Duddingston House Properties applied for planning permission and listed building consent for the former Odeon building in Clerk Street, Edinburgh.
City of Edinburgh Council granted the application, which included partial demolition of the B-listed building, while Historic Scotland maintained its objections to the extent of the scheme.
A campaign to prevent the demolition of the auditorium was created and a petition calling for Scottish Ministers to call in the decision for their consideration was presented to Historic Scotland Chief Executive John Graham in May.
On June 03 2009 Michael Russell MSP, Minister for Culture, External Affairs and the Constitution, announced that Scottish Ministers would consider the application.
The applicant chose to have the case considered by written submissions to the Independent Reporter [PDF, 1MB].
Scottish Ministers announced on May 21 2010 that the application had been refused.
Odeon letter to council [PDF, 175KB]
Update
Following the refusal of the application for listed building consent Historic Scotland was asked again to consider changing the category of listing from B to A for the former cinema.
Although the listed building consent application was refused, the separate planning application (08/00197/FUL) which was applied for at the same time as the listed building consent application remains lodged with the City of Edinburgh Council. It is our current policy that we will not normally list (or review the listing of) a property which is the subject of live planning or during an appeal period. This policy is set out in paragraph 2.35 (page 25) of the Scottish Historic Environment Policy (July 2009), available at www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/shep-july-2009.pdf. Exceptions to the policy may be made on an operational basis in certain circumstances for cases which were received after 4 December 2008, as set out at www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/the-listing-process, although in the case of the former Odeon we had begun a category review prior to publishing the exceptions to the policy.
We are therefore unable to consider reviewing the listing category while the planning application remains unresolved. However, we did note in our submission to the Reporter that the building is worthy of a category A listing.