Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by George Rosie
Remembering my friend, Tom Nairn: the great explorer of a nation’s pathologies
Register today to continue reading You’ve hit your limit of three articles in the last 30 days. To get seven more, simply enter your email address below. You’ll also receive our free e-book 50 Thinkers for a turbulent world and our newsletter with the best new writing on politics, economics, literature and the arts. Prospect may process your personal information for our legitimate business purposes, to provide you with newsletters, subscription offers and other relevant information.
Remembering my friend, Tom Nairn: the great explorer of a nation’s pathologies
It had been an odd few days. On my way to the funeral of the great political thinker Tom Nairn on a Friday in mid-February, I ran into an elderly acquaintance I hadn’t seen for years. I knew him to be a well-read man and a Labour party supporter but with Scottish nationalist sympathies. I had time on my hands, so I stopped to chat. “They’ll baith be sair missed” summed up his feelings about Tom’s death and Nicola Sturgeon’s sudden resignation.
Winners and losers on #MoultriesHill Part 3
Story so far: By the end of Part Two, the brutalist Scottish Office has been abandoned. The fate of the St James Centre hangs in the air. Part Three: 2000 – 2020 After a decade or so of going nowhere things began to move (slightly) around 2005. In October that year Coal Pension Properties (CPP) put the shopping centre on the market. Six months later it was bought by Donegal Place Investments, one of Northern Ireland’s more aggressive property companies.
New Brutalism in St James Square: #MoultriesHill Part 2
The story so far: In Part One, the vibrant mixed community of St James Square slowly declined under exploitative, ever-neglectful landlords. Part Two: 1955-2000 The first stirrings of change came from Her Majesty’s Government. In the mid 1950s, HMG, in the form of the Ministry of Public Building & Works, was looking for somewhere to house Scotland’s fast-growing, post-war army of civil servants.
The tangled history of Edinburgh St James
Rack followed ruin and ruin begat rack. Edinburgh is held to be among the most beautiful cities in the world. The sweeping curves, terraces and gardens of the New Town an example of inspired urban planning, a masterpiece of symmetry and grace – for those who could afford to live there. Other, nearby, parts of the city have not fared so well.
A Bridge Too Far
Over drinks in a nearby hotel he said he had been working on the bridge and was on his way home. What he told me took me aback. ‘You Scotch guys are really sucking on hind tit,’ he said. ‘Every contractor I meet on this job seems to come from someplace in Europe or someplace in the US or someplace down in England. What’s wrong with Scotch people? Don’t you make big stuff any more? If that’s true it’s a real shame.
Scottish Review of Books
I’m sitting in the Conan Doyle, a pub with a view of the statue of Mr Sherlock Holmes in Picardy Place. That’s in Edinburgh. According to a Nicholson’s pub group leaflet, Holmes ‘stands in permanent contemplation of the death of his creator’. Pretty meta. It could be that it’s just a bronze statue of Sherlock Holmes … that’s a possibility, isn’t it? The figure is more Basil Rathbone than Jeremy Brett.
SRB DIARY: Tarred and Feathered
I am in Burghead on the Moray coast for the Clavie, an annual ritual in which a large wooden barrel full of creosote and tarred staves is set on fire and paraded through the streets. It takes place in the town on January 11th to mark the end of the old new year. When Scotland switched from the Julian to Gregorian calendar in 1600, the people here, known as Brochers, refused to change, meaning that their ‘Hogmanay’ comes eleven days after the rest of the country.
Double crossings: the Queensferry Crossing and the future of Scottish engineering
Over the last few years I’ve been making the occasional jaunt down to Queensferry just to see how the new road bridge is coming along. It is, after all, the biggest public works project in Scotland for decades and easily the most expensive. At £1.4bn (probably) it’s three times the cost of the Edinburgh trams and almost four times that of the Parliament building. On one of my visits I ran into a grizzled, middle-aged American from, I think, Ohio.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with George
Contact George, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack