Empty office block pensioned off and reborn as art studios

Published on Tuesday 10 March 2009 08:41

WHEN the last of the Scottish Government pensions administrators removed their dusty files from St Margaret's House in Meadowbank, they must have thought the ageing office block was on its last legs.

Scheduled for demolition, the nine-storey building on London Road saw its last office workers move out in 2003, and has stood empty ever since. Now, it's experiencing a new lease of life as the home to one of Edinburgh's most thriving artistic communities.

The top three floors are midway through a conversion that will create up to 120 artists' studios, with many sculptors, jewellers, photographers and painters already in residence.

Downstairs is 11,000sq ft of gallery space, and the Embassy Gallery has opened its own 3000sq ft space, which has already hosted an exhibition of work by 30 post-graduate students from the Edinburgh College of Art.

The centre takes up five floors in all, and in the long run it is hoped to create a community education space with dance studios, theatre and a small cinema, all funded by the rent paid on the studios.

The project, known as Art's Complex, is the brainchild of artist Derek Gray, 44, and hotel developer Dale Gibson, 51.

Mr Gray said "I'd got a studio in Portobello and travelling up and down London Road in the car I saw it out of the window.

"It's all windows, and artists love windows and natural light. In places like Glasgow and Manchester, you've got an industrial heritage where you've got unused industrial buildings that you can convert and you've not really got that in Edinburgh.

"Office blocks are the equivalent of old industrial buildings for Edinburgh, really."

Work is ongoing to complete the conversion of the top floors into affordably-priced artists studios.

Mr Gray said: "We've got about 60 studios built at the moment, and we can't build studios fast enough."

He added: "We've got a few photographers who work here full time but mainly it's people with daytime jobs coming in."

Building owner, the Caledonian Trust, has said it intends to demolish the building, but no timescale has been confirmed for its final destruction.

Art's Complex has signed a two-year lease in the first instance, which it hopes to extend for a total residency of six to ten years, after moving in last August.

&#149 www.artscomplex.org