Colin talking Tourism

Colin at the Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey Area Committee meeting on the 3rd of December.

”When you see it in terms of the picture presented from the Cairngorm Business Partnership there, there’s a route map ahead and we lack that clarity so I welcome the proposal to have an early focus for a ward forum on it. It is about realising the potential. If you skip back 50 or a hundred years ago, Nairn was the tourist destination in the North of Scotland and incrementally, I think,  we’ve done things about improving the townscape if you like in terms of  - incrementally improving the play area at the links. We’ve linked into these threads that are there on page 5 of this report and I think we can continue to do that but I think we also need to just have a chat about  - are there some bigger things that can be done to put Nairn back on that kind of map again? If you look at the whole Cairngorms, Aviemore type area: it’s been built on the development of ski – the Cairngorm Partnership have built on top of that and you’ve got the whole wildlife tourism theme thing down in Lochaber, whether it is the mountain bikes or the skiing – again it is the kind of transformational type initiatives or projects have made such a huge difference.

We’ve been really fortunate in Nairn. We’ve had industrialisation playing a big part in the recent, the last 30 years. With the bypass I think we need to build on more of these older assets that we’ve undoubtedly got.”