What kind of place is this Edinburgh? Why does it invite questions about who runs it? Consider that last question. On the face of it, it would seem obvious –after all, it seems a city with secrets; in Abercrombie's words, ‘an ancient and venerated shrine’ –but who wants to live in a shrine? Behind the façade, if that's what it is, there seems to be another story, or, rather, stories. Indeed, perhaps it is best to think that there are multiple Edinburghs behind Stewart Conn's sliver of ice.

ECOLOGY OF GAMES

Let us return to Norton Long's notion of a city as an ecology of games. Perceptively, Long observed: ‘It is psychologically tempting to envision the local territorial system as a group with a governing “they”’ (Long 1958: 252). In other words, we are expecting to find, and none more so than in Edinburgh, a close nexus of powerful people who make the key decisions. Why Edinburgh? There would seem a prima facie case for there being a governing ‘they’. After all, the city was run by a peculiar breed of parochial politics for a century, from the 1870s to the 1970s. Readers of this book will recall the hegemony of the so-called Progressive party until its collapse in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it drew disproportionately on the local business class, merchants in the main, who held the city's affairs firmly in its grip. They dominated its economy, its politics and its culture, its schools, even though it was left to James Bridie, a Glaswegian, to remark that ‘Edinburgh prides itself in not being interested in anything at all’ (quoted in Miller 1996: 3–4). One might argue that such insouciance was a front. Bridie's may seem a harsh judgement in a city of festivals as well as its accolade as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.