A British experience ? Public Buildings in Scottish burghs during the
Enlightenment1
Charles McKean
From the nature of public buildings constructed predominantly between 1760 and 1820,
this paper examines urban change in selected Scottish burghs in the enlightenment
period. It studies their urban locations against the improvement agenda, and examines
who required and paid for them, questions whether there was a discernible process and
chronology in their erection, and ponders whether there was a British urban experience
toward the end of the first century of Parliamentary union.2 It concludes that there was a
significant Scottish difference.
Introduction
Public buildings are the most splendid monuments of a great and opulent
people. The purposes for which they are intended admit of magnificence in
design and require solidity in the construction.
Robert and James Adam The Works in Architecture 1776
If our national monument is to accord with our peculiar customs, our own
monument may safely be a church or a theatre; unless it be indeed a prison, a
madhouse, a bridge , or, like Lord Nelson’s pillar, a cakehouse.
New Edinburgh Review No V111 April 1823
In its peroration on the proposed National Monument on Calton Hill, the New Edinburgh
Review thus cast its splenetic eye over the nature of public buildings in Scotland to find
them wanting. Such dismissive comment might have been unexpected given the symbolic
importance accorded to public buildings by the Enlightenment seventy years earlier. For
the PROPOSALS for carrying on a CERTAIN PUBLIC WORK in the CITY of
This paper forms part of the AHC-funded research study ‘The Scottish Town during the enlightenment’,
and I am particularly grateful to my colleagues in that study Bob Harris and Chris Whatley for their
guidance; and in particular, to our researcher Dr Natalie Rosset.
2
The suggestion of a British urban experience was made by Peter Borsay in ‘The Landed elite and
Provincial Towns in Britain 1600- 1800’ in the Georgian Group Journal Vol X111 2003, p. 291, and was
also examined by Bob Harris in ‘Towns, improvement and cultural change in Georgian Scotland – the
evidence of the Angus burghs’ in Urban History 33, 2 (2006).
1
1
EDINBURGH stated, inter alia, had extolled the ‘national benefit’ of adorning the city
with public buildings.3 Moreover, it was remarkable that it omitted the key building
representative of a Scots burgh’s majesty - namely the steeple, tolbooth or town house.
So was the Review being entirely just in its dismissiveness?
Historiography tends to follow Robert Adam’s view that public buildings were selfconsciously intended to perform a symbolic and representative civic role beyond their
immediate function: proclaiming the standing and cultural aspirations of their town to
resident and visitor alike, or reflecting, as has been suggested for Ireland, ‘pride in a new
corporate or municipal status.’ 4 In his 1745 ‘Description of the Exchange of Bristol’, the
Bath architect John Wood wrote that the Magistrates of Bristol had been willing to be at
the expense of constructing the new exchange and related streets and passages ‘for the
Publick Good, and the CONVENIENCE and ORNAMENT of the said CITY’.5 At a cost
of £50,000, it had been a flamboyant expense requiring an equally florid justification. 6 A
virtually identical argument was made eighteen years later, to explain why Newark
needed to go to the expense of a new town hall designed by the equally eminent York
architect John Carr: civic grandeur was a ‘necessary requirement’.7
This article examines the Scottish experience of public buildings and associated
improvement undertaken between 1760 and 1820 in selected and generally middle-sized
burghs throughout the country.8 The period was one of profound urban change
principally on account of the accelerating population expansion, increasing commerce
and consequent urban growth. Between 1755 and 1831, the populations of the burghs of
3
PROPOSALS for carrying on a CERTAIN PUBLIC WORK in the CITY of EDINBURGH (Edinburgh,
1752), p.9.
4
P. J. Gerachty, ‘Urban Improvement and the erection of Municipal Buildings in County Louth during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, in the Journal of County Louth Archaeological and Historical Society
Vol 23, No. 3 (1995), p. 296
5
John Wood, A Description of the Exchange of Bristol… (Bath, 1745), p. 8.
6
C. Chalklin, The Rise of the English Town 1650 – 1850 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 42.
7
Cited in J.M.Ellis, ‘For the honour of the town’, in Urban History 30. 3 (2003), p. 333.
8
The selected burghs included Arbroath, Ayr, Banff, Brechin, Cupar, Dumfries, Dundee, Dunfermline,
Falkirk, Forfar, Greenock, Haddington, Inverness, Irvine, Kelso, Kilmarnock, Maybole, Montrose, Nairn,
Paisley, Perth, Peterhead, Selkirk, Stirling, Tain
2
Ayr increased by over 156%, and of Forfar by 224%.9 The immediate consequence that it
outgrew many of the inherited public buildings and facilities: schools, prisons and
churches were now too small. The growth in wheeled traffic and the development of
turnpike roads required new entrances to the town, street regularization and widening, the
removal of ancient obstructions, new bridges, warehouses and access to harbours. Urban
growth, however, also provided the ambition to build for a politer society, and the
opportunity for councils not just to improve or embellish their town centre, but even to
dream of replacing it.
Context
There is a perception abroad of the improving British town during the 18th century.
Moreover, ‘proliferating venues – coffeehouses, assemblies, pleasure gardens, theatres,
concerts, and masquerades – [that] provided new sites for polite and heterogeneous
interaction,’10 whose presence or absence was taken to signal a town’s culture of
sophistication. ‘Every Georgian town except the smallest built its assembly rooms,
though many were merely ballrooms added to inns; many towns…acquired theatres’; and
by the Regency period, ‘there were now buildings for cultural societies, exhibitions,
tableaux, panoramas and suburban pleasure gardens.’11
Discussion of change in the eighteenth century town has been predominantly English in
scope, tending to concentrate upon three matters: the changes implied by politeness
(usually generically embracing improvement),12 the ‘urban renaissance’13, and the
existence of the ‘leisure town’. The demonstration of how an industrial town like
Manchester could nonetheless enjoy an equivalent cultured existence14 challenged the
concept of non-manufacturing leisure town, but has not reduced the idea’s popularity. But
Population statistics extracted from Webster’s 1755 census and later Census enumerations.
L. Klein, ‘Politeness and the interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, Historical Journal, Vol.
45 no 4 (Dec. 2002), p. 879.
11
K. Downes, The Georgian Cities of Britain (Oxford, 1979), pp. 22, 29, 62.
12
Klein’s ‘Politeness and the interpretation’ provides the most thorough overview of this term.
13
As developed by Peter Borsay in ‘The Emergence of a Leisure Town or an urban renaissance’ in Past
and Present no. 126 (Feb. 1990)
14
H. Barker, ‘Smoke Cities: northern industrial towns in late Georgian England’ in Urban History31.2
(2004).
9
10
3
this English conception of a town mercifully free from industry and graced with a
quiverful of élite locations - assembly rooms, theatre, shops, library or concert hall15 - has
no parallel in Scotland.
It is impossible to review public buildings without considering their context – both in
terms of setting and of available finance. The physical context was improvement - a
slippery word that conveyed different things to different people, but became the generic
term for urban alteration. To Dr Thomas Garnett, principal of Glasgow’s Anderson’s
University, improvement was physical: ‘Glasgow may, I think, without hesitation, be
looked upon as the most improving place in Britain. ….There is not another city or town
in the British empire which is at present increasing so rapidly in population and opulence.
Great numbers of new houses are built every year…’ 16 Alexander Campbell’s praise of
the ‘rapid improvements carrying on in every direction, characteristic of public spirit,
opulence and industry’17 in Perth implied much the same. An equally pervasive notion of
improvement, however, was cultural, as implied by the petition to Montrose burgh
council to put the Town Library on a proper footing in 1777 since ‘it would tend greatly
to the Improvement and Amusement of the inhabitants’.18
Improvement, (rather like politeness), could mean effectively what people wanted it to
mean provided that the outcome was better than before, as Mark Girouard observed: ‘An
enlightened eighteenth century man moved freely from one type of improvement to the
other. He bought pictures, built temples, bred sheep, acted as governor of hospitals and
charity schools, put money into docks, mines and mills, sat on improvement commissions
in the towns, and as JP supervised the building of bridges and prisons.’19 More
specifically, however, the gracious streets and squares of London, Bath, and Bristol set
See for example R. Sweet, The English Town 1680 – 1840 (Harlow, 1999), pp.22 and chapter 7.
T Garnett Tour through the Highlands …Scotland (London, 1800), p. 185. also held that Anderson’s
University was ‘improved’ because it was ‘the first regular institution in which the fair sex have been
admitted to the temple of knowledge on the same footing with men’. P. 202.
17
A. Campbell, Journey from EDINBURGH through PARTS OF NORTH BRITAIN (London, 1802), p.
308.
18
Montrose TCM 24.9.1777. See also Vivienne Dunstan, ‘Reading habits in Scotland circa 1750-1820’
(Unpublished PhD thesis, (University of Dundee, 2010).
19
M. Girouard, The English Town (New Haven, 1990), p. 86.
15
16
4
the standard for improved towns, and character of the urban setting that came to be
regarded as every bit as important as the individual buildings themselves.20 As Dana
Arnold put it, ‘the flow of human existence through the streets and squares of London
remains a potent image of the experience of resident and visitor alike’.21 London, of
course, was exceptional; but in smaller towns and cities, the question was how the urban
fabric might be adapted to suit polite aspirations.
The Scottish experience
English historiography appears quite relaxed about whether improvement had a
chronology: Borsay’s urban renaissance was more or less complete by 1750, whereas for
Sweet and Corfield et alii, various improvements continued until the 1790s. Insofar as
Scottish burghs have been examined, the picture given so far has implied a random rather
than a coherent process.22 The perspective that emerges from this study, however, implies
three relatively identifiable phases. In the early decades, up to 1760, burghs were in a
desperate condition with ruinous buildings, gap sites, unusable roads, and collapsing
public buildings. In the 1750s, both Ayr and Inverness found their tolbooths so decrepit
that urgent work was undertaken to prop up Inverness’s, whereas it was too late for
Ayr’s, which was demolished.23 That was fairly typical: steeples were ‘ruinous and in
danger of falling down’, 24 schoolhouses ‘in danger of falling’,25 and even the Devorgilla
Bridge, upon which Dumfries was entirely dependent),‘exceeding old and crazy and upon
any severe stroak would be in Danger of tumbling down'26 Maybole, Paisley and
Greenock were driven to the expense of constructing entirely new churches.
20
See, inter alia, P. Zucker, Town and Square (Cambridge Massachusetts, 1970), chapter 5; S Kostoff, The
City Shaped – urban patterns and meanings throughout history (London, 1991), and S. Kostoff, The City
Assembled (London, 1992), particularly chapter 3.
21
D. Arnold, Re-presenting the Metropolis (Aldershot, 2000), p. 28.
22
Harris, ‘Towns, improvement and cultural change in Georgian Scotland , pp.201-202.
23
Ayr TCM 6.12.1752. Inverness TCM 6.8.1757.
24
Arbroath TCM 14.6.1764
25
Irvine TCM 14.5.1750
26
Memorial of the Magistrates Regarding the Bridge, 8 August 1752., H2/1/1. Dumfries and Galloway
Council Archives, Dumfries. In 1751, Haddington’s ‘cornmilns requiring repair; grammar school and
schoolhouse currently ruinous; streets in great disrepair and all publick building except townhouse and
prison in decay.’
5
This investment coincided with and may have triggered the first phase of improving the
urban domain - a process naturally varying according to size, location and wealth. The
heart of the town - the market place – would get better cleaning and dung removal, then
paving and lighting. Buildings would be regularized, thatched roofs banned, projecting
forestairs and timber galleries removed, and building frontages regularized in pursuit of
greater cohesion in terms of alignment, building materials and scale.27 Derelict or vacant
property was tackled using an Act of Charles 11 that empowered burgh councils to
purchase compulsorily ruinous buildings or vacant land at a price determined by
enquiry.28 This improvement process would then be extended to the principal streets
leading in and out of the market place, widening and straightening as need was - or new
streets added as required by wheeled traffic. Traffic was a major problem. Not only had
the ‘increased numbers of carts bringing peats and turf into the burgh’ damaged
Dumfries’ Devorgilla Bridge in 1752,29 but the throng of wheeled vehicles also required
the removal of sharp corners, street narrows, projecting buildings and, eventually, market
crosses and town ports (gates). Quite frequently, paving and lighting would have to be
replaced either because it had worn out or because quality standards were rising. In its
phased approach to cleansing, lighting and paving – primary location before secondary
location - Perth has probably the most comprehensive record of how burghs improved
themselves: the wealthier such as Dundee often decades ahead of the stagnant, such as
Brechin. Buildings for polite activities may well have acted ‘as agent of civility,’30 but
eighteenth century towns also had to invest in improvement, buildings of charity and
order such as workhouses and prisons, buildings of learning such as schools, academies
and libraries, and urban icons such as town or guild halls and exchanges - all having to
compete for funds during a period of expensive urban improvement.
It was in the next phase of improvement, approximately from the mid 1760s to the mid
1780s, that burghs expanded their commercial or cultural ambitions in the form of public
works, beginning with the relocation of activities now considered inappropriate or
See Harris, ‘Towns, improvement and cultural change in Georgian Scotland , p. XXX
Haddington TCM 27.7.49/ 3.7.1756.
29
Dumfries & Galloway Archives H2/1/1/ 8.8.1752.
30
Harris, ‘Towns, improvement and cultural change in Georgian Scotland , p. 200.
27
28
6
impolite, and their replacement by new public buildings. The market place, now a
‘parade’ or space for elite social interaction, had to be dung-free and of requisite
refinement with appropriate paving and lighting. Fleshmarkets and mealmarkets would
be removed, shops would be built, and the old tolbooth would be replaced by a new
Town House.
Table 1
Note: only two of the references under town houses are tolbooths, and never for a new building after 1770.
Sample infrastructure buildings
7
6
project tye
5
Bridge
4
Lighting
3
Fleshmarket
2
1
0
1740-9 1750-9 1760-9 1770-9 1780-9 1790-9 180009
181020
decade
7
Not all polite or improved activities, however, necessarily took place in purpose-designed
representative structures. Speaking through the mouth of Jeremy Melford in Humphrey
Clinker, Tobias Smollett, wrote of Edinburgh in 1772: ‘All the diversions of London we
enjoy here at Edinburgh in a small compass. Here is a well conducted concert …Our
company of actors is very tolerable, and a subscription is now on foot to build a new
theatre; but their assemblies please me above all other publick exhibitions.’31 Yet few
purpose-designed structures for such diversions yet existed: indeed, before 1800,
Scotland had only a single purpose-design concert hall – St Cecilia’s off Edinburgh High
Street. So, whereas the visitor to the larger late Georgian English town ‘would have been
struck by the variety of specialist, quasi-public buildings,’32 there was no certainty that
that was the case in Scotland. If in England, ‘new cultural forms were developed, new
kinds of entertainment were popularized, and the provision of ‘leisure facilities’ became a
substantial part of the urban economy of almost all towns,’33 the way these cultural forms
were expressed were likely to have differed north and south of the border.
County towns in England were also embellished by county buildings, constructed on land
owned by the county and usually – as in Chester, Cambridge or Oxford - within the
boundaries and territory of the castle. They were within - but not of - the town. The
English county was an administrative unit with a prominent role in eighteenth century
improvement construction, including the provision of roads, bridges and prisons. 34
Crucially, Scotland entirely lacked England’s county administration, so its county towns
did not enjoy the added status that county business brought. A county town in Scotland
was still only a royal burgh, with all the independence and sternly delineated boundaries
that that implies. It had no county responsibilities. This fundamental difference between
the two countries was indifferently understood, leading to a testy exchange with the
Prime Minister, Lord North. He found the Kinross Justices of the Peace’s request that the
Crown, as feu superior, replace the ruinous county house, ‘unprecedented, as every
County in England built its own Shire house’. He had not appreciated that there were no
31
T. Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (London, 1772) Vol 11, p. 67.
Peter Clark, The Transformation of English Provincial Towns (London, 1984), p. 42.
33
Sweet, English Town, p. 230.
34
See C. Chalklin, English Counties and Public Building 1650 – 1830 (London, 1998), particularly chapter
2.
32
8
such animals in Scotland. 35 Such meagre Scottish county administration as there was
operated through Commissioners of Supply - country gentlemen with the power to levy
cess (tax) upon county landowners for agreed works such as bridges, roads and justice, all
sharing the overriding agenda of keeping such charges to the minimum. Until c. 1780,
they did not have or seek their own premises, although thereafter, with the increasing
desire to build new prisons, the Commissioners began to seek administrative premises,
with space for county archives. Thus early in the new century there emerged a new civic
monument – the Scottish County Building. Indeed, the very fact that a county town in
Scotland could shrink and decline –as did Dumbarton, Renfrew and Wigtown - whereas
that was scarcely possible in England, was a further crucial indicator of difference within
Britain. Behind the same title, lay two very different beasts.
A similar semantic problem emerges with Guidhalls. Where English towns had
Guildhalls, held by the poet Philip Larkin as emblematic of the English town, Scots
burghs had tolbooths. Although Guildries were prominent in public life, Guildhalls, as
such, were extremely rare. It is inconceivable that the Guildry would have been allowed
to outshine or even compete architecturally with the burgh tolbooth since membership of
the guildry and the town council usually overlapped.36 Instead, the Guildry almost
invariably claimed a prominent chamber in the tolbooth for its business meetings.
Arbroath records indicate that the Guild Hall was less an entire building than a space: for
in 1779, its council agreed that the Guildry could add an additional storey to the tolbooth,
roof it at the Guild’s expense, and call the new storey the Guildhall.37 The guildhall
constructed in Brechin on the face of it, appears entirely aberrational until its origins are
examined. After the burgh had opened a subscription for a new prison and town house in
1789, subscriptions had peaked short at £500; and the Guildry had offered £50 on
condition that ‘the large east room of the hall be termed Guildhall of Brechin.’ The
building derived its name from that room.38
35
PKA, JP21/2/1. Minutes of meetings of the justices of the peace for the county of Kinross, 20 August
1771. I am very grateful to John McLintock for this.,
36
I am indebted to Dr. Alan Macdonald for this.
37
Arbroath TCM 28.4.1779.
38
Angus Archives Brechin TC Minute Books B1/1/2 23.2.1767. It was a similar tale in Paisley in 1804.
9
Public Buildings in the Scottish burgh
If the term ‘public building’ is taken as meaning either any building for which the burgh
council had some fiscal or other responsibility (however partial), or a significant structure
erected by an independent body intending to contribute to the town’s identity, then some
fifty separate heterogeneous building types would be involved.[see Table 2].
Table 2: Public buildings in the Scottish Enlightenment burgh
Infrastructure
Exchange
meal market
fleshmarket
cheesemarket
steelyard
cornmarket
clothmarket
Storehouse/warehouse
Bridge
customs house
barracks/battery
docks/harbour
wells/cistern
windmill/watermill
Symbolic buildings
Parish church
Mercat cross
Tolbooth
Town House
Town Clerk office
Prison
Court House
Steeple
Grammar School/ Writing School/Academy
Weighhouse
Shambles
Ports (gates)
County Hall
Social Buildings
Town's Hospital
Poorhouse
Workhouse
Washhouse
Lunatic Asylum
public kitchen
Polite conviviality
Inn
10
Theatre
Assembly room
Coffee room/house
Library
Ballroom
Masonic Hall
Riding School
Trades Hall/Professional Institution
Bowling Green/Walks
Baths
They were not, however, equally widespread or all of equal significance: for example
only Perth invested in a steelyard, when its weighhouse was about to be cleared for
improvement. But a clue to contemporary significance emerges from the ubiquitous
urban guidebooks. In his History of the City of Glasgow39 of 1804, James Denholm
identified twenty-six separate public buildings - varying from the practical (weigh house,
washing house, markets, fleshmarket, slaughter house), to the symbolic (Town House,
University, Grammar School, eight established churches, Trades’ and Merchants’ Halls),
social (Hutchesons’ Hospital, Town’s Hospital, Infirmary), and those of polite
conviviality (assembly rooms, theatre). Their lack of geographical concentration - other
than the location of the Town House on ancient site of the burgh’s praetorium - implied
that Glasgow’s civic centre had become somewhat dispersed. Robert Wilson’s 1822
Delineation of Aberdeen included as public buildings the town house and mercat cross
(rare survivals by this date), two prisons, the inn, the post-office, record office, grammar
school and two universities, customs house, two charitable hospitals, lunatic asylum,
assembly rooms, theatre and barracks. Half of them embellished the urban centre, and
half the suburbs.40 When public buildings in Edinburgh were identified for decoration to
greet the visit of Queen Victorian twenty years later, the city’s definition of a public
building now extended to eight banks, nine insurance companies, the railway terminus
and Gas Light Company HQ, and three newspaper offices.41
A century earlier, public buildings or works were those required for functional civic
purposes. They may be categorized, as shown in table 2, as those infrastructural works
39
J. Denholm, History of the City of Glasgow (Glasgow, 1804)
R. Wilson, Delineation of Aberdeen (Aberdeen, 1822).
41
T. Dick Lauder, Memorials of the royal progress in Scotland (Edinburgh, 1843) Appendix pp. i-ii.
40
11
required by efficiency, order and commerce; symbolic structures of the burgh; the rare
social buildings like poorhouses and hospitals; and finally buildings of polite
conviviality. Very few burghs had all of them or all at the same time, and it was only by
the early 19th century, that competitive emulation in the possession of a core of public
buildings became conceivable.
Infrastructural works
Twenty-two structures may be classified under the modern term ‘infrastructure,’ ranging
from warehouses for grain, coal, or ships’ cargoes to improved water supply and wells,
wind and watermills, and washhouses. Port towns had also to provide for docks, quays,
batteries and a powder magazine (particularly coastal towns in 1781); and a number of
burghs were eventually equipped with a guard house and barracks. All burghs had jails,
gaols or prisons, most of which had been substantially altered and extended or replaced
with larger ones (sometimes in county complexes) by 1820. Possibly the most expensive
infrastructure works was the repair or construction of road bridges, often in the
immediate hinterland just beyond the burgh boundary, caused either by the
transformation of a post road into turnpike road, and required by a burgh’s expanding
commerce.
Ware or storehouses were randomly provided, typically in towns with harbours, and more
often by the private sector. Water supplied by town wells could not keep pace with the
population increase, requiring more wells or, by the end of the century, piped water. The
importance of water supply was symbolized when Falkirk constructed a new fivestoreyed Steeple designed by David Hamilton in 1811: its top storey used for the burgh
clock and the burgh’s ‘great bell’, the intermediate three storeys for prison cells, and the
ground storey for a public cistern with fresh piped water.42
The changes also reflected changing mores. When Dundee’s market place had been
rebuilt in 1560, it had with three civic monuments – the tolbooth at the centre, and a
mealmarket at one end facing the fleshmarket at the other – all constructed with the
42
Falkirk Archives, Callendar House, A812.007/01 Minutes 1803-1821, 3.3.1812.
12
polished stones of the largest Greyfriars in Scotland.43 By the eighteenth century, the
importance of a meal market had become relative: it remained the most valuable source
of Kilmarnock’s town’s revenue in 175644 whereas Brechin’s had become redundant by
1788.45 New mealmarkets were relocated away from the town centre: once Haddington’s
had become ‘incommodious and open to wind and rain’ by 1748, the new one – no longer
a civic monument - was relegated to waste ground on the edge of town.46
Universal to all towns had been the fleshmarket, and one of the earliest signs of
improvement was their relocation to the urban periphery. Over half of them had been
moved by 1769. In 1751, Haddington concluded that it was ‘nauseous and offensive …to
the whole inhabitants and to the Gentlemen and others who have occasion to pass through
this town to have a flesh mercate on the public street;’ and that slaughtering animals in
the street was an ‘ugly practice and common nuisance.’47 Montrose eventually became so
polite that it not only removed its fleshmarket to the fringes, but also banned the herding
of cattle through the market place on their way to slaughter48 - allegedly on the grounds
of damage to its paving, but almost certainly because it was unacceptable to the elite
attending the coffee house or Assembly Rooms at the centre of town. Perth, uniquely,
rebuilt its shambles at the centre of town, but hidden in the backland College Yards.
Whereas fleshmarkets had originally been significant urban structures, their Georgian
replacements were utilitarian, concealed from public view, and far from the market place.
Whilst insisting upon their ancient rights and liberties with growing vehemence,49 burgh
councils were unsentimental about removing public structures where they impeded
traffic. Burgh ports and market crosses would be removed as casually as protruding
staircases and inconvenient buildings. Perhaps Scots burgh ports had been less imposing
than those in other countries since, from the very beginning, burghs had been linear and
C. McKean, ‘What kind of a Renaissance Town was Dundee’ in C.McKean, B.Harris & C.A.Whatley,
Dundee Renaissance to Enlightenment (Dundee, 2009) chapter 1.
44
Kilmarnock TCM 28.8.1756.
45
D. Black, History of Brechin (Brechin., 1839), p. 172.
46
Haddington TCM 25.2.1748
47
Haddington TCM 15.6.1751 and 1.11.57.
48
Montrose TCM 13.4.1763.
49
Natalie XXX
43
13
indefensible (a matter of repeated visitor astonishment during the Renaissance).50 More
like the Danish ones, ports were therefore boundary markers, places of control and
customs. Only Edinburgh’s Netherbow Port, allegedly modelled on that of Paris’ Porte St
Honoré, reached the grandeur of those in England or Europe. Thus there was little
opposition as most of the Scots ones were removed between 1750 and 1770. Glasgow’s
Gallowgate and West Ports were demolished in 1749;51 Haddington’s South Port was
removed in 1766 (wheeled traffic), and when its East Port was removed, it was on the
grounds of adding ‘considerable beauty to that part of the Burrow.’52
Market crosses, which represented the burgh’s privilege of free trade, proved equally
vulnerable, lamentations over their destruction penned by poets in both Edinburgh and
Inverness proving ineffectual. Perth’s market cross was condemned at Michaelmas 1765
because it had become ‘a great impediment in passing along the North Street and entering
the Kirk-gate and Skinner gate with wheeled machines.’ 53 Montrose’s Council was
unusual in insisting that the stones of its cross should be carved with the inscription ‘A
part of the Old Cross of Montrose’ when it permitted David Scott of Rossie to re-erect
them in his policies.54 It was more customary for the carved stones of the cross to be
stored and forgotten until antiquarian rediscovery in the later 19th century. Brechin,
perhaps over zealous in the other direction, instructed that the mercat cross stones should
be used, instead, to line a new well.55
Such investment in unencumbered streets and growing trade proved an extraordinary
burden upon a burgh’s finances in addition to their normal charges, and competed for
limited funds.
Symbolic structures
C. McKean, ‘Understanding the Scottish burgh’ in XXX
Denholm, History of Glasgow, p. 114.
52
Haddington TCM 21.5.1765; 10.6.1766.
53
Memorabilia of Perth (Perth, 1805), p. 211. Maybole’s was removed in 1772,
54
Montrose TCM 1.6.1763.
55
Black, Brechin, p.165
50
51
14
During the Renaissance, the parish church, market cross, steeple, tolbooth and grammar
school had symbolised Scottish burghal status, (although the weighhouse, packhouse (or
warehouse) mealmarket and fleshmarket were given significant standing. In recognition
of this, in the 1560s Dundee had centralised the location of such public buildings into a
new urban axis between harbour and market place to greet visitors arriving by sea,
somewhat along the Dutch model.56
For many burghs, the principal building was the burgh kirk, which absorbed much of the
available finance. So a significant difference between urban Scotland and England was
that the Scottish burgh council, jointly with heritors (as relevant), was responsible for the
parish church, whereas south of the Border that remained the responsibility of the Church
of England. Funding for the extension schemes in England of the early eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries tended to come from the Government - even if the financing of
individual churches appears largely to have been done from individual benefactors,
subscribers and the sale of pews57 - whilst the Scottish burghs and their heritors had to
shoulder such burdens themselves. They were, consequently, also responsible for the
minister (s) of the burgh, their salary, their manse and their glebe – and, by extension,
since the principal teacher was often the minister - for the burgh school, generally a
grammar school. In 1740, almost all the burghs were still using all or part of their
inherited mediaeval kirk, abbey or cathedral: two thirds would equip themselves with one
or more new churches before 1820, the majority between 1770 and 1796. [See table 1]
yet financial difficulties in Dundee in the 1770s meant that the council had to withdraw
from its original agreement to divide the cost of the new chapel of ease of St Andrews
equally between council, Guildry and Trades, leaving the latter and the congregation to
pay for it themselves.58
The nearest equivalent to the English guildhall, and equal in importance and prominence
to the kirk, was the tolbooth - which an Act of 1597 defined as a ‘building where courts
McKean, ‘What kind of Renaissance town was Dundee’, pp. 10-15.
C. Chalklin, ‘The financing of church building in the provincial towns’ in Clark, Transformation, pp. 284
– 304.
58
A. Warden, Burgh Laws of Dundee (London, 1872), p.286.
56
57
15
might be held, justice administered and malefactors be holden till justice be done,’ and
required the addition of prison houses.59 In all but the very largest burghs, the prison
merely comprised a few prison cells – small ones for the poor, and larger ones for people
of higher rank60 - in the cellar or roofspace. The tolbooth council chamber, courthouse, a
chamber for the Guildry, archives – and sometimes, as the centre of civic life and urban
ceremony - a great chamber for civic or royal events (the King’s Chamber in Glasgow).61
Other duties included the weighhouse, a town clerk’s office, and quite frequently a
school, making it more of a multi-purpose civic centre.62 Urban dignity also required a
tower or spire that contained the burgh clock, which a number of burghs maintained as a
separate steeple funded accordingly, as did Falkirk, Ayr and Dumfries, sometimes
attached to but separate from the church as in Forfar.63 ‘A proper steeple’ - an entirely
distinctive Scots structure – was justified by Banff council as ‘absolutely necessary both
for the convenience of the inhabitants of the town with respect to the policy [standing] of
the burgh, and also for convening of the gentlemen of the county… both to serve the
inhabitants for the notification of the hours and for the usual intimation of divine service
and other usual purposes.’64
In mid century Scotland, a new form of municipal building bearing a strong resemblance
to English models such as Abingdon began to appear: namely a public chamber above an
open arcaded market or exchange. The exchange in Scotland had been a space rather than
a building - Dundee’s merchant exchange down by the harbour, for example. In
Inverness, the exchange was the paved area in front of the Town House - ‘the favourite
place of rendezvous for a band of gentlemen without any profession or occupation who
met regularly every afternoon to discuss news.’65 In 1774, Haddington took the
opportunity of a gentry-funded assembly rooms by offering to contribute provided it was
59
A. F. McJannet, The Royal Burgh of Irvine (Glasgow,1938), p.116.
Dundee Prison cells
61
See C McKean, ‘The Scottish hotel de ville during the Renaissance’ in Ottenheym and Mignot, (editors),
xxxx
62
See also RCAHMS: Tolbooths and Town-Houses: Civic Architecture in Scotland to 1833 (London,
1996)
63
Forfar TCM 27.2.1789
64
Banff TCM 15.3.1762
65
I.H.Anderson, Inverness before the railways (Inverness, 1885), p.37.
60
16
built on pillars to allow a barley and oat market to take place below.66 The most striking
example was probably Montrose. In response to the noblemen and gentlemen of Angus’s
proposal to establish an Assembly Rooms in Montrose in 1759, the Council saw the
opportunity for an Exchange. No public funding was on offer for the proposed Assembly
Room - ‘the Town’s funds are so small that the Council can give no pecuniary aid to the
Intended Building out of Publick money’67 - but the council would contribute £100
provided that it was erected ‘upon pillars to the front having a handsome piazza below to
serve for the Merchants and inhabitants to meet and transact business together after the
manner of an Exchange.’68 In the event, the piazza was occupied by a coffee room and
the Town Clerk’s chamber, and the structure above included not only a ‘handsome
publick Room with proper waiting and retirement rooms adjacent’ but a new council
chamber.69 From the exterior, this building was recogniseably neither a Town House (as
it was titled), nor an Assembly Rooms, nor even a Coffee House – although it was
obviously a civic monument. It was a bland amalgam of all three functions: a multifunded, multi-purpose civic centre adorned in vague classical architecture, appropriately
further had been from the harbour and quayside where the food riots tended to occur than
the tolbooth which it replaced.
But that was not always the end of the process. Forfar’s tolbooth had fallen into such
poor condition by 1782 that the council raised first a subscription for a new ‘tolbooth or
town house for the conveniency of Town and County.’ It mutated, first, to a simple
Town House; and then again into what became, effectively, Scotland’s first County
Building – providing ‘apartments sufficiently large and commodious for County and
other Meetings, as also with sufficient Chambers or rooms to contain the records of the
County, a proper Sheriff Court House and prison or County Jail.’70 No weighhouse, no
school.
Haddington TCM 1.11.88. Hawick also sought a ‘weighhouse and market place beneath the pillars of a
new town house’ in 1785, 66 as did both Kelso and Peterhead (the latter’s also containing the burgh school).
67
Montrose TCM 15.4.61.
68
Montrose TCM 20. 5. 1761 and 26.5.1762
69
Montrose
70
Forfar TCM 25.1.1782, 20.12.1785 and Papers re the new Town House of Forfar F/5/181 (1-13) Angus
Archives
66
17
During the eighteenth century, most Grammar or High Schools required repair or
replacement, over three quarters of them being rebuilt by 1789. The nature of the school
itself, however, was changing. After receiving a petition signed by 108 ‘respectable
inhabitants,’ 71 Montrose accepted the need for ‘spacious and airy publick Schools’ in
place of the ‘confined and inconvenient’ rooms within the old tolbooth, and planned
separate grammar, writing and reading schools. When Paisley appointed the eminent
architect William Stark to design its new schoolhouse in 1805, he incorporated a public
library into his design ‘which I understand is much wanted in Greenock’. Estimated at
£3000, Stark’s design was based on the Pantheon, entered through a portico of antique
Doric, and contained a circular library organised along panopticon lines at the centre,
with space for a ‘writing Schooll’ and other teaching rooms on its perimeter.72
Academies, however, were the coming trend. As the Rev James Bonar put it when
proposing an academy for Perth in 1760, they spurned the grammar school’s obsession
with ‘the grammatical knowledge of dead languages, and skill in metaphysical
subtleties…In times not long past, all learning was made to consist while what had an
immediate reference to life and practice was despised.’ Perth Academy was instead to be
‘dedicated to science …to the improvement of the merchant, mechanic and farmer in
their respective arts.’73 Even where academies were intended to provide residential
education for the children of regional gentry, their syllabus was determinedly practical.
‘The branches of education which are taught here’ boasted Perth ‘are such as qualify for
business or the army, rather than the learned professions.74 This new education was
bound to stimulate a new architecture, and a national wave of grandiose academies
erupted in the 1790s.
Academy construction
[Seminaries implied more than one educational institution in the academy building.]
Date
Burgh
71
Montrose TCM 10.1.1787
Paisley TCM 26.9.85. See also drawing 42863 ‘Design for a Public Building’ in the David Hamilton
collection, Hunterian Museum, Glasgow University.
73
Memorabilia, p.342.
74
Memorabilia, p. 23.
72
18
1787
1797
1800
1802
1807
1808
1814
1816
1818
1824
1829
Inverness
Ayr
Dumfries
Perth (Seminaries)
Kilmarnock
Tain
Montrose (Seminaries)
Irvine
Aberdeen
Edinburgh
Dundee (Seminaries)
Locations for these academies were usually selected to enhance the burgh. In 1802, the
pioneer Perth Academy moved accordingly to a much more imposing seminaries building
(which it ironically shared with the grammar school), as the centrepiece of Perth’s
northern new town. Tain’s large Academy was located prominently on a promontory
gifted by Lord Ankerville to the west of St Duthac’s shrine, with the likely intention of
the burgh expanding in that direction. Designed in plain regional classicism by James
Smith of Inverness, substantial dormitory wings for gentry offspring intended on each
side, it was never fully completed and failed to shift the burgh westwards.75 By contrast,
the stern Doric classicism of Inverness Academy shifted of the town eastward, leading to
New Street being formalized and renamed Academy Street. The beetling brows of the
equally stern Banff Academy gazed from the edge of the town down upon travellers on
the turnpike road from Aberdeen to Elgin. By being set firmly in new Ayr to the west of
the old town centre, Ayr Academy reflected the fundamental restructure of the burgh’s
geography,
Almshouses, so prominent in England, did not exist in Scotland. A number of towns
constructed charitable hospitals (the Scots term) between the later seventeenth century
and 1750 (Glasgow’s in 1733, Paisley’s in 1748, and little thereafter), which performed
the comparable function of catering for the old and infirm. Sometimes funded by the
burgh Common Good, as in Dundee, or from an legacy or mortification – as Dunbar’s
Hospital in Inverness, Hutchesons’ Hospital in Glasgow, or Cowane’s and Allan’s
Hospitals in Stirling, they played a minor role. In mid century, burghs like Dundee
75
R.D.Oram, P.F.Martin., C. McKean, T. Neighbour, Tain – a Burgh Survey (Edinburgh, 2009), pp. 66-69
19
decided to use the funds to keep the deserving indigent in their own homes.76 Some burgh
councils constructed poorhouses and workhouses, yet they were relatively few and
relatively small-scale. Purpose-designed libraries were also very rarely built. Even
Dundee’s rare ancient public library continued to inhabit the crossing of the enormous
but semi-ruined St Mary’s parish church.
Buildings for polite conviviality
When, in 1812, George Dempster of Dunnichen wrote to Charles Wedderburn of Pearsie
lauding the benefits of moving to St Andrews, he listed the attractions thus:
‘the society is excellent & cheap, Tea & cards, the Custom of the place, forenoon calls
& walks, numbers of well bred people at their Ease, of moderate fortunes, every Topic
of conversation, except about acquiring wealth - contentment not riches is their
pursuit; one has a field, another a favourite garden, and a third likes reading, & the
University library supplies them with books…ingenious lectures….churches with
famous preachers, an Episcopal chapel, fish fresh daily, a good market.’77
That tends to support the notion of polite society as a way of life.78 Physical evidence of a
polite society or the cultured competition implied by Ellis would be coffee houses,
tontine hotels, theatres, ballrooms, and assembly rooms, ‘walks,’ bowling greens - and
improvement decisions increasingly based upon the perceived ‘beauty’ of the burgh. This
analysis focuses only upon such structures that figured either in burgh deliberations or in
its expenditure.
Coffee houses generally inhabited parts of town houses (the Exchange in Edinburgh) or
inns. Moreover, the great chambers of tolbooths and town houses were often used for
concerts and theatrical performances, which may explain why purpose-designed theatres
were rare – in under quarter of the studied burghs - and concert halls even more so. In
this respect, Scottish burghs were distinctly different from the northern English
manufacturing towns.79 Predictably, the few councils that provided walks for genteel
76
C.McKean and P. Whatley, Lost Dundee (Edinburgh, 2008), p. 5; See also Rosalind Mitchison , The Old
Poor Law in Scotland: The Experience of Poverty, 1574–1845, (Edinburgh, 2000) for the broader pattern of
parish-based poor relief.
77
Dundee City Archives, Wedderburn of Pearsie letters letter G Dempster 24.4.1812.
78
Klein, ‘Politeness and the interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, p.XXX
79
Barker etc
20
inhabitants were pretty genteel places themselves – Banff, for example, Dumfries,
Inverness, Stirling, Montrose and Dundee. It was the inhabitants rather than the Council
of Perth that customised its North Inch as a parade, although the council eventually
provided the seats.80
Assembly Rooms were the totemic eighteenth century public building. Although many
Assemblies and social events were held in new halls attached to the principal inns,81 and
Perth’s ‘scene of all public amusements’ was the Glovers Hall in George Street,82 for the
local gentry that was sometimes not enough. An Assembly Rooms– pre-eminently that
designed by Lord Burlington in York - was the necessary cultural statement. Yet such
buildings appear in only 13 burgh records, very unevenly distributed over the period –
peaking in the 1770 and again in the 1810s. They were expensive for a council. After
Ayr’s had been ‘lately repaired and adorned at a very considerable expense’ in 1783, the
Council combined the civic purposes of ordinary Councils and assemblies with income
from elsewhere. Masonic money was obtained to fit it out in return for the ground floor
being let for the Ordinary Lodge Room, the masons also being permitted to hold their
annual St John’ Day meeting in the Assembly rooms upstairs. Then the assembly room
was let – initially to the Dancing School Ball83 and John Aitken’s yearly concert, with
Clegg and Cooper’s Dancing Masters’ Dancing Schools each allowed three nights every
week for country dancing.84 James Clegg’s country dancing class would later occupy the
Assembly Room for three full days a week.85 This meant that the clerk’s offices would
have to remain behind in the tolbooth which remained in use in a subordinate role. 86
Most burghs had more than one Masonic lodge - Ayr four, Dumfries five and Paisley
seven – but it is always not clear where they met. Only rarely did masons produce
significant public buildings, although the two Inverness Lodges combined with the
Council in 1778 to construct a new Inn in which they might meet. In Peterhead, masons
80
Perth TCM 2.4.1804.
S. Berry, Georgian Brighton (Chichester, 2005), p. 26.
82
Memorabilia, p. 18.
83
Ayr TCM 10.12.83
84
Ayr TCM 3.3.84 and 24.11.84.
85
Ayr TCM 3. 1.87 .
86
Ayr TCM 11.3.87.
81
21
provided the Hot Baths, in Tain they constructed the Knight’s Lodge in 1783 as the
burgh’s principal meeting place, and in Dundee, the smart Thistle Hall – the port’s
principal assembly rooms - designed by the burgh architect David Neave in 1824-8.87 No
purpose-designed structure has appeared for the enormous increase of what might be
termed ‘self-improvement societies,’ clubs, mutual societies or even political societies
which, as throughout Britain,88 proliferated even in the smallest burghs. At least 167 such
associations existed in seventeen burghs, the majority recorded only after 1810.89 Most
probably met in Inns, indicating the extent to which the inn - previously an institution of
highly variable quality (one of Edward Topham’s Letters was entitled ‘on the bad
Accommodation for Strangers in Edinburgh’90) - began to play an improved role in
Scottish urban life, the innkeeper depending upon such business. William Creech
described the transformation thus: ‘In 1763 a stranger coming to Edinburgh at a dirty
uncomfortable inn… In 1783, a stranger may be accommodated not only comfortably
but most elegantly at many public hotels’.91 Some burgh councils patronized particular
inns and in certain towns, owned them. Inverness, for example, took on board the notion
of a Town’s Inn in 1778, Ayr’s council purchased the Kings Arms Inn, and Edinburgh
city council considered the Waterloo Tavern to be such a likely prospect that it purchased
£1000 of shares in it in 1817.92
The enormous variability in what public works burgh councils undertook and how they
recorded their actions, and a total lack of standardization in terminology, makes it very
difficult to ascertain broad trends; and their fundamental focus upon local circumstance
makes generalization risky. Only incidentally did councils record structures that required
neither council permission nor contribution. Even establishing a pattern of dates is
problematic since, presumably as a result of financial stringency, a proposal for a new
street or public building might sometimes takes years if not decades before construction
87
Inverness TCM 9.1.1778; C. McKean, Banff and Buchan (Edinburgh 1989); Oram, Martin., McKean,
Neighbour, Tain p.65.
88
See P. Clark, British clubs and societies 1580 – 1800 (Oxford, 2000).
89
That is known to be an under calculation Records of clubs increase with the growth of newspapers after
1800.
90
See Edward Topham’s Letters from Edinburgh (reprint Edinburgh, 2003), p.8.
91
W. Creech, Fugitive Pieces (Edinburgh. 1791), p.71.
92
Statements representing the Affairs of the City of Edinburgh as at Martinmas 1818 (Edinburgh, 1819).
22
began – if even then. It is very rare that inter-burgh emulation was mentioned; although
once Samuel Bell of Dundee’s 1772 St Andrew’s Church had been published in Thomas
Pennant’s Tour both Irvine and Banff chose to appoint him for a repeat.93 The
consequence is that a portfolio of public buildings is discernible only in the very largest
burghs and only after the 1810.
Funding
Up to the end of the eighteenth century, Scottish burgh authorities rarely acted on their
own in matters of improvement and almost never in terms of paying for a significant
public building. Compared to their English counterparts, they suffered from a lack of
power, patronage and finance. Where an English county would pay for a bridge, in
Scotland it would have to be a group of subscribers, usually led by the heritors and gentry
and occasionally with a Government contribution through the Commissioners of Supply
or the Commissioners for the Forfeited Estates. Burghs undertaking major infrastructure
works might seek an Act of Parliament both to raise money through local taxation and to
provide the power of compulsory purchase, but since promoting a bill through Parliament
was expensive, time and again burghs sought to achieve their improvement objectives
through negotiation instead. It could be a slow process. Dundee took almost ten years to
persuade property owners to sell their properties to allow the widening of the ‘narrows’
of the Nethergate.94 St. John’s Street, in Perth came under criticism because ‘bargains
were made with the proprietors, and instead of producing a street spacious and elegant, it
is crooked and deformed by projecting corners.’ The council had been ‘too oeconomical
to apply for an act of Parliament.’95
Too economical, perhaps, because the Council’s finances may have been overstretched as most of them were most of the time. Burgh council liabilities varied considerably.
Facing considerable difficulty in cash flow after its investment in its harbour in 1793,
Greenock burgh council prioritized its liabilities – beginning with the ground and harbour
93
Irvine TCM 21.1.1775, McKean, Banff and Buchan.
See C. McKean, ‘Not even the trivial grace of a straight line’ in L. Miskell, B. Harris and C.A.Whatley,
Victorian Dundee – image and realities (East Linton, 1999), p. 26.
95
Memorabilia, p. 21.
94
23
rents due to Lord Cathcart and the feu-superior Shaw-Stewart of Ardgowan, followed by
‘interest on borrowed money, salaries to public offices, repairs on harbour, public works,
ministers’ additional stipends and charges for the town’s unfree trade’.96 These liabilities
were very similar to Edinburgh’s ten years later, save that in the latter case there were
additionally the specified items of causeways (pavement) in the old town (3.5% of total
income), lawsuits (5.1%), and water supply (8%). Significantly, interest on money
borrowed on bond, bill or otherwise absorbed 18% of the city’s gross income, compared
to the cost of preserving the public peace at merely £17.7.6d (0.04%).97 Edinburgh was
disproportionately large among Scots burghs; but the evidence from the smaller ones
supports the notion that a great proportion of the average burgh liquidity was spent on
ceaseless lawsuits, or on interest upon bonds as a way of keeping debtors at bay. In all
but one year between 1745 and 1815, Dumfries spent more on debt interest than on any
other cost - indeed, well over 50% of the burgh’s entire income in 1815.98
Another difference between urban Scotland and England was the degree to which Scots
royal burghs were independent corporations. Involvement in burgh affairs by either
regional aristocrats or gentry was by permission or by shared interest only. The
contribution of the earl of Coventry to Worcester or the earl of Derby to Liverpool is not
to be looked for. When Chichester, for example, had decided to replace its Guildhall in
1723, the ‘new council house committee’ was chaired by the second duke of Richmond,
Lord High Steward of the town, who invited his fellow peer the Duke of Burlington (just
then completing the Assembly Room in York) to design it. The Council donated £400 of
a total cost of £1272 (i.e. c.30%), the balance being raised by subscription, subscribers
including a bishop, three dukes and two earls.99 Even the county hall of Angus, a wealthy
and prosperous county, could not muster such support. When Chichester followed with
its Assembly Rooms in 1781, the cost of £1400 was likewise funded by subscription, the
96
Greenock TCM 8.11.1793.
Affairs of Edinburgh, p.3.
98
Burgh Expenditure for 1715-1816, Dumfries Archives Centre. I am grateful to Robin Usher for this.
99
Green, Georgian Chichester, p. 28.
97
24
Council contributing only £50 toward the shortfall between subscriptions and cost. 100 As
shown in table 3, no Scots council, not even in the wealthier Scottish home counties, got
away so lightly.
Whereas the duke of Chandos planned Castle Street, Bridgewater in 1721, the duke of
Devonshire undertook the development of Buxton, 101 and Lord Limerick the centre of
Dundalk,102 not a single royal burgh in Scotland enjoyed such aristocratic patronage or
investment. Moreover, since Scotland had no episcopacy, no burgh had an Episcopal
estate to play the major role that they did in English cathedral cities. The landowners who
could invest in a Scottish burgh – namely the superiors of burghs of barony or regality
over which they had the superiority –did not always grasp the opportunity. Scotland’s
feudal superiors tended to regard their burghs of barony less as source of economic
possibility rather than as a sometimes distasteful nuisance, prone to threatening their
privileges, whereas the Counts of Nassau reconstructed the town on their doorstep with a
prison, post office, riding school orangery, and the entire rebuilding of the market place
with baroque houses, adding considerable stimulus to the town’s economy.103 The earl of
Abercorn’s investment in Paisley was limited to a smart new 1773 inn adorning its new
weaving suburb, and that of the earl of Glencairn in Kilmarnock limited to feueing out a
new street. The duke of Roxburgh’s munificent contribution toward Kelso Bridge was
unique, and in no way matched Nassau’s investment in his town. Relationships – as the
earl of Glencairn with Kilmarnock and the Shaw Stewarts of Ardgowan with Greenock –
could often be sour. This contrasts strangely with the enthusiastic patronage of ‘new
towns’ – the duke of Argyll’s Inveraray, Lord Gardenstone’s Laurencekirk, or sir
William Forbes’ New Pitsligo. Generally, in partnership with their regional gentry to
share the risk, existing Scottish burghs had largely to fend for themselves.
The funding of public buildings depended just as much upon combining activities and
organisations to share the risk as did assembly rooms: sometimes the two functions were
100
Green, Georgian Chichester, p. 33-5.
M. Reed, Cultural Role of small towns in England 1600-1800’ in P. Clark, ed., Small towns in Early
Modern Europe (Cambridge, 995), p.131.
102
Gerachty, ‘Municipal Buildings in County Louth, p.310.
103
H. Graf, ‘Small towns in early modern Germany – Hesse’ in Clark, Small Towns, pp. 198-9.
101
25
indivisible. Greenock’s 1765 Town Hall and public offices, planned by James Watt, was
funded partly by the council for its prison and council chamber, partly from shops, and
partly from Greenock’s Mountstuart Kilwinning Masonic Lodge which had the use of the
hall when required.104 Whereas it would be expected that the gentry might fund an
assembly rooms, they also had to stump up for public ones. The initiative behind
Forfar’s Town House came from George Dempster of Dunnichen and the regional gentry
who paid for most of it. Dempster had led the rescue of Forfar from economic collapse by
making it the centre in Scotland of the coarse linen trade (osnaburgs),105 and the time had
come to acknowledge it. The tolbooth being ‘not only mean in appearance but also
extremely unfit for accommodating the Freeholders,’ they desired a larger building ‘of
more decent appearance ’ – a town house that could accommodate county and public
meetings, the county records, a sheriff court, and a prison or county jail.106 Plans were
sought from the London architects Robert Adam and George Stewart which were then
scrutinized by the Angus-born architect James Playfair. He found both inadequate –
Adam’s because it had insufficient prison space, no council chamber, did not address all
the surrounding streets, and space was ‘wasted by lobbies and the steeple;’ and Stewart’s
because it not only lacked a privy for criminals, but his design of a high central pavilion
with lower wings was insufficiently imposing.107 When, seven years later, the building
was complete – to a design by Playfair himself - it was Forfar’s most important public
building, sitting four-square facing the main road from Montrose and Arbroath through
Forfar to Perth. It got this for the princely investment of £200 – or only 18% of the total:
17% came from regional aristocrats, 14% townspeople, and the bulk from the gentry. 108
Without such collaboration, even burghs as wealthy as Haddington could not have
afforded the public buildings they did. In 1774, the burgh council was seeking a new
public chamber, and the gentlemen of East Lothian, led by Charteris of Amisfield, an
104
D. Weir, History of the Town of Greenock (Greenock, 1829), p. 26.
See Ann Law, ‘Why Forfar became the centre of osnaburgs manufacture,’ unpublished M :Phil
dissertation, University of Dundee 2008
106
Angus Archives Memorial for the Magistrates and Town Council of Forfar – Extract minutes 16.8.1793.
107
Angus Archives F/5/181 (1-13). J Playfair to R Graham 26.11.1784
108
Angus Archives F/5/181 (1-13)
105
26
Assembly Rooms which they planned for Little Sands 70’ long and 30’ broad.109 The
council offered the site adjoining the west of William Adam’s 1748 town house and to
contribute ‘so much as funds allow’ provided it had the use of the assembly rooms on
particular occasions. In the event, the County paid for both new prison rooms and an
archives store, the burgh had the use of the assembly room for ‘ necessary public
occasions,’ and the East Lothian gentry their fashionable destination.110 The downside
was that five years later, the ‘prodigious increase in carriages’ – presumably carrying
revellers to the assembly room – had caused significant damage to the street paving.111
Assemblies, theatres, concerts and academies could not survive economically without the
investment and patronage of the gentry. As Table 3 shows, there was a mutual
town/county dependency in funding public buildings and major improvements to
infrastructure. Symbolising the priority now accorded to practical education, academies
also attracted investment from far beyond the town itself. 20% of the £6479 cost of Perth
Academy from abroad, the preponderance of the rest from military men, aristocrats and
gentry. No burgh inhabitant contributed more than £10 toward Tain’s Academy, the
project paid for by a combination of the regional gentry and expatriates.
Table 3:
Subscribers to Public Works
Town
Project
based
Perth Bridge 1766ff
North Water Bridge
1767
Forfar Town House
1791
South Esk Bridge 1792
Kelso Bridge 1799
Perth Academy 1802
Tain Academy 1810
Burgh
Govt
Gents
Non
Aristocrat Local
488
2000
11000
1603
2965
432
0
0
788
1366
146
753
1050
1881
0
200
350
0
811
2969
1300
977
550
180
21
3000
420
200
-
0
1050
0
-
Misc
184
900
21
550
850
654
1100
109
Haddington TCM 14.12.1774
Haddington TCM 1.11.1788.
111
Haddington TCM 1.10.1792.
110
27
-
This table taken from the relevant subscription lists and groups all ranks of town subscribers. Some types of
subscribers cannot be identified. Non-local includes subscribers from other towns, but principally from
London and the colonies and, as a percentage, appears to be increasing. The initiative for Tain Academy
came from London, and the majority of its funding came from the West Indies.
Changing urban geography
The application of these changes to Scottish burghs may best be tracked by examining
urban embellishment in five: adornment in the ancient seaport of Dundee, the gentrified
town of Montrose moving with fashion; the manufacturing town of Kilmarnock
responding to the demands of efficiency; and the county towns of Ayr and Perth
modernising themselves to the new social agenda.
The Dundee Trades Hall was a rarity in Scotland: built in 1776, it was a significant public
building reinforcing the ancient town centre, funded by a single organization and
representative of it. It was, in short, what one might have expected: but has proved to be
exceptionally rare in the eighteenth century Scottish burgh. The Nine Trades of Dundee
purchased the redundant Renaissance fleshmarket at the east end of the burgh market
place in March 1776 once the Council, seeking to remove nuisance and offal from the
civic centre, had forcibly relocated both fleshmarket and Mealmarket down to a site on
the New Shore. Flush with money having successfully feued out their lands, the Trades
were simply looking how best to invest it. So if Dundee’s burgh council had no civic
agenda for the most prominent site in the market place (other than removing a nuisance),
neither had the Trades. 112
Initially instructed to design as many shops ‘as the ground can take’, the architect Samuel
Bell was then instructed to add an upper floor with a large and well appointed Hall at the
west end overlooking the market place, and nine rooms to the east for Trades’ use. As the
project grew, so did their civic ambition. The Convenor of the Nine Trades requested the
Council for permission to construct a ‘Tympany [pediment] on the West Gavel Wall
which would greatly ornament the building and beautify the street’; which was duly
granted.113 However, the Trades’ investment cash proved insufficient to cover the entire
112
113
Nine Trades Minute Books: General Fund Court Minutes 12/3/1776.
Charters and Documents relating to the burgh of Dundee (Dundee, 1880), p. 179.
28
cost, and to raise the balance, they resorted to various stratagems such as individual
trades fitting out their own room, each Trade paying an additional charge for meal
purchased from the organisation, raising ‘marriage merks,’ entry dues for each apprentice
and entry fees for new Masters; and finally agreed ‘to set the large hall for temporary
purposes’ when required. Such devices were probably unnecessary since the annual
income from the four shops and cellars provided £54.10.0 – or rather more than 10% of
the capital cost, and much more than the interest. 114 The Trades Hall was eventually
leased out to the Exchange Coffee Room for 40 guineas a year.115
Only Glasgow and Edinburgh built Trades’ Halls like Dundee, several decades later, and
both with ground floor shops.
Montrose, by contrast, radically altered its urban geography. The current perception of
the burgh - that it comprised a large market place lying toward the north, bounded by the
Town House at its southern end116 - is entirely erroneous. The original market place lay
south of the current one at the bottom end of the town nearer the harbour, dominated by
the burgh tolbooth to the south, parish kirk to the north-east, and mercat cross to the
north. The large space north of the cross had originally been filled by buildings knows as
‘The Raws’117 which had been removed in 1734.118 The northern end of the town became
spatially much grander; so that when the County gentlemen proposed an Assembly
Rooms in 1759, the site chosen was facing this larger space. The ancient tolbooth was
first unsentimentally converted to burgh prison and grammar school, and then demolished
after a new grammar school and a new prison had been built. Once Bridge Street, leading
to the southern approach bridge was cut through in 1800,119 most vestiges of Montrose’s
original market place disappeared.
114
Nine Trades Court Minutes 6.7.1778.
Ibid., 29.5.1805
116
R. Naismith, the Story of Scotland’s Towns
117
A form of urban encroachment in Edinburgh and Dundee, and probably in Stirling, Wigtown and
Hawick.
118
Montrose TCM 18.9.1734
119
Montrose TCM 19.11.1800
115
29
Kilmarnock’s agenda for its town centre was that typical of a manufacturing town, with
priority being given to efficiency and commerce. In 1767, the Trustees for Turnpike
Roads had written to its burgh council peremptorily demanding, ‘anent the road between
this town and Ayr, what measures this town will take to make an easy passage thro the
Town’,120 thus putting the burgh on notice that a principal driver of its improvement
would be roads. But the burgh had also suffered a bad fire, and periodic flooding of the
Kilmarnock Water; and any strategic action was invariably blocked by its perennial
preoccupation with having insufficient money to repair both council house and steeple.121
A miserable litany of financial impotence wails from the record every seven years or so.
In 1777, the Treasurer had to borrow money ‘by reason of many late demands from the
toun’s funds for repairing the schoolhouse, the Kirk steeple, widening of the passage to
the Kirk, carrying on the process of Feuing of the Green, and other extraordinary
advances.’122 Seven years later, he moaned ‘the great inconvenience from the present
smallness of the Council House,’123 the prison house too large, the need for a steelyard,
the need to repair streets, and the necessity of opening a ready communication between
the great road from Ayr to the road leading to Glasgow. There was no money with which
to tackle them.
The funds arrived with an Improvement Act in 1802, since its Trustees - four regional
gentry, three merchants, two burgh trades people and two burgh professionals - had
powers to borrow money.124 Instead of repair, they created an entirely new town centre,
appointing the Glasgow architect David Hamilton as designer. The crux was the
construction of a new bridge over the Kilmarnock Water; on top of which the Cross of
Kilmarnock’ - the new heart of the burgh - was to be set: namely ‘a new town house,
Guard Room, Prison, and Clerks Chambers’ with shops underneath.125 Urban power had
moved so much from the burgh council to the Trustees that the latter had to be pressured
into returning ownership of Town House, Gaols, Guardroom, Clerks’ Chambers and
120
Kilmarnock TCM 5.9.67
Kilmarnock TCM 17.7.71.
122
Kilmarnock TCM 17.10.77
123
Kilmarnock TCM 16.9.84
124
Kilmarnock Improvement Trustees Minutes (KITM) 20.7.1802.
125
KITM 9.12.1803.
121
30
Slaughter House back to the burgh.126 Thus a historic and rapidly expanding
manufacturing town, with virtually no assistance from its feu superior the earl of
Glencairn, set about improving itself by removing its old centre and public buildings and
constructing a new one to the south - on a bridge. Not much sentimental about that.
The two final case studies are of the county towns of Ayr and Perth – two substantial
burghs whose improvement and public buildings, associated with the construction of elite
suburbs of terraced houses ‘after the English manner’, appear intended to create a new
burgh centre away from the old. One was successful, and the other less so.
The catalyst for change in the genteel burgh of Ayr - not merely a county town, but one
with early coffee and assembly rooms and its own racecourse - was the deteriorating state
of its mediaeval bridge over the Water of Ayr: too steep, too narrow and tottering.127 By
1784, the decision had been made to build a new bridge on a new site nearer the sea, the
designer being Robert Adam.128 For some inexplicable reason, possibly in the belief that
the bridge lay entirely within the burgh’s jurisdiction, the Commissioners of Supply
refused to contribute any finance for Ayr’s new bridge, leaving the Council to fund the
project itself. It attempted to raise a subscription, but since the county (unusually)
refused, the council decided to persevere ‘without giving the Gentlemen of the County
any trouble thereanent’129 by raising bonds against potential toll income. It left itself with
a ruinous debt.
The site of the new bridge was at the foot of Water Vennel leading into the Sandgate, and
its construction had a profound geographical effect upon the burgh. Over the next thirty
years, it would shift its public buildings from the old centre of town by the original
tolbooth, church and Fish Cross westwards to the line of the bridge. The Sandgate was
transformed by the removal of the Malt Cross (‘taking care to preserve the materials’),
then by the demolition of the steeple/jail at its centre. The bridge was constructed by the
126
Kilmarnock TCM 3.1.11
Ayr TCM 2.3.1774, 29.4.1777, 10.4.1782.
128
Ayr New Bridge Minutes Ayrshire Archives, B6/29/7 20.7.85.
129
Ayr TCM 26.1.1785.
127
31
architect/contractor/developer Alexander Stevens,130 who persuaded the Council to allow
him to develop a building right up against it ‘in an Elegant Manner which would tend to
Ornament the bridge’.131 Stevens’ development was the smart double bow-fronted sixstoreyed cabinet wareroom that became representative of new Ayr in all its depictions,
and set the required tone. Eventually both sides of the Sandgate were reformatted in the
most handsome grand classical metropolitan manner, a process that culminated in the
construction of the splendid and spacious replacement 1828 Assembly Rooms and
steeple. Unusually, even though it had had to be rebuilt virtually from its foundations, the
Auld Brig was retained – possibly as the first act of urban ‘sentimental retention’ in
Scotland - remarkable given the short shrift generally accorded to historic fabric such as
town ports, mercat crosses and tolbooths elsewhere.132
Given the scale of the shift, it would be reasonable to suppose that Ayr’s urban evolution
represented a self-conscious ‘modernisation’ comparable to Edinburgh’s new town –
namely the replacement of the old town centre by a new one to the west. Although that
was the outcome, no grand plan was ever in evidence. The Sandgate debouched into the
Town’s Green on the burgh’s southern edge whereas the Cromwell’s Fort, owned by the
Cassilis family, lay to the west. Like most burghs, the Council had only been casually
interested in its Green, contemplating feuing out a regular street of houses upon it in 1781
for people like coopers, blacksmiths and other artificers with no great enthusiasm, and
then doing nothing.133 Ambition toward greater politeness was not in evidence.
In 1793, the Council decided to rebuild its Grammar School, already on the western
fringe, and approved three houses nearby - albeit dithering whether to build a row of
houses on the road leading to the Shore or move the (new) grammar school elsewhere to
allow a parallel row of houses thereby forming ‘an elegant square.’134 When the provost
130
Stevens was then described as a mason in Prestonhall and bridge builder in Ayr. See also the entry H.
Colvin, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600–1840 (Yale, 2008).
131
Ayr TCM 12.9,1787.
132
The contrast or battle between the two bridges was encapsulated remarkably in Burn’s poem ‘The Twa
Brigs’, in which the new Scotland was pitted against the old. Burns recorded the insulting attitudes of each
but, unusually, sat on the fence.
133
Ayr TCM 24.11.1784.
134
Ayr TCM 4.12.1793.
32
proposed establishing an Academy ‘for Teaching the various branches of literature’ on
the adjacent site, the Council subscribed £400135 and offered as much land as might be
needed.136 The growing significance of western Ayr was then underpinned by a proposed
new Assembly Rooms, designed in 1803 by the Glasgow architect, John Robertson.137
That same year, an overflow parish church was located on a site adjacent to the
Academy: a plain structure also by Robertson – so plain indeed that the council sought
David Hamilton’s help to embellish it with a steeple. 138 It was highly significant that the
new and therefore fashionable parish church was located in this part of town. Then the
long-established Air Library Society decided to build itself a library house – library
above, librarian’s accommodation below – beside the new church at a cost of £30.139 Few
years later, the Academy would join them.
The council, in the meantime, was still struggling with its Green. ‘Plans for the
enlargement of the Town’ in 1796140 had given way to pressure from gentlemen ‘in both
town and country’ that land on the Town Green be feued for ‘decent houses for genteel
families,’ (houses after the English manner) requiring a different ‘proper Plan’; and by
April, Robertson’s second or third plan for the site had been approved.141 But his
distinguished elevations of two palace-fronted terraces of houses with pedimented centre
and end pavilions remained abortive.142 The council established a New Building
Committee to oversee the project, but it was out of its depth, ignored existing plans for
the Green, and dealt with proposals entirely on an ad hoc basis. It even amended the
architect’s plan so it aligned with the houses that it had pre-emptively feued out. One of
135
Ayr TCM 26..1794
Ayr TCM 1.2.1797.
137
Ayr TCM 17.9.1800 Payment for making ‘other Plans of new Buildings in and about the Town;’ Three
years later, the council decided to proceed, omitting ‘some extra expensive pieces of the work’, to a cost of
£1320. 4.4.1803. NAS RHP 3321.
138
NAS RHP 3322.
139
Air Library Society Minutes 1803.
140
Ayr TCM 17.2.1796. No such plans are known to have survived, but they may have been those referred
to in 1798 when the Council considered building ‘a square of Houses under a proper plan in the Green…of
which a mensuration and plan was made some years ago.’ Ayr TCM 7.3.98.
141
Ayr TCM 9.1.99/27.3.99/10.4.99. The scheme had overblown Venetian windows and impressive raised
doorways as though Robertson was trying to scale down from the somewhat similar schemes by Robert
Reid for Perth’s Marischal Place and Edinburgh’s second new town – save that this scheme was earlier than
either.
142
NAS RHP 2555
136
33
the residents complained that since the new houses were intended to ‘extend and beautify
the Town,’ each wing should be formed on precisely similar plans.143 This should not
have needed stating.
When Wellington Square, as it was finally called, was being built, the council abandoned
the ‘palace’ plan, insisting that feuars maintain scale and regularity only.144 At this point,
the earl of Cassilis commissioned Alexander Stevens to feu out an elite suburb of terraced
houses within the citadel itself - ‘an elegant plan of Buildings of a circular square
form’145 (as the muddled Town Clerk perceived it). Stevens planned to fill the citadel
with a square of regular two and three storeys houses with a circus at its centre. Though
elegant, they lacked Robertson’s rhetorical flourishes, and were probably the better for
it.146 There followed a further proposal by Lord Alloway, who commissioned James
Milne to design a new square intended for the space between the citadel’s south west end
and the proposed [Wellington] Square;147 and yet another, called Alloway Square.148.
Such ambitions were well beyond Ayr’s capacity, and only Wellington Square was
completed. It was clear, however, that fashionable Ayr was moving south west.
This shift was consolidated by the arrival of the County Buildings. Commissioners were
appointed for the erection of public offices, a bridewell ‘to confine vagrant and disorderly
persons’ who had become ‘an intolerable nuisance to this county,’149 and apartments for
the county records. In 1814, a site on the west wing of Wellington Square was identified
and David Hamilton appointed with the brief that the new structure must ‘consult the
Utility of the Public and the Ornament of the Town, And, as far as possible to avoid
obstructing exposing any part of the buildings so as to be Offensive … to the houses
already built.’150 Since that meant keeping the prison invisible from the genteel new
143
TCM 25.8.1803.
R. Close, Ayrshire and Arran (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 21.
145
Ayr TCM 30.7.1800.
146
NMRS AYD/80/1-2: Plans and elevations of the New Town proposed to be built upon the Citadel at
Ayr1799
147
NMRS A/
148
Recorded on John Wood’s town plan of Ayr in 1818.
149
AA/Co3/7/1 Minutes and reports of General Meetings of the County…relating to the new public
buildings, 16.4.1805.
150
Ibid., 2.3.1814.
144
34
houses, it was placed at the rear facing the sea. The regular open location on the very
western edge of ‘new Ayr’ was remote from any possibility of urban riot. Hamilton’s
design of almost teutonic austerity for the County Buildings did not appeal, and after
seeking plans from Thomas Harrison, designer of Chester County Hall, Robert Wallace
of London was selected. 151 His much more flabby design, which combined both burgh
administration as well as county functions, was a ‘British’ county buildings.
With the completion of Thomas Hamilton’s splendid new Assembly rooms and Steeple in
1828, the burgh’s institutions had finally quit the heart of the burgh by the Fish Cross.
Theatre, Academy, Library Society, new parish Kirk, the Assembly Rooms and Steeple,
burgh and county administration were now in western Ayr. Once Wellington Square was
complete in 1825, it became the residence of 23% of the elite residing in the town. 50%
lived in the streets of ‘new’ Ayr – particularly Barns and Academy streets, and the
Sandgate, and the balance in their country houses. Not a single member of Ayr’s elite
remained in the old town centre.152 The burgh’s move westward was gradual, inchoate
and mostly impelled by individual organisations and the housing market. The county
building project merely underpinned a process long under way.
When the phrase the ‘system of improvement’ was applied to Perth in 1805,153 by
contrast, it referred to the specific programme of council-led urban aggrandizement then
under contemplation, probably intended to knit together its ‘new towns’ facing North
Inch and the South Inch. Surprisingly for a major burgh, Perth had never rebuilt its
tolbooth or jail (although it had smartened the court room in the former and was
ceaselessly extending the latter), but there was growing pressure for a bridewell, jail,
administrative offices and archives.154 The county’s desire for a new courthouse and a
county jail proved the catalyst. The burgh-owned earl of Gowrie’s sixteenth century
courtyard palace at the south end of Watergate, used as an artillery barracks, was
proposed as the location for ‘elegant public buildings’ – namely a new Town House,
151
Ibid., 24.4.1815.
Pigot’s Directory of Scotland 1825-6.
153
Memorabilia, p. 20
154
Perth TCM 7.9.1789, 1.2.1802,
152
35
County courthouse, meeting room, town and county jails - and a theatre.155 A new street a parade – would stroll along up the riverbank to a coffee room and assembly rooms by
the bridge.156 Such a street, boasted the Memorabilia of Perth, ‘will certainly be of equal
use and ornament to the town’.157
Perth, however, had overreached itself. Whereas the county remained keen and had the
funds, the burgh procrastinated and finally withdrew from the project, remaining behind
in the old tolbooth.158 So the county proceeded on its own, constructing a court house and
public offices, and a county gaol. A street along the river Tay was built, but never to the
quality originally anticipated. Of the coffee house and assembly room, there is no further
mention. Given a choice between investing substantially in urban grandeur, or doing
nothing at a time of financial doldrums, the burgh opted for nothing.
A Different Culture ?
Harris: culture is weak: or was it different ?
Already seen differences in responsibility for the kirk, and absence of county
administration, and presence of the steeple as distinctive features of Scottish burghs.
Three issues: inherited urban form and attitudes to heritage; trade and politeness; and
consumption.
[inherited urban form]
In Scotland, such ambitions led to fundamental change, in that the new (British) urbanism
sat uneasily with the inherited (European) fabric of the town. Scotland’s inherited pattern
of town centre living had been to reside in stacked apartments in the European manner,
rank being defined by storey. Scotland’s Enlightenment improvers thought it wrong that
different ranks should have to share the same staircase – a ‘vertical street’ as they put it –
preferring the order and regularity of London squares.159 So the Scottish urban agenda
155
Perth TCM 6.6.1808.
Perth TCM 1.3.1802
157
Memorabilia, p. 20
158
Perth TCM 25.5.1812
159
See C. McKean, ‘Twinning cities: - improvement versus modernization in the Old and New Towns of
Edinburgh 1750 – 1820’ in B. Edwards and Jenkins, (eds.), Edinburgh, the Making of a Capital City
156
36
shifted from improving what existed to replacing it with a new import as Edward
Topham observed in 1774. The houses of the New Town in Edinburgh were ‘built after
the manner of the English, and the houses are what they call here “houses to
themselves”…In no town that I ever saw, can such a contrast be found betwixt the
modern and antient architecture.’160 So the urban improvement impulse that Scotland
generally shared with England had significantly different consequences upon urban
geography north of the Border.
[different culture] No matter how polite a Scots burgh might be, new manufactories were
still seized upon and promoted with enthusiasm. Montrose, Angus, which in its genteel
behaviour possibly most closely resembled the social patterns of a leisure town, was keen
to encourage manufacturing on its eastern rim.161 This attitude was reflected So
eighteenth century social change in Scottish burghs was taking place within the context
of ‘the sobering influences of the under hard work and religion’ that more characterised
the northern English industrial towns than the effete southern ones.162 Moreover, any link
between improvement and politeness would be further strained in the Scottish context if a
polite town were defined, for example, according to whether it was a ‘residential leisure
town’ with more than thirty dedicated manservants.163 As the Rev. Dr Robert Small wrote
of Dundee in 1792/3, the seaport (then the fourth largest conurbation in Scotland) was
entirely uninterested in male servants, having a total of only nine.164
The shopping culture that has been identified as a principal component of English polite
activity,165 is a another arena in which Scottish urban experience was different. Although
(Edinburgh, 2005), and C. McKean, ‘The controlling Urban Code of Enlightenment Scotland,’ in S.
Marshall, (ed.), Urban Codes (London, 2011).
160
E. Topham, Letters from Edinburgh (London, 1776), p.12-13.
161
Harris, ‘Towns, improvement and cultural change in Georgian Scotland , XX C. Fyffe. Montrose TCM
8.9.1762 records the Council permitting part of its Links to be used for a heckling house and warehouse.
162
Barker, Smoke Cities’, pp. 177 and 188.
163
L.Schwartz, ‘Residential Leisure Towns in England toward the end of the eighteenth century’ in Urban
History 27.1 (2000), pp. 53-4
164
R. Small, Statistical Account of Dundee (Dundee, 1793), p.237.
165
H. Berry, ‘Polite consumption shopping in eighteenth century England’ in Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society 12 (2002), p. 307
37
shopping passed from the market to the shopkeepers in England from 1691,166 there is no
doubt that purpose-built shops had existed in English towns from the middle ages.167
That was not the case in Scotland. The primacy of the public market place and
prohibition upon selling directly from the house – particularly of victuals - was still being
enforced with penalties enforced until the middle eighteenth century. Kilmarnock’s
Council, fulminating in 1756 ‘that a practice has lately crept into the Town of people
selling meal by retail In their houses & shop every day of the week and not taking their
meal to the mealmercat as authorised by Law’ was typical.168 Thus the emergence of a
‘parade’ with its attendant shopping from the 1770s was as much a matter of urban
institutional change in terms of the crumbling of the primacy of the market place, as it
might have been a signal of cultural laggardness.
[attitude to the past] Whereas a significant number of town gates survive in England, only
two survive in Scotland, one for sentimental reasons in St Andrews, and the other - the
Wishart Arch in Dundee - because it had possibly spurious associations with a Protestant
martyr (hence its name). Every single other town gate was removed from Scots burghs in
the mid eighteenth century, which can be said of neither England nor any country in
Europe. Whereas Chichester decided to remove all its four gates for the ‘great
convenience and utility to the Citizens’ in 1773,169 Chester had retained its city walls in
good order as a walk for its inhabitants.170 More often than not, a tolbooth would be
replaced by a Town House with a more select range of functions, in a Scottish inflected
classical architecture a fair distance from Palladian. A distinctly Scottish agenda must
have been operating in all this – namely the Enlightenment-impelled desire to jettison the
Scottish past in order to embrace a better British future.
166
Ibid., p. 378.
D. Clark, and L. Alston, presentation to/discussion at conference Markets and Market Places Oxford
2009
168
Kilmarnock TCM 21.11.1765.
169
Chichester Common Council Minute Book, 20.10.1773 cited in A.H.J.Green, The Building of
Georgian Chichester (Chichester, 2007), p. 179
170
Thomas Pennant, cited in M. Reed, ‘The transformation of urban space 1700 – 1840’ in P. Clark, (ed.),
Cambridge Urban History of Britain Vol 2 (Cambridge, 2000), p. 623.
167
38
Not a single-purpose-designed coffee house is to be found in the Scottish eighteenth
century burgh, and only three Assembly Rooms - two in Edinburgh, the other in
Glasgow.
Conclusion
Since few Scottish burghs had the representational public buildings expected of British
Georgian towns, perhaps the New Edinburgh Review had it right after all. Burghs existed
in a thinner financial environment than their counterparts in England, having an
introverted and limited income base – and until the 1810s, lacking even the county
presence and investment. Probably the consequence of their lack of capital, their public
buildings were normally multi-functional and multi-funded, which necessarily blunted
their architectural impact. Despite that, their liabilities were greater – particularly the
responsibility for the parish church(es), for infrastructure and for that peculiarly Scottish
construction – the steeple. Given that virtually nothing could be built other than cooperatively, without either raising a substantial subscription, or developing multiple
income streams, it is impressive what they achieved.
The 1820 Scottish burgh was substantially different to that of 1740. Towns throughout
Britain shared comparable pressures of population increase, growing trade and traffic - as
well as the seductions of improvement and politeness; but given the fundamentally
different nature of the inherited urban form of Scots burghs from English towns at the
outset, a difference in trajectory was to be expected. What has emerged, however, are
differences in culture.
The evident pragmatism of burgh councils – using a new turnpike road, for example, as
the catalyst for urban change - was not uniquely Scottish. Nor, probably, was the
emphasis on practicality: Perth was the only one of the five case studies into changing
urban geography to prove abortive probably because its agenda derived from aesthetic or
politeness ambitions rather than from necessity. This matter of factness also extended in
Scotland to an enthusiasm for manufacturing, and a lack of concern about its
juxtaposition with elite activity in genteel towns. Where symbols of the historic town -
39
such as mercat crosses and town gates - impeded traffic, they were swiftly dispatched:
similar to England but more ruthlessly. Nonetheless, Scots town dwellers aspired to a
fashionable, clean, paved and well-lit urban centre adorned with civic monuments as in
England. Dundee’s Trades Hall, a significant public building constructed by a single
agency to improve and reinforce the ancient market place very much as was done in
England, however, proved exceptional. For the greatest difference north and south of the
border was the Scots’ insouciance as to whether this smart town centre was to be the
historic one revivified or a new one entirely.
The elite showed no regret at abandoning their inherited apartment living pattern for new
‘British’ terraced houses; and burgh councils eagerly exchanged their old tolbooth for a
new town house. This almost dismissive attitude to both the Scottish urban past and to
historical associations was exemplified in Montrose, Kilmarnock, in the Sandgate, Ayr,
and in the proposed changes to Perth. Their replacement town centres, adorned with
appropriate civic buildings, would be recogniseable as such on both sides of the border.
That implies an agenda of convergence with England.
If the most distinctive feature of the period in Scotland was this preference for change at
the expense of the historic urban culture, the answer to the question of whether there was
a ‘British’ urban experience in the eighteenth century must therefore be – only up to a
point.
Charles McKean
University of Dundee
40
Proposed illustrations
1. Dumfries Steeple, Cross and Exchange
2. Montrose plan in 1763
3. Painting of Montrose High Street
4. Market Cross
5. Tain Academy
6. Dundee Trades House
7. Forfar Town House
8. Selkirk Town House
9. Falkirk Steeple
10. Haddington Assembly Room
11. St Andrew’s Church Dundee
12. Greenock school and library
13. The Cross at Kilmarnock by David Octavius Hill
14. Ayr Sandgate
15. Ayr citadel houses
16. Ayr Assembly Rooms and Sandgate
17. Wellington Square
18. Perth – Rose Terrace and Academy
41