Who a Square Belongs To

You can read the priorities of a place from its ground plane. Where the kerb sits, what the surface is made of, which movement is uninterrupted and which must wait.

In most Scottish market towns those decisions were taken sixty years ago, in favour of the car, by people acting entirely reasonably on the information they had.

Reversing them is not a technical problem. The engineering is understood. It is a question of consent — and consent is earned in rooms, over months, with traders who are genuinely at risk and residents who have been consulted before and seen nothing happen.

We hold those rooms. It is the slowest part of the work and the part that determines whether anything gets built.