Times change but not always as much as we
think. In the 1990s more people live longer and some live better than they did when the NB
first opened. Then Edinburgh people feared tuberculosis; now it is heart disease. The
overcrowding and squalor of the old time has changed to a different kind of deprivation
among the new housing estates on the outskirts of town, away from the obvious tourist
route. When "Butcher" Cunningham started work in the NB kitchen, his home,
Corstorphine, was a farming village and he came to the hotel by train. Now the outlying
"villages" and "towns" of Leith, Newhaven, Colinton, Corstorphone, are
part of the urban sprawl of Edinburgh and people come to work by car (if they can find
somewhere to park) or bus. The cable cars which took hotel guests along Princes Street
gave way to buses 30 years later.
But although the city seems a much more
congested place the population has remained surprisingly much the same: from 413,008 in
1901 to 433,200 in 1989. The difference is the vast turnover of tourists who now come all
year round. By the time the hotel closed in 1988 there were more than two million visitors
absorbed by the city that year - 1.27 million from the UK, and just over half a million
from overseas. That means four times as many people as the resident population to be
housed, fed, entertained and transported.
No wonder new hotels have sprouted at every
corner. The newly restored NB with 200 bedrooms still holds the trump card of those
enormous function rooms. To the loyal customers of the old days are added the new growing
trade of business parties. When the hotel first opened in Edinburgh had its own Stock
Exchange - now Charlotte Square is an international centre attracting business from Japan,
America and Europe.
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