Edinburgh city centre is a resilient and special place as we all know, but it will take time to recover.
Introduction Little did we know when we started out on our second year of the current business plan that a global pandemic was coming our way, with consequences not only for our everyday personal life but also for how our city centre operates, for the short and longer term. Our 2019/20 report has two distinct parts, reporting on the period from July to March, and then the COVID 19 timeframe of late March to the end of June. We continued with the delivery of our key business plan priorities such as our award winning city centre marketing campaign, The Sign of a Great Time; our partnerships with Police Scotland and The Cyrenians to support both security and the homeless community; our work to promote the city through supporting partner events; our partnership with FUSE to support employment opportunities and training; delivering a highly effective Clean Team operation to support an enhanced cleaning presence and ensuring the
city has fantastic Christmas lighting. As always, we represent our members interests on numerous city-wide working groups, enabling and supporting new developments in the city centre, communicating widely and effectively on many issues and liaising with the Council and other partners to either facilitate change or raise concerns. Once the scale of the pandemic became apparent, we re-focused much of our energy on supporting our businesses with enhanced communication, producing guides on re-opening, social distancing guidelines and window and floor stickers, as well as providing enhanced security for closed premises. Like all businesses we had to adapt to the environment by reducing our staffing compliment to a core team to survive on a reduced income. We contributed to many forums to support business, especially in regard to re-opening and the longer-term economic impacts we will all face.
Edinburgh city centre is a resilient and special place as we all know, but it will take time to recover particularly as it is an environment that is changing quickly. Already we are seeing new planning policies and developments on Princes Street, the St James Quarter is nearing completion, and we are all dealing with the ever-changing nature of retail. The pandemic will undoubtedly hasten this change, but we are optimistic that our city centre will recover, our residents, workers and visitors will return and Edinburgh will be as strong as before.
Roddy Smith, CEO Denzil Skinner, Chair ESSENTIAL EDINBURGH Annual Review 2019-20 | 6
