Future Granton Waterfront: Edinburgh as a coastal city

The Strategic Plan and Development Framework for Granton Waterfront, north of Edinburgh, envisions Scotland's capital as a unique coastal city. Successful transformation of the former industrial areas and wastelands holds the potential to reconnect the city to the water and to build on wider ongoing regeneration projects, to ensure the area can develop and thrive in association with the local community and project partners.

Granton Waterfront, to the North of Edinburgh, has been identified as a priority for regeneration for a number of years. Over the past 20 years a series of masterplans for the area have been drawn up and implemented in part. A turning point occurred in March 2018 when the City of Edinburgh Council purchased Forthquarter, the former gas works in Granton. This increased the Council’s land holdings in the area to over 120 acres, providing an opportunity to deliver a coordinated, housing-led regeneration of the area and to extend the benefits of this into the surrounding neighbourhoods.

The Granton Waterfront project stretches from the edge of Cramond in the West along the waterfront to Granton Harbour in the East. It connects the surrounding communities of Pennywell, Muirhouse, Pilton, Royston, Wardieburn and Trinity. The Development Framework will set out strategies and a vision to guide future development. It lays out development principles and design guidelines that have been developed to be flexible enough to allow for future uncertainty but be robust enough to maintain an overall vision for the area. The Framework will also lead to non-statutory planning guidance. This ensures that existing and future built projects in the area are inter-connected and sustainable.

The design team is currently designing a more detailed plan for the area, where The City of Edinburgh Council are majority landowners. Current aspirations include reconnecting the city with the waterfront to create a unique public destination, new homes of varying tenure, a new primary school, healthcare facility, retail, business and creative space, tied together with a high-quality public realm and diverse green spaces which help reconnecting the city with the waterfront, creating a new destination.

The site is also home to the Edinburgh College, the National Museums of Scotland and the proposed National Collections Facilities.

The Strategic Development Framework considers the site from a wider city perspective and places the coastline and the Granton neighbourhood at the heart of the Region and the Firth of Forth. A series of character areas, linked by over-arching design and development principles, respond to the existing landscape, topography and heritage to interlink new and existing neighbourhoods.

The project – a joint proposal by Collective Architecture (lead urban planning) and Studio for New Realities (strategic advice) – presents an amazing opportunity to develop a collaborative approach to the physical, social and economic regeneration of Granton and Edinburgh’s waterfront. In December 2022, the transformative vision for Edinburgh as a characteristic coastal city was awarded a Future Cities Forum Award in the 'Master planning, regeneration & mixed-use' category: