Up the Stairs to an Understanding of Topography #02

Today, the stairs we document are all in areas which begin with a 'K'. This is just a coincidence.

At Kincorth, this complex of paths and stairways (pictured left) leads all the way from the southern landfall of the medieval Bridge of Dee to the summit of Kincorth Hill itself. (There's a great deal of interesting history and artifacts in Kincorth and on Kincorth Hill, which we'll cover in more detail someday soon.) At the Bridge of Dee, the river is tidal, and the summit of Kincorth Hill is marked by an Ordnance Survey pillar marking 105m elevation. So that's quite a trek, but well worth it for the view over the entirety of the southern-facing slope from the Dee to Cairncry and north-east to the city centre and over to the North Sea.

The majority of the path is in a directly straight line up the steepest part of the hill, in line with the bridge, and so forms an irresistible temptation to the psychogeographer: the grandiosity of a Roman-straight desire line directly up a hill from a strategic river-crossing is very difficult to ignore.

Mounting the paths and steps from the south of the Bridge of Dee, we take a civic journey in time, from Bishop Elphinstone's medieval bridge, passing a handful of Victorian houses at the Inverdee initiation of the Stonehaven Road, then up and up through the pleasant 20th Century 'garden estate' social housing of Kincorth.

The photo was taken in the autumn, and the charm of the yellowing leaves made for a pleasant, if a bit fall-melancolic walk on the day. During most months, the path is not visible from the south, as foliage obscures it, only in the winter is the lamplit footpath plainly visible to southbound users of the Bridge of Dee. It's is also visible in the winter months from the pocket park which divides Wal-Mart/Asda from South Anderson Drive's terminal roundabout.

Next, these stairs allow an easy climb up the steepest part of Kaimhill from the of the valley of the Ruthrieston Burn at Auchinyell. At this point the trackbed of the dismantled Deeside Railway runs along the valley of the burn and forms a border between the areas of Garthdee/Auchinyell and Mannofield. Once the primary route to highland Aberdeenshire and Royal Deeside, the railway was closed and dismantled in 1966 after 113 years in operation. Then left to grow wild in the 1970's and 1980's the track-bed now forms a highly successful part of the Sustrans National Cycle Network and is designated 'Route 195'. While we like this, we'd still greatly prefer that this were a railway route.

Kaimhill itself is a prominence which separates the broad tributary valley of the Ruthrieson Burn from that of the River Dee. We suspect that the name Kaim-hill may be derived from that of the glacial feature kame: "a geological feature, an irregularly shaped hill or mound composed of sand, gravel and till that accumulates in a depression on a retreating glacier, and is then deposited on the land surface with further melting of the glacier." Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire are strewn with glacial features - but we really don't know for sure if Kaimhill is a kame. If anyone can enlighten us we'd be grateful.

And now, once again to Kepplestone. We've written about Kepplesone once or twice before, and we return to it now in the context of the grand-processional stairway feature which we previously called an "orotund yet oddly asymmetrical staircase [which hints] at a touch of unhinged, slurring megalomania in the conception of the scheme."

We wrote about this new-ish development in slightly mocking tones. We questioned the validity of the design, we raised concrerns about the quality of the fabric of the buildings, and we satirised the emphasis on underground parking upon which both the developer and the residents of this type of new housing appear to place so much emphasis. We received several reader comments in support of what we'd said, but we did appear to have upset one anonymous commentator - a resident of Kepplestone - who wrote:

Yes the outside is not too everyones taste ... But inside is very nice and spacious. The parking is excellent with no common on street problems. And no amount of boring pictures of gutters or negative comments will overcome the fact it is prime real estate in the west end with excellent transport links and local infrastructure.

The rest of the comments are merely jealously.

I bet none of you have even been inside one?

My neighbours are all nice professionals. Unlike the studentville or DSS that seems to occupy most other parts of Aberdeen.

We found these borderline offensive comments, socially prejudiced as they were, to be highly enlightening - telling us a great deal about the abrasive mindset of the type of people who live in Kepplestone today; their insecurities, their beliefs and their provocative outlook.

This gave us quite a lot to ponder upon, particularly in the context of a former resident of Kepplestone who we also learned about through a reader comment.

There he is. Outside Kepplestone House itself (the house is, at the time of writing, still lying derelict on one corner of the site). This is Thomas Ogilvie, wool merchant and hat manufacturer in Aberdeen at the turning of the 19th into 20th centuries. It is said that this man brought the top-hat to Aberdeen. And here he is wearing one (fifth from the left, 2nd row back).

Ogilvie was an old-style paternalistic capitalist, building real capital in this town, investing it and providing wealth for future generations of the entirety of Aberdeen. This is the building of social and civic as well as financial capital - as well as industrial capital. Indeed, he retained architect William Kelly (of Kelly's Cats) to build his stately wool warehouse (Ogilvie Buildings) on the corner of Dee Street and Dee Place which stands in situ to this day, a listed building now converted into city-centre apartments.

We can't help but feel that there's a huge contrast between the - "I've got mine, I'll tolerate no criticism of what I hold dear - but I'm happy to display my contempt of everyone else..."  - attitude so indignantly exhibited by the current Kepplestone resident, and the more civil and civic practical business activities of the resident of Kepplestone one hundred years ago. While the Victorian/Edwardian era saw the operation of capital in the generation and accrual of real societal wealth and was often characterised by great works of philanthropy, today's resident mistakes private affluence for wealth, having no concept of social capital. Let the devil take the hindmost. Thus, where once value (and values) was (and were) built at Kepplestone, today it is (and they are) destroyed.

Kepplestone!

On our way to seek out a prominent example of an Aberdeen Ice House (watch this space) we were struck by the cognitive dissonance provoked by the après-post-modern skyline at new Kepplestone.

Is it an Aztec ziggurat? We wouldn't mind if it were.

We had heard that taxi-drivers in the city have taken to referring to the new Kepplestone as 'the west-end Tillydrone', so we thought we'd better take a closer look. (We can, of course, read well the implication in that loaded phrase, and we don't like it. Tilly is much done-down; residents of other areas self-importantly assuming their own neighborhood to be "better", and populated by a "better kind of folk". It is not, and they are not.)

So, ready for anything, we approached via Viewfield Road. The developer has laid some engraved (if a bit breathless and ungrammatical) granite plaques giving an interpretation of the histobunk of the site.

So far, so good.

Interesting.

Didn't know that.

OK

That's what we were familiar with, before the new development:

Hubris?

So we continued wandering about, firstly on the lower level of the site, where we remember that there used to be rugby pitches. Now there are detatched houses. Not really to our taste, but nice enough and well mannered, if you like that sort of thing.

But why do the feel they must park on the pavements?

The bizarre sense of anti-place only really started when we turned round and looked north up the hill where a orotund yet oddly asymmetrical staircase hints at a touch of unhinged, slurring megalomania in the conception of the scheme.

All Grecian Sir! Modernist detail on a Classical body!

Climbing the steps, we arrive in a neo-Grecian courtyard. If you find yourself a little tired out by the climb, you'll be glad to see that the developer has thoughtfully provided some Granitette chairs where you may sit and admire the details.

Moving on, we are ushered under a pointless arch for a view of the 'exclusive' parking. A significant and important aspect of any housing development for the sort of people who want to live like this, we understand.

And so to the tower-blocks. Note the astroturf on the un-balcony. Honestly. Why?

Thrilling juxtaposition of old and new.

Turning round to re-orientate ourselves, we notice the remains of Kepplestone House. And we begin to lose hope.

We remember the College of Domestic Science - 'The Dough School'. Slab and plinth modernism, not to everyone's taste - fair enough - but it sat back from Queen's Road and down an embankment. Today's residential towers loom boastfully and alarmingly over what remains Aberdeen's premier residential area.

They rejected plans to build a supermarket into the profile of the slope, so they got this residential development instead. We'll wager that the longer-established residents of Queen's Road, Royfold Crescent and Anderson Drive would much sooner have the Dough School back.

Turning our eyes skyward (in search of hope), we looked up in the darkening gloom and we could see that the residents of three of the apartments, each flat atop the other, were watching television. The television screens shone out over Queens Road in the gloaming. Identical large screen LCD's mounted in identical positions on their respective identical and otherwise unadorned walls, all identically tuned to the same channel. There was an ad-break being transmitted.

From the 22,000 mile high 'Clarke-orbit' geostationary Sky satellite to the dishes of Kepplestone, via the walls of the over-mortgaged residents, the tired eyes of the rush-hour motorists - furiously becalmed in the tea-time gridlock at the Earls Court roundabout - were invited to consider whether or not they were paying too much for their car insurance.

We note that the entire complex is guarded by a tank. The gun points towards the development and its residents. We approve of that, and wonder if any of them have noticed...

By Gad! A tank!

Rubislaw Quarry: Source of Wealth. Curse. Liability.

We heard recently that the remains of Aberdeen's world-famous Rubislaw Quarry were to be put up for sale at auction, starting bid £30k. The sale is now complete.

We read that the quarry, starting work in earnest in 1778, produced something like 6 million tonnes of the fine grey silver granite we are so familiar with. The granite from the quarry supported an ecosystem of business networks in the city and the stone found its way into some famous buildings elsewhere in the world such as Waterloo Bridge, the Palace of Westminster and the parliament in New Deli. But all things must pass, and the quarry became uneconomic and closed in 1971, round about the time of this famous picture...

Wooooaaaaahhh!

Here's a picture of the quarry in its high Victorian hey-day in 1885.

Interestingly, in this illustration looking south towards the low hills of Kincardineshire, on the brow of the ridge in the middle-distance we can see Kepplestone House to the left (east) and Rubislaw House to the right (west).

Rubislaw House has been well preserved and added to over the years, and today houses the Gordon Highlanders' regimental museum.

Kepplestone House has fared less well.

Back on-topic... Often fetishised by Aberdonians, 'the granite' - and the perceived need to maintain the city's 'granite heritage' - can sometimes act as a brake on innovation in urban realm architecture and spacemaking in the city. Worse, as the grey silver granite is now hard to come by, all too often we see builders paying lipservice to this heritage through the use of 'granitette' blockwork simulacrum (which is concrete breeze-block with a coating of rice-crispie-sized granite chips). This is used to hoodwink the passerby into believing that a building politely fits in among its Neo-Grecian Georgian and Neo-French-Gothic Victorian neighbours. This 'granitette' un-material can be seen most obviously on the deck of the St Nicholas Ctr in the heart of the city. But look at any - yes any - residential building built between 1972 and 2010 - it's everywhere. And it's horrible.

Ironically, the granite itself built the long breakwater pier at Aberdeen Harbour from which it was exported worldwide. Today, in Aberdeen, the quarry exhausted, rather than dig and blast our wealth from the ground, we sook it from beneath the seabed. This over-reliance on one business sector is known as 'the Dutch Disease' and is related to 'the Resource Curse'.

There is, however, in addition to this economic disease, a real physiological disease associated with Aberdeen granite: lung cancer. Granite contains uranium and radium, both of which follow a radioactive decay chain to form radon gas. Radon is the single largest contributor to an individual's background radiation in the UK and there is a well established link between breathing high concentrations of radon and the incidence of lung cancer. Radon is heavier than air, and so accumulates in the basements of granite buildings. You have been warned.

It's often said that the quarry is the biggest man-made hole in Europe, but we can't find any reliable confirmation that this assertion is a fact. But one thing's for sure, it is now one of the largest man-made lochs in Scotland!

We didn't have the Other Aberdeen theodolite with us on the day we visited the quarry loch to take this photo, but by simple dead reckoning on line of sight, we could establish that the water level is now significantly higher than the road level of Queens Road at Queens Avenue (opposite Kepplestone) where access can be gained to get a look at the quarry loch.

As mentioned at the top, the quarry loch was put up for sale with starting bids of £30,000. And, as luck would have it, the buyers happen to be friends of a relative of ours. They won't say how much they paid, but will say that it was "less than a one-bedroom flat". We scratch our heads at why they bought this obvious liability... one day, the water level will overtop the berm on the Queen's Road side.

A friend has calculated that the quarry loch now contains about 2 million cubic metres of water. That's two megatonnes in weight. He asks:

"How do you get rid of that amount water? Do you simply drop a sump pump down the hole with a riser draining onto Queen's Road and hope the water finds its way down to the sea?"

This makes for an interesting thought experiment: On it's way downhill, the water would first encounter Stewart Milne's magniloqent (if oddly asymmetrical) grand processional stairs at Kepplestone:

"All Grecian, sir; Modernist details on a classic body"

We think that the resulting cascade would be most beautiful and spectacular! It might even become a top tourist attraction for the North East! Unfortunately the SuDS at the bottom of the Kepplestone basin would need upgrading.

Kepplestone SuDS

We don't think that this is up to the challenge of half a megatonne of water.

And the culvert of the West Burn of Rubislaw (or the Holburn, if you want) which drains this entire basin is only 1.5 metres in diameter.

This culvert runs below the houses of Cromwell Road and Union Grove, so we can't see any way to increase its capacity other than by demolishing some of these prestigious, exclusive west end properties.

But hey, you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs!