Extra, extra, sleep all about it; Cost-cutting spelt the end for the

EVERYONE who's anyone in journalism was there once. In the new Scotsman Hotel, which on Thursday had a very partial opening in the majestic former premises of the Edinburgh-based newspaper it is named after, there is a box of a room which is now a small kitchen servicing the cocktail bar. Throughout the 1970s this kitchen cooked up some of the most impressive talents in British writing.

Its various tenants included the distinguished foreign correspondent Neal Ascherson, who had returned to Scotland excited by the imminent (ha!) prospect of self-government; Conrad Wilson, the paper's influential music critic; the young David Leigh, now a senior executive with The Guardian and the man who rumbled Jonathan Aitken; industrial specialist Chris Baur, who became a Scotsman editor; the young Michael Fry, egregious columnist and revisionist historian; and the young Harry Reid, who became editor of The Herald and a more challenging post - my husband.

All our yesterdays have been given a makeover. Earlier last week my tour of the #19.5 million metamorphosis on the North Bridge reaches its apotheosis when I arrive at Room 399, one of the few public areas which isn't crawling with carpet-fitters, joiners, electricians and doggedly optimistic executives from The Scotsman Hotel Group, whose flagship property (it has other luxury hotels in Leeds and Paris) opens in phases over the next three months.

There is no sign of the 399 malt whiskies which will soon ornament the gantry in Room 399, but I feel sozzled with sensations which aren't quite cosy enough for nostalgia. The four dusty steps between the old features department and its cramped annexe, between the sleek new cocktail bar and its half-completed kitchen, are steps into 14 years of my life, and my path from woman's page to feature writer to columnist.

I, too, battered out a career on a standard issue Olivetti portable in the cell-like room on Fleshmarket Close. For a time it was something of a seraglio, isolating the woman's editor and her two handmaidens (half the paper's female staff) from the frontline troops in the nearby newsroom.

We were sprung from this ghetto by Eric B Mackay, our handsome, introverted and - looking back - rather radical editor. With the late Sir Alastair Dunnett, its most celebrated post-war editor, he piloted The Scotsman through a golden age of elegant journalism, political vision and circulation growth. He also began hiring more women. We had plenty of role models from over the Border. Jean Rook was the Daily Express's First Lady of Fleet Street, Jill Tweedie was the Guardian's feminist counterblast and Spare Rib was a brightening gleam in Rosie Boycott's eye.

All this is of only polite interest to Lucy Scillitoe, the energetic young director of sales who shows me round. She is expecting the first guests in two days but, amid the mayhem, she shows great patience with my memories.

The newspaper resonances are predictable but cleverly executed. There is the new masthead above the North Bridge entrance; there is the old, thistle-garlanded masthead painted above the fireplace in the drawing room; and there is the sculpted glass table which, like one of Damien Hirst's formaldehyde display cases, contains a woman reading a newspaper in her bath.

As for the bedrooms - 68 including suites - I have heard rumours of rooms dedicated to publishers and editors, not to mention an #800- a-night two-level penthouse with sauna, terrace and private lift, and I wonder if perhaps Andrew Neil has been hired as design consultant. Scillitoe laughs off this piece of whimsy, but looks a little mysterious. The penthouse on the 10th and 11th floors is almost as spectacular as its views and is already booked for festival entertaining.

The real editor's room - the oak-panelled office on the third floor - is merely de luxe. But on one of the panels it still bears the paper's early mission statement in gold letters: the conductors pledge themselves to strive for impartiality, firmness and independence, their first desire is to be honest, their second to be useful.

By this time Scillitoe and I are both wearing hard hats, we have climbed and descended eight flights of stairs (the lifts aren't yet operational) and I'm disoriented. Are we in tele-ads or display advertising? Where was personnel? Was this the cuttings library? Scillitoe can't answer these questions but she's enthusiastic about the breakfast room which might well have been the library.

In another basement space the demented, clacking linotype machines stamped out our stories in hot metal while their grey-faced operators somehow stayed noisily blithe.

I am cheered by the news that both these gloomy, airless floors will become a health club and spa, while the building's bedrock - the machine room where the presses rolled our prose into bundles and dispatched them to the nation's newsagents - will open as a nightclub later this year.

A frivolous fate for an honourable workplace? Maybe. But the growth of the leisure industry remains hot news. Nor has The Scotsman Hotel neglected Edinburgh's other growth industry - business. There are two suites of meeting rooms named after two former editors - Magnus Linklater during the 1990s and founding editor Charles MacLaren.

When we reach them I gasp and demand of Scillitoe: "But where is the Dunnett Suite? The Mackay Room? Or the Roy Thomson Walnut Hall?"

These are the names which made The Scotsman great. Two long- serving editors and a gung-ho publisher who, for all his commercial imperatives, left them alone to pursue journalism.

Lucy Scillitoe, who is fairly new to Edinburgh, listens courteously to my lecture and says perhaps it's not too late. I write them down and press them into her hand, resisting the temptation to give her a resume of the paper's history since it was bought by the Barclay Brothers in 1996: five editors in five years, most of them whirled through a revolving door by the hyperactive Andrew Neil, publisher and editor-in-chief.

Talking of whom - they haven't named the nightclub yet.

Julie Davidson was a feature writer with The Scotsman from 1967- 77 and a columnist from 1977-81 Where the papers stay: publications that moved on

KEYBOARD-bashing hacks in modern Scottish newspapers may have access to the latest technology, but don't necessarily enjoy the history and, ahem, culture of the buildings where their predecessors worked.

lSMG: The Herald was initially produced in various humble Merchant City locations before its first dedicated offices in Glasgow's Buchanan Street. The rear, overlooking Mitchell Street and redesigned by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in the 1890s was transformed into design centre The Lighthouse in 1999. Until last summer, the Sunday Herald, The Herald and Evening Times were based in an office block on Albion Street. Strathclyde University is the new tenant. SMG's new nerve centre is in Renfield Street.

lTrinity Mirror: The Daily Record and Sunday Mail's old site near Glasgow's Kingston Bridge has been purchased by US technology giant Cisco, who plan turning the area into offices.

Copyright 2001
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.