and is legally entitled.
The council now proposes:
- to put a notice on the road entrance opposite Stafford Street, saying: ‘No Through Road’;
- to put a notice on the road entrance from the north Esplanade, saying: ‘Authorised Vehicles Only’ – for access to the Pier parking area, which will lose at least seven parking spaces;
- to have the Harbour Master of the day ‘control’ vehicular access [how will that work - and since this is a 40 hour a week job?];
- to put bins storage for the Pier complex in the area facing the rear of the restaurants;
- to restrict the sweep of access behind the rear of the restaurants which would make the present emergency use of that area for deliveries to the restaurants unusable.
While such measures might not, as the council argues, ‘prevent’ access [as they are legally unable to do] there is no doubt whatsoever that they will, severally and together, inhibit access – and that means inhibiting the restaurants business.
Mr Macleod has asked for the notice at the Esplanade access reading ‘No Unauthorised Vehicles’ to have added to it: ‘except for restaurants’. The council has flatly refused even that concession.
Before construction gets near beginning, the architects talk of the risks of ‘intrusive site investigations’. During construction, access to the restaurants will be blocked for periods of time.
There is no guarantee either that construction will not impact upon the major tourism season where the Macleods can reasonably expect robust revenues to shore up the weaker winter season.
In use, when this shelter may effectively host Farmer’s Markets, these will often be very windy experiences – but they will involve service vehicles building and striking the stalls and delivering vehicles bringing and removing the goods for the stalls. This traffic can only disrupt access to the restaurants and make lunch at Ee-usk a less than relaxed affair.
The Council has made no Traffic Survey evaluations whatsoever for usage on the North Pier – with the defence that their Area Roads Manager did not ask for one. Mr Macleod’s lawyer has made the unarguable point that, with his restaurants operating year round on the North Pier, he is better placed to known about this than anyone else, including the Harbour Master and the Roads Engineer, both of whom visit only sporadically and the latter only occasionally.
But as with the wildly expensive disasters of the Port Askaig harbour development on Islay and the Dunoon Linkspan in Cowal, the Council may be underinformed and inexpert – but still knows best. And there’s Oban Airport.
And what about the regular berthing cruise ships?
With the rendering virtually unusable the emergency rear access to the restaurants, whatever else is happening, deliveries and all harbour traffic will have no option but to use the formally appointed space round the end of the Pier.
The cruise ships,SS Quest and Island Sky regularly berth across the end of Oban’s North Pier on west coast cruises. To protect their passengers’ privacy and access and their own logistical needs for loading stores and unloading wastes, pedestrian and vehicle access to the end of the North Pier is heavily restricted for them by the Heras fencing and the security caravan both require.
While there is still room for vehicular access along the front of the restaurants, it is not easily two-way. With more vehicles – including cars, which have previously been able to enter and exit via the rear of the restaurants – forced to use the outer end of the Pier, there will, in these circumstances, inevitably be traffic jams in unseen counter-traffic movements, with more noise and nuisance right uptight to the restaurant buildings.
In these situations, pedestrians either walking on the Pier or trying to access the restaurants, will have to use the rat-run between the rear of the restaurants and the rear wall of the bus shelter and facing the bin storage for the harbour complex.
This is not the context these cruise ships expects for their berthing facility.
Since the council did not formally consult Mr Macleod on the project, it is improbable that they consulted the owners of SS Quest and Island Sky and any more fully.
The absolute abuse of power
Alan Macleod has serially asked for the projected revenue earnings from this excursion – and been denied it. He was told by Council Project Manger, Linda Houston, that this information would be part of the ‘Full Business Case due to be presented to the Oban Lorn and the Isles Area Committee and Full Council in September. This is in accordance with the target dates published in my update reports to the Area Committee’.
When he inquired about the sense of spending money on a planning application before scrutinising and testing the robustness of the business case, he was told that Ms Houston was ‘following Council procedures’.
These ‘council procedures’ will be news to Oban Bay Marine, which spent literally years, funded by local businesses who energetically supported the initiative, trying to convince the council of the business case for the establishment of a walk-ashore transit marina in the centre of the town – before they could get anywhere near a planning application. And the reason given for the latest blocking of that project is that the business case doesn’t stack up.
The ‘Full Business Case’ is said to contain an ‘independent’ Economic Impact Analysis for the bus shelter project, which estimates that over 15 years the asset will generate £22.6m, support 59 full time equivalent jobs and provide a gross added value of £11m to the Oban economy. It will be very interesting to see the foundation for those estimates. Perhaps the 59 jobs anticipated are to be in traffic management, security and industrial cleaning?
When the Macleods were, until the last minute, denied information to be submitted to Councillors [as per usual. as a late supplementary report] before the meeting of the Planning Committee to decide on the project’s consent, their lawyer asked for a postponement of the meeting to allow the Macleods to consider if there was information consequent on this report that they needed to submit to the committee, to clarify aspects of the matter on which they were to decide.
In a markedly cavalier refusal, Stephen Fair, from the Council’s local planning office, told them that ‘The supplementary report is for Members benefit. It is the Members who require sufficient time to absorb the reports prior to the committee meeting, and they will ultimately decide whether they are ready to determine the application or not.’
The issue was, of course, that the information members required to absorb ought not properly to come only from the side of the applicant – the Council itself – although its officer here exercised his authority to prevent Members’ access to additional and probably contrary evidence. This has been an affront to good practice as much as to democracy itself.
Mr Macleod has, until very recently, been unable to get local councillors to meet him to discuss the matter.
Given local councillors’ direct responsibility for local economic welfare, this reflects badly on every one of them, questioning their right to be where they are. It also speaks to a gagging regime that is another affront to democracy. It should be noted that Councillors Iain S Maclean and Neil Macintyre are now in contact with Mr Macleod – and that both are opposition councillors. [Update 00.15 7th January: We now understand that Councillor Roddy McCuish, an administation councillor, has also very recently been in touch with the Macleods.]
The forcing through of this project to date has been an exercise in the use of raw power by a council careless of its responsibilities and ill-equipped to fulfil them.
The council has, with marked arrogance and without accountability, used its power to permit itself to undertake a wholly uninformed vanity project, with no understanding of the realities of what it will become, with no interest in building something worth maintaining – and with no care to the economic damage this cannot but bring about to a failing town.
Eating out is about good food and ease. Whatever the Macleods do about keeping their cuisine first class and their restaurants well served, everything to do with this ill-conceived development can only damage the enterprise into which they have sunk their own financial security; and which they have made into a powerful support for the Oban tourism sector.
Sources:
- The architects’ schematic, artists impressions and narrative on the Oban Maritime Visitor Facility is here: Annex 1.1 Concept Design Report 140220 email quality Final copy.
- The ground plan for the Maritime Visitor Facility with distances to the rear of the Macleod restaurants is here: 141112_NorthPier_GA_Eeusk-Pavilion_Distances plan.
- The schematic showing the rights of access detail conveyed by his lease upon Alan Macleod is here: Ee-usk lease access 2003 – 20100607122454593
