Among the surprisingly large pool of under-appreciated Scottish architects is Arthur George Sydney Mitchell. His Edinbornian works include Well Court in Dean Village, Ramsay Gardens in the Old Town, and his restoration of the Mercat Cross on the Royal Mile. Sydney Mitchell also did a number of branch commissions for the Commercial Bank of Scotland (which in 1959 merged with the National Bank to form the National Commercial Bank, which in turn merged into the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1979).

This bank branch, in Kyle of Lochalsh in Ross up in the Highlands, was built in 1896 and demonstrates Sydney Mitchell’s adeptness at what could loosely be called the Scottish style in architecture. The level of ornament is fairly small and concentrated on the entrance. This simple style can be found not only in the Highlands, but also, in a slightly different variation, in the East Neuk of Fife, and elsewhere, but more often in places closer to the sea.

The stone though light in colour still provides a handsome contrast to the whitewash of the walls. The mis-match in the steps of the gable ends (see below) is an interesting touch.

Simple but handsome buildings like this are easily achievable today.

By SUSAN MANSFIELD
The Scotsman | 22 November 2008

ALEXANDER STODDART welcomes me into his studio, and into the 19th century. “It hasn’t gone away, you see,” he says, brightly. “The 19th century is not a period in time, it’s a state of mind.”

Indeed, if one could visit the workshop of one of the great monumentalists of a century ago, it might look a lot like this: plaster casts in various stages of assembly; imperious figures missing limbs or, occasionally, a head; bags of clay which until recently were a working model of physicist James Clerk Maxwell.

Stoddart is Scotland’s premier neo-classical sculptor, the man who made the figures of Adam Smith and David Hume for Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, Robert Burns for Kilmarnock, the beautiful Robert Louis Stevenson memorial on the capital’s Corstorphine Road. He’s 49, but looks boyish, with his sandy hair and dusty lab coat cut off at the elbows. He is a man of swift, enthusiastic intelligence, rarely still, and almost never silent.

Despite once being dismissed by the Scottish Arts Council as “backward-looking, historicist and not reflecting contemporary trends”, Stoddart is busy. Around us are the plastercasts of past commissions: immense allegorical figures for the £6 million Millennium Arch in Atlanta, Georgia; religious commissions for a mysterious private client who has her own chapel “somewhere in North Britain”; parts of 70ft frieze for Buckingham Palace. A bust of Pope John Paul II for a Chicago seminary.

Soon they will be joined by James Clerk Maxwell, whose statue, commissioned by the Royal Society of Edinburgh, will be unveiled on Tuesday at the East End of Edinburgh’s George Street. Stoddart is thrilled to be sharing a street with 19th-century sculptural greats like John Steel’s Thomas Chalmers. “It’s the greatest honour to be anywhere near the company of Steel.”

And he is ready and waiting for the next question, the one about relevance.

Set in stone

James Clerk Maxwell was a mathematician and physicist who grew up in Edinburgh. His greatest achievement is considered to have been developing a unified theory of electromagnetism, which has been described as “the second great unification in physics” after the achievements of Newton. Many believe him to be the 19th-century physicist with the greatest influence on the 20th century.

On the centenary of his birth in 1931, Einstein described Maxwell’s work as “most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton”. The plinth for Stoddart’s figure will feature two friezes showing the “schools” of Newton and Einstein.

“Is this relevant? Is James Clerk Maxwell relevant to us? I don’t like to say: ‘Yes, he is’, although he is. He’s relevant to our mobile phones, our navigation systems. I’m told he’s the man that changed everything. But the relevance of the statue does not depend on some stupid mobile device in your pocket.”

In fact, it doesn’t depend on you at all. Statues, by their nature, have little truck with relevance. They refer to the past, they will last until the future. The present is transitory. The makers of monuments take the long view. “And if you ask to have your own statue made, you’re a twerp.”

But the very idea of elevated monuments to great individuals (usually men) provokes discomfort in the modern era. Anyone daring to make public sculpture at all has tended towards “everyman” figures, such as Kenny Hunter’s Citizen Firefighter in Glasgow or the Fair Maid in Perth High Street. Most 19th-century statues have become little more than repositories for traffic cones by drunken revellers.

Stoddart is a remover of traffic cones. “It’s antideferentialism, we’ve always had a problem with it. It’s institutionalised. At one point, Glasgow City Council actually voted to adopt the cone on top of the statue of the Duke of Wellington (in Royal Exchange Square] as an official Glaswegian marketing plot, because, guess what? ‘It shows we’re able to laugh at oorsels’. What they’re really doing is scoffing at the great.

“I try to concentrate my work in Scotland because the nation is in need of more monuments. Too many greats as yet unmarked.”

Like who? Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, who led the opposition to the dissolution of the Scottish Parliament. Archbishop Gavin Douglas of Dunkeld, the first man in Europe to translate Virgil into a vernacular language. King James IV, “our Renaissance prince”. The “greatest architect of the modern age”, Robert Adam. Historian Agnes Muir Mackenzie. Mary Queen of Scots. Monuments which teach us our history.

“Isn’t it astonishing that there wasn’t a statue of Hume until I made one? We need serious monuments which don’t have the Braveheart touch. If we’re to be a nation, we need that. Fletcher of Saltoun is absolutely urgent if we’re to show we mean business. We don’t do it with a stupid Parliament building that looks like a Barcelona-inspired cafeteria. It’s a bloody outrage.”

He is currently working on a figure of Willie Gallacher, the Paisley-born Communist MP. “I’m not much of a Communist myself. We belong to the other side, somewhere to the North of Genghis Khan, but he’s a great man whether I like him or not. Gallacher’s funeral was the biggest civic event in Paisley ever, there were 7,000 in the cortege alone. The civic monumentalist has a responsibility. There are limits, I might draw a line at Goebbels.”

In the partitioned area set aside for maquetes, he sprays water on a tiny clay model of his “magnum opus”, a “mammoth representation and celebration of the Ossianic phenomenon” earmarked for an amphitheatre site which will be hewn out of the ground at Ben Cruachan. With a finger and thumb, he twirls a tiny spike of clay to demonstrate the height of a man. “I’ve been trying for this for 15 years now, and we’ve got a bit of headway.”

We repair to the Stoddart home, a lovely 19th-century villa in Castlehead, Paisley, where he and his wife Catriona have raised their three daughters, now teenagers. Statues, busts and maquetes line every room. He takes care to explain that “the house is less opulent than it looks – the sculptures cover over the cracks. All monuments are done on a shoestring.”

Sitting in the cosy kitchen with Jura the spaniel at his feet, Stoddart talks about how all this began. He went to Glasgow School of Art in 1976, a gifted draughtsman out of step with the modern era. After a “difficult first year” he started making abstract sculptures out of sheet metal “to get good crits”, while finding solace in the 19th-century via the works of Schopenhauer, Wagner and GF Watts.

Then one day, after one such “good crit” he turned a corner and came face to face with the art school’s plaster cast of the Apollo Belvedere. Over two millennia the statue, it seemed, had lost none of its power. He was chastened, and switched to figurative work.

After gaining a first – keeping the modernists on side by referencing Rodin – he planned to become an academic “to work with the sculpture I loved”, but on a study trip to Denmark he encountered the work of Bertel Thorvaldsen, a contemporary of Canova, and was “struck dumb”. He left academia to return to sculpture and spent a “difficult” six years in the studio of Ian Hamilton Finlay.

Once independent, one of his first works to propel him to public attention was the series of classical figures he made for the frontage of the Italian Centre in Glasgow. He contemplated selling his house in order to finish them.

Raise the subject of the modern and he gets combative. Modern art is “rubbish”, narcissistic, snobby, devoid of skill, ignorant of taste, gripped by “nostalgia for the future”. But it goes deeper than that. It’s a difference of opinion about what art should do. Art, he says, has always been about “trying to alleviate the pain of existence”. Modern art “collaborates with misery as opposed to trying to oppose it”.

“A painting by Titian is like a Leningrad, holding out against the forces of the world. Even if they’re having to eat rats in there, they still will never surrender to it. Whereas the art of Tracey Emin is a complete capitulation to the world. Cutting a shark in half and putting it in a tank of piss is just art giving up. I find it very odd when they describe art as challenging, because I always thought art was meant to calm you like a lullaby, not challenge you like some skinhead in an underpass.”

Unsupported by the Arts Council, largely unrepresented in national collections, he has a strong base of private admirers who enable him to keep working. “I’m an elitist. I believe in the elite for all. We’re allowed elite footballers because they’re the best at sticking the ball in the net. We’re allowed elite surgeons, and elite scientists. These people pursue their various careers according to the highest accomplishments and the results are superb.

“I’m trying to bring the highest elite form of art back to the people. And they are going for it.

“You calm down because at a certain point, you realise that if you had stuck with ambition to be in the contemporary art world, so many great opportunities would be cut off. It’s a tiny closet and it’s joyless. Everyone is wanting to get into the cupboard, I’ve got the run of the house.”

PRINCES STREET IS the thoroughfare of the nation, and its sad decline during the second half of the twentieth century and only partial comeback since then are reflective of Scotland itself. The architects of Edinburgh’s New Town had no idea that Princes Street would evolve into a commercial avenue, and the street was originally laid out as a handsome row of Georgian townhouses, built between 1765 and 1800, facing Princes Street Gardens and the Old Town above behind them.

Almost immediately the mercantile and social nature of the street began to assert itself, with shops and traders setting themselves up in the converted basements and ground floors of townhouses. The New Club showed up at No. 86 Princes Street in 1837, coming from previous premises in St. Andrew’s Square and before that Shakespeare Square (where the former G.P.O. now stands).

As the Victorian era progressed, more and more of the Georgian townhouses were demolished and replaced with new buildings in the varying styles of age. It was just two years after Victoria’s death that an old company built a new headquarters in a brimming Edwardian baroque: the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company.

The North British was founded in 1809, merged with the Mercantile Fire Insurance Company in 1862, and by 1901 had acquired sufficient subsidiaries that its remit had extended to marine risks and general insurance. Given this expansion, a new headquarters on the principal thoroughfare of the nation’s capital seemed an appropriate expression of confidence and the NB&M commissioned Sir George Washington Browne for the task. Browne was born in Glasgow in 1853 and was first apprenticed to an architects’ firm there at 16. After some work in London he won the Pugin Studentship, allowing him to travel to France and Belgium, where he inculcated himself in the French Renaissance style.

Two years later he came to Edinburgh and worked as an assistant architect to Robert Rowland Anderson, who devised such city landmarks as the Scottish National Portrait Gallery and Edinburgh University’s McEwan Hall. Within two years he was made a partner at the firm, and not long after that Browne launched his own firm, which won the contract for Edinburgh’s Central Library in 1887 and the Caledonian Hotel at Princes Street Station in 1899, the latter commission after his firm merged with his new partner John More Dick Peddie.

Browne & Peddie gave the North British & Mercantile a splendid classical palazzo spread over four principal stories on a large scale. The rustication of the ground floor gives way to a first story with window surrounds of particular elaboration. The second floor is more simplified and is followed by a decorative cornice completed by the final storey, crowned with a balustrade.

The Apostle Andrew, Scotland’s patron saint, stood guard over the building’s entrance.

Visitors entering No. 64 Princes Street were greeted by a grand stairway to the left which ascended to the board room and principal offices on the floor above. The ground floor included a larger hall for general inquiries from customers and policy-holders.

The interior furnishing of the offices was in a dignified classical style, mostly restrained but with occasional flourishes toward the more elaborate and fancy, if not quite fanciful. It is difficult to imagine a large insurance company building offices as handsome as this, but it was par for the course at a time when tastes were better and standards higher.

In 1959, North British & Mercantile became a subsidiary of the Commercial Union Assurance Company. (Commercial Union merged with General Accident to form CGU in 1998, which merged with Norwich Union in 2000 to form Aviva). In 1964 the company put its magnificent palace on Princes Street up for sale.

The ‘Princes Street Panel’ first convened in 1954 and in the 1960s made a number of highly controversial recommendations. The Panel wanted the entirety of Princes Street to be demolished and replaced by Brutalist monstrosities, with a pedestrian walkway above the ground floor theoretically doubling the pedestrian-accessible retail space on the street. The department store chain British Home Stores bought the old North British & Mercantile headquarters as well as the building next to it, demolished them both, and decided to build the first Brutalist structure according to the Princes Street Panel’s recommendation.

The result, I think, speaks for itself. Despite a popular outcry, the assualt on Princes Street didn’t end with BHS. The New Club, the most prominent private club in the city, was even convinced to tear down its classical pile and replace it with a Brutalist monster. (The silver lining is the Club’s decision to salvage some interior panelling and re-apply it in the new building).

Princes Street wasn’t perfect before the Brutes had a go at it, but there can be no doubt (except in the minds of those sufficiently indoctrinated into the cult of modern architecture) that they and their confreres made it worse. One particular problem is that where there is good architecture, it rarely reaches down to the ground floor. The building to the left of BHS, for example, is a fine structure, but at street level there is nothing but a bland, cruel box with sharp edges that bears no relation to the structure above. A canny landlord would replace the box with a more sympathetic brick facing, perhaps in a style suited to the rest of the building. This would still allows for the great amount of window space required by modern shops, while at the same time creating a more harmonious appearance that would be more inviting to shopgoers.

The street is currently being turned over by the laying of tracks for Edinburgh’s new tram system. I hope they will take this opportunity to reduce traffic lanes and increase space for pedestrians, especially on the narrow, perpetually overcrowded Gardens side of the street.

The newer architecture on the street, while generally inoffensive, is still nothing worth writing home about. It is tempting to hope the Brutalist monsters stay for today, knowing that the property developers would only build mediocre replacements for them. But Scotland herself has Robert Adam at the ready, and there are even more traditional architects south of the Tweed. Good architecture is possible now, it just isn’t getting the best commissions.

Edinboronians and visitors to the capital would infinitely prefer the old palace of the North British & Mercantile to the Brutalism of the British Home Stores. Replacing the latter with new architecture in tune with the former will be a major step in reinvigorating Princes Street.

Keith Patrick O’Brien, the Primate of Scotland and Cardinal Archbishop of St Andrews & Edinburgh, this weekend preached at the first mass offered by the recently ordained Fr. Simon Harkins of the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. The mass was offered in the Cardinal’s own Cathedral of St. Mary in Edinburgh, Fr. Harkins’s own home town. The Very Rev. Fr Josef Bisig FSSP and the Very Rev. Fr. Franz-Karl Banauch FSSP assisted, and monks from the Transalpine Redemptorists of Papa Stronsay (who provided these photos) were also present, in addition to a number of diocesan priests.

I’ve spent the past eight years of my life divided between three (arch-) dioceses and I have to admit that Cardinal O’Brien is still the one I feel the greatest affection for. He’s an affable, uncomplicated fellow, and can be relied upon to defend what’s right in the media — unquestionably one of the best prelates in Britain today.

“I find him a much more approachable figure than other Scots prelates,” writes Damian Thompson, “less inclined to stand on his dignity despite (or perhaps because of) his red hat. I met him once at a party to relaunch the Scottish Catholic Observer, to whom he’s been a good friend; he didn’t sweep in surrounded by flunkeys, but hung around chatting in ordinary priest’s dress, reminding me a bit of Basil Hume in that respect.”

As it happens, I’m head of Cardinal O’Brien’s fan club on Facebook, which I encourage any Facebook users out there to join.

God bless our cardinal, and many congratulations to Fr. Hawkins!

When the “Scottish Parliament” was refounded in 1997, the first man to hold the new job of Presiding Officer was Sir David Steel (the Rt. Hon. the Lord Steel of Aikwood), the despicable creature who as an MP introduced legal abortion to the United Kingdom in 1967, and who has inexplicably and disgracefully been created a Knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, the highest honour in the land (the Scottish equivalent of England’s Garter).

Anyhow, the St Andrews Fund for Scots Heraldry decided to commemorate the hosting of the Heraldic & Genealogical Congress in Scotland by commissioning a ceremonial gown for the Presiding Officer of the Scottish Parliament, who lacked one at the time. This rather handsome creation was presented to George Reid, the holder of the office at that time, during 27th International Congress of Genealogical and Heraldic Sciences held at St Andrews in 2006. Unfortunately I can find no evidence that this well-executed gown has ever been used.

The University of St Andrews in Scotland and the College of William & Mary in Virginia are to begin offering joint degree programs starting in the autumn of 2011. Students admitted to the programs will receive a single Bachelor of Arts degree issued on behalf of both institutions — which will be the only B.A. offered by St Andrews, whose arts & humanities undergraduates typically graduate with an M.A.

The joint degrees will be available in four fields — history, international relations, English, and economics — with the aim of combining the depth traditional to the Scottish style of education with the breadth of William & Mary’s liberal curriculum. Students will spend the first year at their home university, followed by a second year abroad, with the remaining two years divided between the two. The program will start with about forty students divided between the two, with the hope to gradually double that size.

St Andrews is the oldest university in Scotland, and third-oldest in the English-speaking world. The College of William & Mary (now a university, despite its name) is the oldest in Virginia, the second-oldest in the United States, the third-oldest in North America, and the ninth-oldest in the English-speaking world. William & Mary, which is located in Virginia’s ancient capital of Williamsburg, has traditionally maintained links to Great Britain even after the Dominion of Virginia was recognised as independent in 1783. Queen Elizabeth II has visited the College twice, first in 1957 and more recently in 2007, and her former prime minister, Baroness Thatcher, served as Chancellor of the University.

BELEIVE IT OR not, Inverness is one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe, and a local landowner, the 20th Earl of Moray, has teamed up with Duany Plater-Zyberk, an American firm known for its traditional architecture and urbanist ideas, to help create a sustainable new town of 10,000 inhabitants near the “Capital of the Highlands”. Tornagrain will rest on a 200-hectare (500-acre) site on the A96 corridor between Inverness and Nairn. Much of the recent growth in the Highlands has been poorly managed, raising concerns of suburban sprawl and poor land management. Moray Estates, the land holding company of the Earl of Moray (pronounced ‘Murry’) has decided to take the lead by planning a new town in the best tradition of Scottish architecture and urban development.

If, as predicted, the Inverness area is to increase in population by over 30,000, Tornagrain will be able to accommodate one-third of that increase on a relatively small footprint, allowing for much of the natural beauty of the area to be maintained instead of over-developed. The town will feature a High Street (that’s ‘Main Street’ to Americans) and town center functioning as a nucleus for smaller neighbourhoods with appropriately sized green spaces.

In the town center, parking will be available in internal courts so that the town streets can remain focused on the inhabitants rather than their parked transport. Tornagrain is also ideally sited for transportation purposes, located next to the Aberdeen-to-Inverness railway line and with Inverness airport nearby providing air links to the rest of Britain and Europe.

The five thousand housing units will include flats, cottages, courtyard houses, terrace houses and mews units. Importantly, Moray Estates confirms that the architects of the new development are “looking to the Scottish vernacular for architectural inspiration”. Tornagrain will be a Scottish town that looks like a Scottish town, instead of a series of soulless boxes that could be planted anywhere in the world.

The predictable objections from the more ideological members of the architectural community, but the Earl of Moray is made of sterner stuff than to give in to the raised hackles of some taste-deprived modernists. While it’s in the short-term interest of quick-profit developers to put up ugly shacks, sell them, and “get outta Dodge” with the profits, the Earls of Moray have been in the neighbourhood for centuries, and (God willing) will stay there for centuries to come. Traditional architecture may incur a larger outlay at the beginning but is cheaper to maintain and more versatile in the long-run. What’s more, it sells better than bland pre-fab suburban units. Would that more property developers have the sense of this wise Scots aristocrat!

IT IS A DESIGN masterstroke, combining simplicity and ease of recognition with layers of symbolism. The emblem of the Scottish National Party is just one single line that descends, turns around, and crosses itself, but while remaining uncomplicated manages to evoke the Saltire (Scotland’s flag), the thistle (Scotland’s flower), and — the pudding which has given the logo its nickname — the clootie dumpling, a Scots specialty. And yet, despite its ubiquity, there is surprisingly little to be found online about the history of the SNP’s clootie dumpling.

The emblem was commissioned by William Wolfe (right) in 1962 for the parliamentary by-election in which he was standing as the Scottish Nationalist candidate. The party had typically employed a lion rampant as its symbol, which Wolfe thought too complex, and got Julian Gibb (in his own words, “scarcely out of childhood”) to design the brilliantly simple logo. “A political visionary with an eye for iconography,” according to Gibb, Wolfe used the emblem in the unsuccessful by-election campaign and a year later successfully proposed it to the party for adoption as the party emblem.

“The adoption of a geometric logotype is a bold act for a political organisation, especially a nationalist one, with the swastika a not too distant memory,” writes Gibb. “But the inner logic of the thing was persuasive. Forbye imagined allusions to saltire, thistle, and clootie dumpling, there was perhaps something irresistible about virile angularity supported on swelling curvature, implying among other things that in this outfit, the mechanistic depended on the organic. At one end of the scale of application it was devised to be hastily slapped on walls with a furtively loaded brush (the aerosol age had yet to come) and a quick flick of the wrist – no skill required. Try doing that with the lion rampant.”

How does it compare to the other party emblems or logos? Labour have long used the rose — a long standing socialist emblem — as their party symbol, which has gone through several incarnations, the latest rendered in white cut out of a rounded red block. The Lib Dems have been using the “Bird of Liberty” since it was designed for them in the 1990s by Rodney Fitch Design Company, the latest version dating from 1999. It’s actually a fairly handsome logo. We have already written extensively about the Scottish Tories and their evolving emblems. The current tree is a bit ambiguous and from afar resembles a few careless strokes of green paint. The Scottish Greens went for a standard Green sunflower, which is to the eco-political movement what the red rose is to the socialists. None of these symbols have the enduring simplicity of the Clootie Dumpling.

Despite its simplicity and success, the party hacks failed to resist fiddling with the emblem through the ages. The first new take on the dumpling was to “swish-ify” it during the 1980s, in a fashion rather redolent of the era. But then they made the mistake of horribly blunting this flowing line into a series of right-angle turns. “From a distance,” its creator Gibb observed, “I watched in wonder as the logo acquired in turn notoriety, popularity, and in the penultimate revision, dereliction as a crude rectilinearity was forced on it, recasting it in unmistakably fascist mould.”

As if to add to the misery of their decision, the party bigwigs then made the pseudo-fascist emblem even worse by filling it in and sticking a black star towards the top of it. It was immediately recognised as a mysteriously cycloptic bunny and fell into great disfavour among the party faithful and the public in general, though the cartooning profession had a field day with it. Gibbs called it the “cyclops bunny mutant”, its adoption “a serious gaffe” by the SNP. Introduced at the 1996 spring party conference, by the end of the summer it was done for. “Without giving the poor creature a chance, the activists of the Scottish National Party have decided that the only place this rabbit should go is into a stew,” wrote Peter MacMahon in the Scotsman. The bunny was succeeded by the auld clootie dumpling and, MacMahon pondered, “a piece of artwork that could make a tasty main course was being replaced by a pudding”.

The Clootie Dumpling now employed by the Scottish National Party is pretty close to the original, what Gibb calls its “definitive form”, while Peter MacMahon assures us the party leadership “are confident there will be no moves to dump the dumpling”.

IT IS ONE OF those curious aspects of Edinburgh: its multiplicity of parliament buildings. The Estaits of Parliament, as they were known in the old days — consisting of the three estates of prelates, lairds, and burghers — first met in the Great Hall of Edinburgh Castle in 1140, though the first gathering of which we have primary source material was at Kirkliston in 1235, during the reign of Alexander II. The body led a somewhat peripatetic existence, meeting wherever was convenient, and even met for a year in St Andrews, where the building which housed it is still known as Parliament Hall. Indeed, that august edifice is home to the proceedings of the Union Debating Society, where the germinal gasbags of Scotland, and indeed of all three kingdoms, first enter the fray of political discourse.

In 1997, nearly three-hundred years after the Parliament was abolished, it was decided to bring it back, albeit in much reduced form. Great were the rumours and discussions about what effect the return of legislative power might have on the country, and Edinboronians pondered where the body might be housed. There were obvious choices, and less obvious choices, but in the end the Westminster government decided to go for the choice that hadn’t been suggested at all and built one of the most heinous offences against the sensibilities of taste that the land has ever seen. And so, the fact is that Scotland has three beautiful parliament buildings, none of which it uses.

Because parliament buildings aren’t built in a day (the exception, of course, being the tent housing the Tynwald on the Isle of Man), it was necessary to secure temporary accommodation for the Caledonian legislators while their ugly new home was under construction. New College on the Mound proved a well-suited venue. It was built by the Free Church of Scotland to train dissident Calvinist ministers, but importantly also holds the Assembly Hall in which the Free Church’s governing body convened. After the Presbyterian churches re-united in 1929, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland chose to hold its annual meetings here, and so it has generally become known as the General Assembly Hall.

In the old days, the annual convocation of the General Assembly was quite a whirl on the social calendar of Edinburgh. The Lord High Commissioner — the Sovereign’s Deputy to the State Church — held court at the Palace of Holyroodhouse, and was even authorised to fly the Royal Standard of Scotland from the tower. Since the Parliament had been abolished, and with it the annual ‘Riding of Parliament’ procession that opened the legislative year, the General Assembly week arguably replaced the opening of parliament as the annual high occasion of state in Edinburgh.

It had been wide supposed, before Labour announced otherwise, that the Scottish Parliament would meet in New Parliament House on Calton Hill. It was built from 1826 to 1829 to house the Royal High School, founded 1128 and one of the oldest schools in Scotland. The design was by Thomas Hamilton, who modelled the great hall in the middle after the Hephaisteion of Athens. Edinburgh, traditionally a centre of philosophy and learning, has been known as “the Athens of the North”, and the architects of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were keen on drawing an architectural suggestion of Greek learning. Rather disappointingly, it was decided that the beauty of the view from Calton Hill would prove too great a distraction for schoolboys, and so the main schoolrooms that flank the great hall on either side were built with skylights instead of windows.

The Royal High School left Calton Hill for more expansive, though modern, premises in Barnton in 1968. The City Council sold the building to the Scottish Office, who refurbished it to house the devolved Scottish assembly whose creation was planned to take place after the 1979 devolution referendum. The referendum failed to gain enough votes to support the new assembly, however, and so the assembly was never born. The Scottish Office had already renovated the school’s great hall into a legislative debating chamber, however, and it was at this time that the building became known as ‘New Parliament House’, despite never having housed a parliament. In 1994, Edinburgh City Council bought the Old Royal High back from the Scottish Office for £1.75 million.

But the grandpappy of all Scottish parliament buildings is undoubtedly Parliament House, often called Old Parliament House to distinguish it from the others. It sits on Parliament Square in the very heart of the Old Town of Edinburgh, right next to the High Kirk of St. Giles. It’s oldest part, Old Parliament Hall, was built in 1639 and has a hammerbeam roof of Scandinavian wood. The building we see today is the result of a gradual evolution, with new bits being added on through the centuries, until we arrive at the handsome classical façade which unifies a rather hectic interior.

After the 1707 abolition of parliament, Parliament House was handed over to the courts. It houses the Court of Session, Scotland’s supreme civil court, as well as some sittings of the High Court of Justiciary, Scotland’s highest criminal court. Scotland’s lawyers are divided into advocates and solicitors, who are gathered into independent bodies respectively known as the Faculty of Advocates and the Society of Writers to Her Majesty’s Signet. The Advocates’ Library sits within Parliament House — it’s non-legal collection was removed in the 1920s to form the seed of the National Library of Scotland — as well as the Signet Library.

Each one of these buildings is worthy of further exploration in and of themselves (and I hope to eventually write on each of them in particular). Each of them, furthermore, has numerous qualities that would make it a suitable home for Scotland’s parliament. The General Assembly Hall enjoys a prominent location, from the Old Town looking out towards the New. But the Church of Scotland made clear from the outset that it was loath to deprive itself permanently of its complex in the center of Edinburgh. New Parliament House is a stately and dignified edifice in a classical style which has become almost native to Scotland. Opponents claim there are security concerns or not enough space, but these could be easily overcome. Finally Old Parliament House has the weight of history upon its shoulders. What better place for the government of Scotland to convene than the hall where its ancient predecessor met?

There’s no doubt that the demerits which could be laid against all of these buildings combined still argue in their favour against the ridiculous monstrosity erected insultingly close to the Palace of Holyroodhouse, ugly from every angle from which it has ever been viewed. Despite the £414m pricetag of constructing the new parliament (first estimated to cost £10m-£40m), Scots rejoice that it is already falling apart, and indeed not long ago one of the strange stalactites hanging from the ceiling of the plenary chamber fell to the ground, nearly taking an MSP or two with it. Perhaps some day in the future, when sanity is regained, we might see the end of the Holyrood Parliament? I have no higher hope.