I don’t mean LORD Elgin. I’m talking about the town of Elgin, north of Aberdeen (to which Marion Diamond suggested I might turn my attention).

The fact is that the husband has been up in Scotland this weekend, and we decided to spend a couple of nights even further north, and chose Elgin as a good base for all kinds of things we thought we wanted to see.

Elgin had once been a wonderful town. Not to mention the famous ruined cathedral, it still has an elegant Greek revival church (complete with a replica “Monument of Lysicrates“, as you can see in the photo, on its top). This was just part of what had once been an elegantly proportioned town centre of the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century.

But what on earth have the locals allowed to happen to it?

The High Street is now a complete disgrace (and I am afraid the pictures don’t quite capture the horrors of it). All local efforts seem to have gone into a 1980s/90s shopping mall, leaving the beautiful street to crumble — some of it boarded up, some of it taken over by rock-bottom rent charity shops, all of it scarred by modern shop-fronts that  pay no attention to what had been a beautiful street-scape.

What on earth as caused this?