THERE is a stench of death hanging over Edinburgh’s Princes Street, the capital’s main retail centre. To be frank, it is dying in front of our eyes. Once proud stores such as Jenners are shuttered. The building is slated to become yet another hotel (though with some retail retained).

Along the famous thoroughfare, there are empty spaces instead of a thriving shopping promenade. Increasingly, those ugly gaps are being filled with cheap emporia unfit or inappropriate for the showcase boulevard of a rising new nation.

The usual explanations for the depressing decline of Princes Street – the ravages of the Covid lockdown or the Gadarene rush to internet shopping – are not the whole story. The major explanation for the death of Princes Street is the creation of a giant new shopping mall at the top of nearby Leith Walk. The St James Quarter contains 850,000 sq ft of modern retail space on five levels, a massive car park and the ubiquitous “luxury hotel” to add to the capital’s over-extended tourism sector.

It does not take a genius to work out that if you allow the creation of a monstrosity like the St James Quarter, you will simply blow the commercial viability of Princes Street out of the water. You might think that Edinburgh Council would have mandated some dovetailing of investment in the new St James development with a necessary makeover of Princes Street.

On the contrary, both the city council and the Scottish Government went out of their way to pump public subsidies into the St James project, thus adding to the economic woes of the capital’s main shopping street.

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This move is doubly odd. Besides the collateral damage done to Princes Street, the public money (ultimately your taxes) directed into the St James project went to aid a giant US investment company that had absolutely no need of subsidy.

The St James Quarter is the handiwork of Chicago-based Nuveen Investments, one of the world’s top-three biggest asset managers, along with BlackRock and Vanguard. These are financial companies that invest in property and shares on behalf of rich clients. Nuveen has a trillion dollars under management, roughly the GDP of the Netherlands.

What is Nuveen doing investing in Edinburgh? Excess competition, rock-bottom low interest rates and now the global economic disruption of the pandemic has made life difficult of asset managers such as Nuveen. Margins have been paired and risks have spiralled. So Nuveen and its rivals have plunged into high-end commercial property and land as a more secure bet.

Nuveen is now the world’s biggest private owner of farmland, which it rents out. It is the second-biggest owner of vineyards in the United States. In Brazil, Nuveen owns 300,000 hectares of farmland, equivalent to 4% of Scotland.

Why does this rapacious financial merit public subsidy that could better be used to improve Princes Street? Worse: Nuveen has been accused by Brazilian environmental activists of buying land that has been cleared by dubious methods. It is claimed these include expelling indigenous people and burning wild savannah to make it open for industrial cultivation (the last chicken you ate was most probably fed on imported Brazilian soya).

In the light of the Glasgow COP26, Scotland can’t claim to be at the forefront of combating global warming if it is complicit in funding companies associated such as Nuveen. Yet the Scottish Government (through its Futures Trust) and Edinburgh Council put £60 million of public cash into the St James project, purportedly to “unlock” Nuveen’s investment by proving public road and utilities infrastructure. This is a bum deal. Nuveen was coming to Edinburgh anyway. And the huge rental income that Nuveen and its Dutch partners will make every year from now on could easily have funded and necessary infrastructure.

SOME will argue that Princes Street – with retailing only on one side facing Edinburgh Castle – is an imperfect and limited retail space. That the available floor space is too restricted for modern retailing needs.

With the internet capturing more retail pounds, shopping in person has to be an experience to draw the crowds. The argument for projects such as the St James Quarter is that they provide such necessary retail experience.

Given that the St James Quarter leaked badly at the first sign of Scottish rain, I’m tempted to say that Nuveen’s architects were aiming for a Brazilian rainforest experience in miniature.

But the arguments about the inadequacy of Princes Street as a modern retail venue are deeply flawed. For starters, of course, there is no more scenic shopping concourse in the world, with its view of the castle, two of the world’s greatest art galleries, and acres of pleasant gardens in the middle of the city. You can stick that up London’s Oxford Street any day.

No, the issue with Princes Street is that for decades the city council and local authority planners have religiously opposed the very developments that could have provided Princes Street with extra retail space and extra residential accommodation.

At the start of the new century, the council’s own development arm came up with an imaginative plan to extend available retail space from the unused basements under the north side of Princes Street, out under the road to new frontages looking directly on to Princes Street Gardens. This would have created extra shopping to attract retailers and at the same time revamp the gardens themselves.

Sadly, this scheme was squashed by political indifference and the usual Edinburgh conservative reaction to anything new. A tiny hint of what might have been possible can be seen in the new extension to the National Galleries, with its popular cafe looking on to the gardens.

Again, in the early 2000s, Scottish architect Malcolm Fraser came up with a brilliant plan to utilise the thousands of unused space in Princes Street that lurks above the ground-level shop fronts.

Insurance companies are notoriously reticent to accept flatted accommodation above shops, for security and fire safety reasons. But often there are solutions to these problems and insurers are just being ultra conservative. Fraser, one of Scotland’s most consistently creative architectural minds, set out to redesign and integrate Princes Street’s upper floors in a way that created extra living and shopping space – and dealt with the insurance niggles. Alas. This scheme, too, was binned.

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As a result, the sorry state of Princes Street is the result of an official pincer movement. On the one hand, Edinburgh Council’s questionable championing of the Nuveen project – including the so-called “turd” sculpture that sits on the apex of the new hotel and disfigures the capital’s skyline. On the other hand, we have official sabotage of earlier schemes to renovate Princes Street as a place to live, shop and enjoy.

Truly, the decline of the capital’s main boulevard is a man-made event.

What to do? We need a serious tourism tax to start to create the resources to channel back into Edinburgh’s public infrastructure. We need more control of hotel development to tilt the balance in Edinburgh away from tourism towards indigenous living and the local economy. We need a sustainable approach to urban development rather than giving foreign investment companies carte blanche to do what they like with our heritage.