Cleaning the city is a dirty job but we’ve got to do it - Iain Whyte

This also brings the usual gush of articles and council puff about how beautiful Edinburgh is. Every time I read this, I just hope that the visitors in the city are so busy looking up at the castle or enjoying the culture that they don’t notice the state of the place.

Last year I led a Conservative campaign for the council elections based on cleaning up the city. I was not alone in being fed up with litter-strewn streets that made us officially the dirtiest city in Scotland. Accompanied by overflowing communal bins, regular dumping at bin hubs, street weeds, a guddle of temporary signs and bollards and a general lack of maintenance of roads and pavements, the city needs a spruce up.

Sometimes when people tell a councillor an area is dirty, a quick look shows it’s not actually litter but a lack of basic maintenance. The ever enduring “temporary” Spaces for People measures are a great example of this. Not designed for the long term they look scruffy and mismanaged yet seem here forever.

I can claim some success in the last year as council colleagues have recognised that change was needed but it hasn’t all kicked in yet and won’t address all these issues. So, with August, here what do visitors really think of the reality of some of the scruffier things that Edinburgh residents are becoming inured to?

Last week I got my answer when Lloyd Evans, writing Fringe reviews in The Spectator, used up some of his space to file on the state of Edinburgh thus:

“A chilly August in Edinburgh. Colder than it’s been for 20 years, and the city looks scruffier than ever. Locked Portakabins squat in elegant stone courtyards. Unused site machinery lies abandoned outside neoclassical museums. Pavements and bridges are scarred by ugly steel roadblocks and lurid signs mar the visual harmony of virtually every thoroughfare. The place seems to be governed by a crew of philistine control freaks whose bossy urges affect the festival staff.”

The truth is that our hard-won reputation and self-promotion are way better than the reality. That can work for a while but not forever. This isn’t just the detritus of the Fringe but a systemic failure to address our wider public realm properly.

Edinburgh is a truly beautiful city with majestic architecture that has generated World Heritage status. That is precisely why we must care a lot more about our public realm.

As we see with banning comedians, small stories can blow up quickly into an international media frenzy at Festival time. We seem to have been lucky so far on the “dirty old Edinburgh” front, but we shouldn’t take any more risks.

To keep our reputation the council must up its game – and quickly – so that the reality reflects the puff. Otherwise, Lloyd Evans won’t be the only visiting writer setting out the truth. That would be very bad for jobs and our economy indeed.

Councillor Iain Whyte is Conservative group leader on City of Edinburgh Council