Recession Road: Edinburgh
This post is from our Recession Road series, part of our special report on the global downturn.
We're here. This trip was all about the journey - who we might encounter on the way, what they might tell us, what we might see. But nevertheless, it is always good to arrive.
The end of the A1 - where the road meets Princes Street at the top of the North Bridge - is bathed in evening sunlight when we get there. An imaginary fanfare goes off in my head as we stand behind the sign pointing east back towards Berwick upon Tweed. Da-da-da!
It's rush hour so people are generally charging around, speed-walking past us towards Waverley train station and dodging map-wielding tourists.
I try to get Kirsteen McClaren, 24, as excited as I am that we are standing at the spot that is the end - or the beginning - of the A1. The road that runs for 409 miles between two capital cities.
"I didn't know that," she says. "But I do now".
She and boyfriend Steve Calderwood, 26, both work at shoe shop Schuh - Kirsteen as a store manager and Steve as a graphic designer. They say times are good because the business is expanding and opening new shops.
"We don't feel like the recession has affected us," says Kirsteen, who has worked at the store since November. And if you are young with no mortgage, few overheads and a job in a growing business, why would it?
"A lot of friends, and family of friends, have lost their jobs but they work mainly in trades areas like building," adds Kirsteen.
Steve is saving for a mortgage, and wishes he had enough money now so he could take advantage of the lower property prices. But he won't be in that position any time soon, he says.
The recession is just not at the forefront of their minds, they say, as they head off arm in arm.
That's how it is for them. For others we have met, the story is altogether different, and for some it's a mix of sweet and sour.
And so, this blog is what it is. A fairly random slice of a section of Britain, as much as we could squeeze into four days.
Thanks for coming along for the ride.
PS: Tomorrow (Friday 18 September), we will post a link to the final piece of the trip - a slideshow of sounds and pictures from Recession Road.
You can read an explanation of our Recession Road series here. Words: Paula Dear; Images: Phil Coomes.
I'm 
~RS~q~RS~~RS~z~RS~36~RS~)
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Scotland has a government it can be proud of, I feel sorry for English folks that they are unable to say the same.
The SNP has lifted the spiitis of the Scottish people and been a breadth of fresh air over the dead hand of the labour party.
The SNP has steered the country through the recession, despite the best eforts of Brown and his cronies to prevent the SNP suceeding.
Well done the SNP!
D McN
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The current form of the cliché is:
map-wielding
not
map-yielding.
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This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the House Rules.
Number 1 obviously does not live in Scotland or is being ironic! Hard to tell. The SNP are hardly a breath of fresh air! The SNP are just like any other party, saying one thing and doing the opposite. The TramLINE in Edinburgh is just one example of their contradictions!
If there is one place where spirits have not been lifted then its Edinburgh. Having to endure the agonising disruption caused by the TramLINE which will amount to nothing more than a life size train set going from the West End to St Andrews Square with all the reductions and cut backs and budget increases.
While ordinary people during the recession think of ways to stretch their money, the Scottish Government think a TramLINE costing over £545 million and possibly 2 years behind schedule is better value for money than the initial several planned tramlines billed at over £300 million!
I'm surprised Edinburgh is not worse off than it is!
So much for the SNP steering us through the recession! They really do have some funny ideas about freeing up £1.1 billion they saught to gain in the last election! As long as the council earns salaries £2000 more than their private sector counterparts, then who is to say Edinburgh is affected by the recession!?
- Edinburgh resident and one cynic of many in this battered city.
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I live in Edinburgh and have done so all my days. I am 23.
The people you found here are most definitely NOT representative of this city's current situation. It is a total mess; unemployment is approaching 11% here and the city has a very high cost of living for what you get. The whole city's economy revolves around the property market and banking/financial services, and what's been mostly affected by the recession? Yes, you guessed it correctly.
I can't think of anyone I know here who is completely unaffected. Even those with stable incomes and jobs have watched their house values plummet and mortgage values change, and everyone else has taken redundancy or pay cuts. These people working at Schuh are being worryingly blasé about the whole thing and I would argue that the young people are the worst affected, as they're not financially secure enough initially to ride it out in any case.
By the way, it's Edinburgh City Council that's responsible for the poorly planned tram "network", not the SNP. In fact, the SNP want to hold an inquiry into it to ascertain why things have gone so badly wrong, why it's so delayed and why it's so expensive. The ~£600m spent so far on a system which will never be completed as envisaged (due to scaling back of the already very very limited routes due to budget cuts) should have just been spent on hybrid buses and reinforced Lothian Buses' reputation of excellence that they keep going on about.
Edinburgh has been going downhill for a good few years now due to various things but it really is getting worse. I plan to leave at some stage and start a new life elsewhere, as this city is now too expensive to live in for many people (I actually know a millionaire and even he is considering selling up) and there really isn't much in the way of prospects unless you want to work in property or finance, both of which are currently very much in the doldrums. When the economy recovers, these sectors will bounce back, no lessons will have been learned and we'll be in the situation where it could potentially happen again.
As for post #1, I would call that sarcasm or irony. There's no way he can possibly be serious, surely?
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I had my previous post removed for "breaking the house rules".
Okay, here goes again.
Perhaps a more in-depth article would have been better than simply asking one couple what their views were.
There - no feathers ruffled with that, I hope.
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In total, and in retrospect, what a lousy piece of journalism this has been. Starting out with a overstated objective, and trying to cram into half a working week an informative overview of how things are out there all along this great highway, I have finished up with a great sense of let-down, possibly shared by others. No sense of history (except abandoned Little Chef buildings), no sense of the future, in fact no hope of things new or better than today. The journalists should be put back on the road again (at least they now know the way) and told not to return until they have something encouraging to tell us.
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I believe Waverley is a railway (or rail) station. Train station may be becoming more used now but it is not english.
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