The Hero Building

An Architecture of Scottish National Identity

Johnny Rodger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317029137
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

Why was it that, across Scotland over the last two and a half centuries, architectural monuments were raised to national heroes? Were hero buildings commissioned as manifestations of certain social beliefs, or as a built environmental form of social advocacy? And if so, then how and why were social aims and intentions translated into architectural form, and how effective were they? A tradition of building architectural monuments to commemorate national heroes developed as a distinctive feature of the Scottish built environment. As concrete manifestations of powerful social and political currents of thought and opinion, these hero buildings make important statements about identity, the nation and social history. The book examines this architectural culture by studying a prominent selection of buildings, such as the Burns monuments in Alloway, Edinburgh and Kilmarnock, the Edinburgh Scott Monument, the Glenfinnan Monument and the Wallace Monument in Stirling. They give testimony to how a variety of architectural forms and styles can be adapted through time to bear particular social messages of symbolic weight. This tradition, which literally allows us to dwell on important social issues of the past, has been somewhat neglected in serious architectural history and heritage, and indeed one of the main monuments has already been destroyed. By raising awareness of this rich architectural and social heritage, while analysing and interpreting the buildings in their historical context, this book makes an exciting and original scholarly contribution to the current debates on identity and nationality taking place in Scotland and the wider UK.

1

The Hero Building

TOWERING INFERNO

At 5a.m. on 19 November 2004 the Fire Service in the Ayrshire town of Kilmarnock was called out on an emergency in the winter dark. Their caller directed them to Kay Park, a 29-acre open expanse for public benefit in the middle of the town. When they got there they found their destination was at the top of the hill in the park, at its highest point. The Burns Monument, a B-listed 80-foot tall red sandstone building, completed in 1879 to commemorate the eighteenth-century poet Robert Burns, was ablaze.

In the report of an East Ayrshire Council meeting of 9 December 2004, called to discuss the conflagration, we read that:

At approximately 5.20 am the tower collapsed as a result of the intense heat and fire weakening the structure. Two firefighters were seriously injured by falling masonry. Both were taken to Crosshouse Hospital where they were treated for their injuries.¹

The document then relates how three young men. aged 16, 18 and 22. were arrested by Strathclyde Police in connection with the fire. After inspection it appeared that the fire began at the base of the tower. The remains of the tower ‘subsequently had to be demolished for safety reasons’.

The bringing down of the tower was met with both disappointment and anger from locals, from Burns enthusiasts, and indeed from people all over Scotland. On Wednesday 24 November a Conservative MSP for Central Scotland, Margaret Mitchell, had raised a motion asking the Scottish Parliament to ‘condemn first, the inadequate maintenance and unacceptable neglect of the historic Burns Monument in Kay Park, Kilmarnock, and now its destruction by fire’.²

Any idea that the tower, with its quirky nineteenth-century style, had been simply much loved by the public and showered with tokens of their affection for it, sits uneasily with the historical record of its last few years before the fire. Margaret Mitchell referred to neglect of the tower, and it appears that since the late 1980s the ground floor windows had been bricked up and a galvanised iron security fence put around the building it to close it off to the public. It remained in this condition until it burnt down: it had been all but abandoned. Yet can we simply lay the blame on an uncaring and unimaginative local authority – East Ayrshire Council – as owners of the monument, for this neglect? Successive councils had spent money renovating the building: when the Tourist Board moved out of the tower in the 1980s they were unable to find a new tenant to occupy the building. It seems, in fact, that its isolation in the middle of the park led not only to the building being unwanted, but to a sustained attitude of contempt – from the public at large as well as the authorities – being levelled at the building over the years (see Chapter 3, pp. 131–2). James MacKay wrote of the neglect of the monument some 12 years before it was burnt down: ‘part of the problem is that the monument stands in a park which is secluded by trees and therefore difficult to keep under surveillance’.³ How then should we view the latterday protests of anger and disappointment from a public who had seemed uninterested in engaging with the building while it stood alone, vulnerable and unloved?

1.1 Kilmarnock Burns Monument before the fire

The Council – Labour-controlled at the time – acted promptly in the face of criticism. By the time of the minuted meeting on 9 December, they had already established that it would cost £4 million to rebuild the tower. They subsequently received almost £2 million in an insurance payout for the damaged building and by September 2006 already had planning permission to partially rebuild. The remaining front staircase and portico, which housed the undamaged statue of Robert Burns, were to be preserved, and a single story, copper-roofed extension wrapping around these remnants to create a courtyard was to be built. There would be a marriage suite and archive services for ancestor research installed in the new build. The total cost would be £5 million.⁴

Unfortunately for the Council, much of the public anger and disappointment was not to be quelled by these plans. Indeed it now seemed that it was specifically the lost tower, as opposed to the Burns statue, staircase, or ground floor rooms of the monument, which had constituted the vital part of the building for its admirers. Protestors now demanded the rebuilding of the full 1879 version 80-foot tower.

The Burns Monument Supporters’ Group raised a 6000-signature petition against the Council’s rebuild-without-tower plans, and was reported by The Scotsman to be ‘furious’. A spokeswoman said:

The tower is just as important to the people of Kilmarnock as the statue. It was the backdrop to many local events and should be fully restored. If this was happening to the Scott Monument in Princes Street in Edinburgh, there would be a national outcry.

The SNP MSP Adam Ingram is also cited, asserting of the Burns monuments in general, that:

It would be much better for Scottish tourism as a whole if there was a single body in charge of them all. While they remain in the hands of local authorities, the Scottish Executive will be reluctant to intervene.

Peter Westwood, editor of the Burns Chronicle, the publication of the Burns Federation (the national body to promote the life and works of the poet Robert Burns) was also in ‘favour of a national body to run the sites’. He supported ‘a full restoration’ of the tower and went on to say, ‘It was a great landmark and I am very disappointed that the tower will not be restored as will considerable numbers of membership’.⁵

The first sod was nonetheless duly cut in the construction of the new building – without the tower – as per the Labour Council’s plans in March 2007. Succour was close at hand for the protestors however. The main opposition in the Council Chamber was the Scottish National Party (SNP).⁶ Both local and national elections were due to take place two months later, and the SNP was campaigning in the county with the promise that if they took control of the Council they would abandon the lower new-build project, and rebuild the full-height tower as was. In May 2007 the SNP swept to power in East Ayrshire Council and in the national elections for the Scottish Parliament. Yet these promises were quietly laid aside and forgotten, and the low one-storey extension, the new Burns Monument Centre with no restored tower as planned under a Labour Council was completed, and opened in May 2009 by Alex Salmond, the SNP First Minister of Scotland.

It’s hard to understand why a political party would perform such a blatant policy and practice about turn, and leave itself so open to a charge of hypocrisy, or lack of professionalism. As regards that last charge, we might well ask, what was it that made rebuilding the tower so unthinkable, and how had the SNP failed to comprehend this before they came to power? Clearly, as a party they were aware of the symbolic strength of a campaign to rebuild, so why not see it through and gain the final capitalisation of such a policy? The estimated cost of rebuilding with the tower was roughly of the same order as the cost of the actual completed towerless project. Since the mid-1980s there had been an increasing abundance of stonemasons in Scotland, many of whom work solely on conservation and historic monument projects, so there would be no want of craftsmanship to carry out the work. It is true that the Ballochmyle quarry in nearby Mauchline which supplied the original red sandstone of particular hue and consistency had been shut since the years of the First World War. Nevertheless other similar types of stone – such as that from Locharbriggs in Dumfriesshire, used to build the Burrell Gallery in Glasgow – are coloured with the same red iron oxide, are said to be of identical colour and texture, and were still available in quantity.⁷

1.2 The rebuilt Kilmarnock Burns Monument

With material, craft and financial considerations thus discounted, what could have been the reason for the SNP to fail to live up to their promises? Perhaps the opacity in the thinking behind the SNP’s decision was forced by factors more historical and existential, rather than practical and contractual? In his great Vienna novel The Man Without Qualities Robert Musil describes the nineteenth-century neoclassical styles of that city, saying:

But by virtue of that secret law that will not permit man any kind of imitation without his getting an exaggeration along with it, everything was at that same time done with a correctness of craftsmanship such as the admired prototypes could never have achieved.⁸

What could this ‘secret law’ be that its transgression leads to exaggeration by way of over-perfection? Surely it entails a relation that is proper not to a practical hands-on, human to material interface, but an ideological relationship? One that binds together not just persons and objects, but also society, its attitudes and way of living within a certain range of meanings. We are afforded insight into this social relation when both Adam Ingram MSP and Peter Westwood of the Burns Chronicle advise that a national body should be set up to manage all of the Burns monuments together. Hence we arrive at the conclusion that this not just about the people of Kilmarnock after all. Neither is it insignificant that the spokeswoman from the Burns Monument Supporters’ Group makes a comparison with the Walter Scott Monument in Edinburgh. What we have here is an understanding that this monument means less in and of itself than it does as part of what Claude Levi-Strauss calls a ‘logic of the concrete’.⁹ Thus the Burns Monument is viewed and analysed in this book as part of a network of buildings constructed in Scotland across the nineteenth century – that great era for building commemorative architectural monuments – to various heroes and important moments in its history. In effect all these hero buildings are figured as operating as some kind of great stone thinking machine: they articulate a lapidary calculus in the themes of identity, relation and belonging for the society that erects them.

Thus we see the commentators cited above struggling blindly towards their own understanding of that language of nineteenth-century Scottish monumentality, and the idea that those individual hero buildings represent but isolated statements in that language. This also means, however, that as these buildings were built to speak of particular identities and relations proper to that era, as Musil implies those particulars are secrets which have been lost to us and we are left unable to resurrect them from out of our own particular concrete and quotidian historical situation. Hence the SNP’s failure to live up to their rash and immature promise. But what did those buildings mean in their own time? What is the significance, the ideology, the meaning embodied in their stony forms, their cavernous interiors: and why were architectural forms those chosen to represent them in that particular era?

WHAT ARE THESE HERO BUILDINGS?

The monumental tradition examined here is an architectural one, which consists of works built in Scotland principally over the long nineteenth century, as defined by Eric Hobsbawm – though there is some minor reach beyond his bookend dates. As an architectural tradition we are concerned with monuments which are buildings and not just statues or otherwise sculpted materials, although there is often a sculpted element incorporated into the hero building. There are around 20 important completed hero buildings in diverse sites across the country, both urban and rural, and they employ various architectural forms and styles within a definite and recognisable typology. The tradition can be exemplified in its range from Robert Adam’s classical Hume Monument (1777) to Robert Lorimer’s eclectic gothic War Memorial (1927), both in Edinburgh; James Gillespie Graham’s neobaronial Glenfinnan Monument (1815), topped by a statue of a kilted highlander, to Robert Ingram’s pseudo-ecclesiastical eclecticism in the Kilmarnock Burns Monument (1877), fronted by a W.G. Stevenson statue of the eponymous poet.

Although the actual commemorative element in these hero buildings is often upfront, straightforward, and usually incorporated in its name or title, it will be helpful in bringing them into view in their full distinct significance if we make clear where they differ from similar contemporary phenomena like follies, memorial statuary, and an ascription of ‘monumental’ to nineteenth century buildings in general. Thus it is important to note that these hero buildings are not simply structures that, no matter their function, can for reasons purely associated with scale, material or other such physical and design factors, be described as having ‘monumentality’. Indeed the monumental aspect consists in these hero buildings having the unique function of commemoration. In this sense they conform strictly to the original Latin sense of the root word of monument, monumentum, meaning that which ‘calls upon the faculty of memory’. That is to say, it is the aspect of public or civic commemoration which differentiates this tradition from the contemporaneous flourishing, throughout Britain and the continent, of a tradition of building ‘follies’. The works in this nineteenth-century Scottish tradition of hero buildings do share some essential qualities with architectural follies, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Hero Building
• 2 Prototype: Hume and Glenfinnan Monuments
• 3 Romantic Poet – Enlightenment Poet: Early Burns Monuments
• 4 The Athens of the North/Valhalla of the West: Calton Hill in Edinburgh
• 5 Wizard of the North: The Scott Monument
• 6 Baronial Revival and the National Wallace Monument
• 7 National Poet – Poet of Humanity: Late Burns Monuments
• 8 Aberration, Autism and Vanity: Hamilton Mausoleum and the McCaig Tower
• 9 The Fallen: The Scottish National War Memorial
• 10 A Postmodern Proof
• 11 Afterlife
• Bibliography
• Index