The problem is one of success. Now that the population of Edinburgh and district is expanding at pretty much the same rate that Glasgow’s is declining, and now that its devolved-capital status has enhanced its international standing, the pressure is on. Such buoyancy always attracts the developers, like wasps to a chicken sandwich. Edinburgh is thought to have a shortage of good office space (“good” means “new” in this context). Hence projects such as the distinctly bulky Calton Square complex - offices and leisure centre - now being built at the foot of, and blocking many views of, Calton Hill. With the St. James Centre and the later John Lewis store just across the road from this, Edinburgh has now acquired a commercial Scylla and Charybdis, commanding the straits leading down to Leith.

We’ll see how it turns out - though to judge by the published pictures, Calton Square is far from being the kind of exceptional architecture you might think a UNESCO World Heritage Site deserves. It looks like standard developer’s floorspace to me, the architecture (by Allan Murray) reduced to the level of wallpaper. Of course it sports a big rotunda on the corner. Edinburgh is full of new buildings, good and bad alike, with such rotundas. The rotunda has become a design cliché, an architectural nervous tic. See here, everyone: you’ll never be able to better the one on Benson and Forsyth’s Museum of Scotland. Don’t try to compete. Think of something different.

Since I’ve mentioned Leith, what on earth were they up to when they designed the new shopping mall down there called Ocean Terminal? In its favour: no rotundas, and a clean modern design aesthetic inside (very Conran, whose company co-designed it with Keppie Design). Against it: an unforgivable inability to engage with the waterfront. There’s the Royal Yacht Britannia, but it’s moored up to a service road running along the dock at the back, where there is no public access. You have to get into Britannia via a high-level gantry. True, there is a vast glazed foodcourt inside the centre that looks out over the water. But you can only look: you can’t engage with the waterside. It’s intensely frustrating and rather depressing.