For the past two years, Edinburgh residents have been getting used to a ban on cars and buses from George Street at the heart of the New Town, and the project to reshape the famous thoroughfare into a pedestrian paradise has only a few months to go before completion.

Fears about the impact of the work on business have not come to pass because, as confused Edinburgh folk reading might guess, I made that up. There is a plan, but two years after it was originally scheduled to begin the work hasn’t even started. Back in August 2021 when the scheme was approved, it all seemed so simple, with city centre footfall still to recover after the three Covid lockdowns of the previous 16 months, and some doubt ─ with hindsight not without justification ─ that it ever would.

Maybe, just maybe the major disruption to both public and private transport could be pulled off with less fuss than it would have done pre-Pandemic, and perhaps with minimal impact on traders getting used to fewer customers crossing the threshold. That was the theory anyway.

Of course, no-one that summer could be blamed for not knowing that a full-scale war on mainland Europe which would disrupt the global economy was only six months away, or that markets were about to be plunged into turmoil in the aftermath of the disastrous Liz Truss mini budget that September, but perhaps the unforeseen result of the economic upheaval is that George Street traders have, to borrow an unfortunate phrase, dodged a bullet.

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