Revitalizing Edinburgh’s Granton Waterfront

00:04
Davion Ford
Welcome to Better Cities by Design, a podcast brought to you by Arcadis, where we talk to change makers who are working to make our cities better places for people to live, work and play. I'm your host, Davion Ford. This week, we're headed to Edinburgh, Scotland to talk with Sat Patel, who is the Programme Director, Edinburgh Waterfront, working for the city of Edinburgh council. We're going to speak with Sat about the massive and ambitious Granton Waterfront regeneration effort, which will transform an underserved part of Edinburgh into a highly livable and sustainable section of the city.

00:48
Davion Ford
With more than 550,000 residents, Edinburgh is the capital of Scotland and the seat of the Scottish government. It's the second most populous city in Scotland behind Glasgow and the seventh most populous city in the United Kingdom. Despite its relatively small population, from an economic standpoint, Edinburgh punches well above its weight. A 2022 report from the Center of Economic and Business Research places Edinburgh in the top 10 best performing cities for economic output and employment. Edinburgh is the second largest financial center in the UK behind London and ranks fourth in Europe in terms of equity assets. But like any city, economic prosperity obtained by some residents doesn't mean that everyone is thriving. Here is Edinburgh resident, Associate Cost Consultant at Arcadis, Craig Kecheran.

01:42
Craig Kecheran
The City of Edinburgh Council has a strong economy which is set to emerge from the many recessions that the UK has recently had to endure. So with a sharp increase in inflation over the recent months and years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, it's resulted in pockets of deprivation across parts of the city and made it more and more difficult for people to be able to afford to live in Edinburgh.

02:03
Davion Ford
One of the parts of Edinburgh that has been underserved over the past decades is the Granton Waterfront region, which is three miles north of the city center. This part of the city has a long history dating back at least as far as 1479, when Granton Castle stood there. That castle was largely demolished over the ensuing centuries. Granton Waterfront is comprised of a number of coastal communities from Cramond in the west to Portobello in the east. This is roughly 200 hectares of open green space and parkland and also about 50 hectares of industrial land, one of Scotland's largest brownfield sites.

02:45
Craig Kecheran
So Granton was once a very important part of Edinburgh in terms of industrial and maritime purposes. It's a part of the town that has largely been forgotten about over the past few decades in terms of investment. Whilst there's been various plans to regenerate the area, many of those plans were never realised and as a result, many of us living in Edinburgh have had limited reason to visit this part of the city. Granton has so much potential and it's a great part of the city with various active travel links along the coast of the River Forth. but there's a massive amount of investment needed to transform this former industrial area into a vibrant, sustainable and livable community. So having personally visited the Granton area over the years and a lot more regularly as part of Arcadis’ involvement in supporting the regeneration of the Granton warfront area, I'm extremely excited to see the end result of the City of Edinburgh Council's plans and the great impact this will have on the community and for the people of Granton.

03:39
Davion Ford
As we just heard from Craig, the City of Edinburgh Council has stepped in with an ambitious plan to redevelop Granton Waterfront with the goal of creating sustainable growth and helping Edinburgh become a greener, fairer economy. The plan is to deliver around 3,500 new net zero carbon homes along with creating Europe's largest coastal park, ample commercial space, a new school, and a health center. And many of those homes I mentioned will either be social housing, owned and managed by the City Council, or they will be rented to households on low to middle incomes at a rate that's lower than private rental rates. Now, to learn more about the redevelopment of this part of Edinburgh, I'm very excited to welcome Sat Patel to the show. Sat is the program director at Edinburgh Waterfront, so he's been intimately involved in the regeneration of Granton.

04:39
Davion Ford
Okay, Sat, welcome to Better Cities by Design.

04:42
Sat Patel
Thank you, thanks for having me Davion.

04:44
Davion Ford
So Sat Patel, you work for the City of Edinburgh Council and you're the Granton Waterfront Programme Director. That means you know an awful lot about the Granton area of the city. Before we talk about the amazing redevelopment project that you've been involved in, can you talk a bit about why all of this work was necessary?

05:40
Sat Patel
Absolutely, Davion, and a good starting question. This project started back in 2018, but really, progress within the north of Edinburgh has probably been happening over the last 20 to 30 years. It is a really forgotten part of the city. So, north Edinburgh, for those who know Edinburgh very well, it is north Edinburgh, it is right on the waterfront, so it's right next to the Forth. And in terms of its geographical location, it's surrounded by communities that are fairly deprived. So there's about 28,000 people living in surrounding communities around Granton Waterfront. Just to give you some stats off the top of my head, Davion, in terms of what some of that deprivation looks like. We did a study a couple of years ago, and really the kind of high level stats that were coming out of that were that about 30% of children live in households and relative poverty in that area. It has the second lowest average household income in the whole of Edinburgh. It has twice the crime rate per 1,000 people as a city as a whole. And one in four residents live within 10% of the most deprived data zones in Scotland. So that gives you a real sense of the type of area that we're talking about. And unfortunately, forgotten this really of that part of the city. It is in much need of regeneration. So there has been regeneration and work going on over the last 20 or 30 years but really that's been piecemeal. This is quite a challenging area of the city in terms of its steep topography, in terms of its made ground, in terms of decontamination that's required because it was industrial use before. So it does require somebody to come in and deal with all of that challenge. The private sector did do that until about the 2008 global credit crunch crash and then effectively private sector has kind of walked away from this area and it is now really needing pump primed. Really that's what we see ourselves doing as the council, really acting there as a public sector pump primer to try and work with the private sector but to really help unlock this site.

07:22
Davion Ford
Well, thank you for sharing that about the situation that's going on there. And so I guess my next question is, what's the plan? So what all is involved in the Granton Waterfront regeneration project?

07:34
Sat Patel
So yeah, moving away from all of the doom and gloom and into the positivity and light. We've got some real grand plans for Granton. So we plan over the next 15 years to deliver three and a half thousand net zero homes, to deliver a new primary school, a new medical facility, about nine thousand square meters of commercial space, to deliver a low carbon heat network, a large coastal park, active travel network, mobility hubs, really just effectively a brand new community, Davion, somewhere where people will live, work, play, and have open space and green space on their doorstep. So really at the heart of our development ambitions is to use biodiversity, to have natural resources on our doorstep, to create a low-car ownership environment, really hinged on net zero development, and really hinged on being future-proofed.

08:32
Davion Ford
You talked a bit already about some of the, not just the deprivation, but the private sector walking away a bit. I can imagine for people living in the communities there that they're very, very focused on actually seeing progress. And I can imagine as well that there've been promises that have been made in the past that may not have been delivered upon. So what tangible progress have you made so far?

08:56
Sat Patel
I would hope that the surrounding communities and others would see lots of tangible progress. In terms of the last three years, we've really been focused on trying to deliver Granton Waterfront and trying to progress it. Now you can imagine regeneration project of this size, scale and nature. It's an unwieldy beast and there's certainly no silver bullets and it's not something that can be progressed quickly. As we work our way through the logical steps we're really trying to get to a stage where we can deliver as quickly as possible down on the ground. So we purchased the land which has given us most of the land opportunity back in 2018, that's fourth quarter land and that gives us now about 50 hectares of developable land to allow us to deliver on the regeneration ambitions. We then did a huge round of consultation with not only our politicians but of course the surrounding communities and other stakeholders within the area. So that effectively turned into a development framework for the area which was signed off by our planning committee back in February 2020. That is the guiding principles of how we'll build out Granton Waterfront and really sets out the framework and the parameters for how we do that. We then moved into Outline Business Case stage, which concluded that we would deliver Granton but break it down into more deliverable phases. So we're now focused on phase one at the moment and we've gone out and procured a development partner. So our development partner is Cruden, who we're working with right now. We've master planned what phase one looks like. Phase one will be about 800 homes, the primary school, capacity for the medical center, low carbon heat network, about 3000 square meters of commercial space. So it's a real chunky first bit of development. So that is well in progress right now. We're just finishing the master planning stage and we've just put in a pre-application notice for planning. So we're just about to go out and do consultation with the local community and that will take place next month. Alongside all of that though, in terms of actual tangible things down on the ground, we've got numerous housing projects already in delivery within Granton. So that's to help deliver much needed affordable housing within the area. So we have approximately about 600 homes already in various stages of construction. We've got two housing sites that are well into construction now. So they will deliver homes this year and the first sets of tenants will start moving into those. So again that's really exciting for us, it's a mixture of social housing and mid-market rent housing and again you know some of the first net zero developments in Edinburgh for us. So Granton has been really used as a test bed and a pilot place for us to really pilot the way we'll deliver homes within Edinburgh in the future. Alongside that we've also got the Granton gas holder project, so the gas holder is an iconic heritage structure that's slap bang in the middle of our development. And I said that's a B-listed structure, but in much needed need of some TLC really to fix the steel and structural integrity of it. And also we're building a public park within the middle of that. So that's a real anchor place and a destination place for people who will move into phase one, but also wider visitors to the city as well to come and enjoy a really iconic structure. All of those projects that are in progress will complete over the next two or three years and will then be the springboard as we start progressing with phase one of the wider regeneration start delivering more homes and more public realm and landscape in open space within the area.

12:36
Davion Ford
So Sat, I do understand that there is an area right at the waterfront, which was deemed very attractive to be developed by the private sector, potentially for high-end housing. But you guys made a decision that that was not what you wanted to do. Why is that?.

12:53
Sat Patel
I think it's a really good example of how we've been innovative in our thinking and also how we've embedded natural resource biodiversity into our thinking. So, Granton, of course, has been subject to numerous master plans. So previous master plans within the area that you're talking about built out for housing. So it's right on the waterfront. It's currently industrial use at the moment, but the plans in previous master plans were to demolish that industrial use and to build high-end housing right on the waterfront. When we did studies back in 2018 when we were producing our development framework, we looked at flood analysis and that looked at 1 in 250 storm event flood analysis data and really that set out quite clearly to us that it was in a flood zone risk area and really to combat that what you would need to do is to build fairly high seawall defenses to ensure that the homes that you built there weren't flooded. So we took the decision at the time, and from a commercial viability point of view, you know, private sector operator probably would have continued with trying to build housing there because it's really lucrative, and also, you know, probably in terms of selling homes, the most appealing place to build homes. But for us, we took the decision to use that area as a natural floodplain. So it forms part of our coastal park within our development framework. So it's a large coastal park. And we've done some recent studies around what we would put in the coastal park. So things like sculpture parks, BMX track, you know, exciting things that you would expect to see in a local park now. But really that design and that idea was around using that area as a natural floodplain. So effectively, if there was a storm event effectively the coastal park would suck up all of that water and ensure that the development that we're building more inland is protected by it effectively.

14:51
Davion Ford
You spoke about the district heating network that you want to put in place for this area. And I understand that you want to tap into, I guess, a very unlikely source for the heat, or at least for me, I think it's an unlikely source, which is the actual sewer system. So how does that work?

15:09
Sat Patel
Well, you're asking a very technical question, Davion, but I'll try and give you my understanding of it. And that's the beauty of this role. I think I've learned all sorts of things, things I would never have learned before. But in terms of the heat network, we've looked at various different sources over the time we've looked at this. We've been through a feasibility study and we looked at a couple of sources. We looked at sea source, which is around harnessing energy from the waves. And of course, because we've got the Forth right on our doorstep, that was something that we looked at. But I think we ruled that out because of its technical viability. It's quite a tricky heat network to get off the ground. We also looked at ground source, which is where you take boreholes right down into the ground and effectively use the core of the earth's heat effectively to heat homes. But again, technically quite difficult to do in terms of having a bore down to 100 meters and also takes up quite a lot of space on site. So where we landed on was the sewer source, which is what you're talking about. It is effectively extracting heat from the sewer, effectively. But what you really do is you put in a pipe that connects into the sewer, and then you then install a wet well which sits outside it. And effectively that wet well takes the ambient heat from the sewer itself and processes that through heat pumps, which then effectively create a source of heat in hot water, which is piped straight into homes. So you need a fairly large energy center, which we're planning for within our phase one development, and we've set out a site for that. And then effectively, that centralized energy center pipes heat and hot water to homes around the development. So it's a real opportunity to create a low carbon source of heat.

16:59
Davion Ford
Well, for an accountant who doesn't know about technical things, I think that was a really great explanation. Thank you for that. A big part of the success of this project going forward is, of course, going to be really tied up in the timing of things. I'm thinking about the fact that you've got energy center that you're building, and also you've got homes that are going to use the energy. But of course, you don't want to have a situation where you're producing energy and there's no one to consume it, or that you have people that need to consume energy and none is being produced. So what has it been like managing the timing, getting the timing right, I should say, for such a massive project?

17:39
Sat Patel
Heart wrenching to be honest with you, Davion. I've got a few more greys on this old noggin than I had when I first started this role. It's one of the biggest challenges we've got but of course not insurmountable. Really what we've got is an overall master program, it's about staying on that program as far as we can. So where we're currently at at the moment is we are designing up phase one so we of course have Cruden who are our development partner and we're working alongside them to design up phase one, take that to plan and effectively get all the statutory consent so that we can start enabling an infrastructure works. Alongside that, we have been over the last two years progressing the heat network plans. And I have to be honest, I think the heat network is actually a lot of the hard work and the time is all in the feasibility stage of it, where you're trying to really rule out what solutions you shouldn't go with honing on the solution that you should go with. So I think now that we've got that out of the way, and that's almost taken us probably two years to get to that stage, we're now progressing quite quickly through the various stages. So we've just completed Outline Business Case stage. That took us about four months, so that was fairly quick. And we're now into procurement, going out to procure a partner to help us deliver that heat network. And at the same time, what we're doing is, we're planning for a pre-development period with that partner as well, so that we can bring them in. We go through the procurement process really quickly. We can bring them in and they can start working alongside Cruden so that they can plan how they would do the enabling and infrastructure works together. They can plan the timing for the energy center to ensure that it's built, like you say, at exactly the right time. If it's too early, then you've got an asset that's sitting there that's making no money. Similarly, if it's too late, then you've got homes that have no heat and hot water being supplied to them. So it's about managing all of that time. And so for us, I think what's key is to bring people into the tent as quickly as possible and get them to work alongside each other. I think the key for the council is that whilst we're public sector lead in all of this, it's about bringing in all of the private sector partners and getting them to work together as quickly as possible and getting them to work together efficiently so that we don't take the project too far. And also we don't have any abortive work. So we don't take the designs too far. We bring them in and we let them use their expertise.

20:03
Davion Ford
I hope that our listeners are starting to get a bit of a vision of what the Granton Waterfront is going to be and what this project all entails. So, Sat, my final question for you is actually looking into the future, twenty years from now, when you go down to visit Granton Waterfront, what do you hope to see and what will be your measure of success?

05:40
Sat Patel
That's a great question. I think ultimately for me, and this is giving you some of my kind of personal thought here, Davion, but before I took this role on, I am an Edinburgh boy born and bred. So, but before I took this role on, I'll be honest with you, the area that we're now working down in, I didn't know it very well. I never went down to it because there was no reason to be there. There's nothing there. It has a reputation of being surrounded by communities that are not great communities, so you have no reason to be there unless there's a reason to be there. So I think for me the measure for success in 20 years time is that we have built a brand new community that is thriving, that offers job opportunities for local people, has great school and is a place where people can live, work and play, enjoy their leisure time. They won't feel they need to go to the wider city unless they want to, but at the same time it's also a place that people will visit from the wider city and wider region as well and will want to go down there and to me that will be a measure of success. There are lots of areas like that in Edinburgh now that potentially weren't as good as they are now, so Portobello I'm thinking of as a good example of that, where if you now go down to Portobello it's absolutely thriving with local business, thriving with water sports and is a really hip and trendy place to live, go, and visit. I think for me if Granton became that in 20 years time that would be an absolute measure of success. I think we would have done our job and I certainly would be super proud going down there. No doubt I'll be hopefully pointing to my kids and perhaps my grandkids by that point about all the things that have helped deliver down there but yeah I think it is just creating a new community and creating opportunities for the local people who live down there and giving them something because, you know, I think the key to all of this is that in terms of that consultation we did over the last few years, what we hear from the local community is just get on with it. You've been giving us lots of promises all of these years, but nobody's actually delivered. So I think we just want to deliver. It's key for us.

22:41
Davion Ford
I certainly hope that you're able to achieve all of that success for the people living in the Granton area and everyone across Edinburgh. Sat Patel, thank you so much for your time.

22:51
Sat Patel
Thank you for having me.

22:52
Davion Ford
That's all for this episode of the show. We hope you enjoyed our chat with Sat Patel, the Programme Director, Edinburgh Waterfront. You know, at Arcadis, we're really happy to be working together with the city of Edinburgh Council to help deliver this really ambitious project that has so much potential to transform this section of the city and to improve quality of life for residents. Stay tuned for our future episodes as we continue to bring change makers to the table who are driving progress in urban development. And if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and check out our other episodes. I'm Davion Ford and you've been listening to Better Cities by Design, a podcast brought to you by Arcadis, the world's leading company delivering sustainable design, engineering and consultancy solutions for natural and built assets. You can learn more by visiting our website, arcadis.com, or by following Arcadis on LinkedIn or Facebook. And please, stay curious, get inspired, and remember, the future belongs to those who dare to make a difference in the cities we call home.