The house on the hill

Published on Thursday 3 September 2009 20:45

ONE of Edinburgh's best-known public buildings is celebrating its 70th anniversary. On 3 September, 1939, while air-raid sirens sounded in London for the first time, Edinburgh officials were preparing to begin work inside the gleaming new edifice of St Andrew's House.

The controversy over the construction of the building – the architectural culmination of a decade-long consolidation of Scottish administration in the capital – confirms the maxim that there is nothing new under the sun. The row over the Holyrood building project, however, pales in comparison with three decades of public outcry and official squabbling over St Andrew's House.

A year before the outbreak of the First World War, William Wedgwood Benn, father of Tony and grandfather of Hilary, told the House of Commons that there would be an open competition to design a new Scottish government headquarters. Although the Scottish Office had existed since 1885, in fact, it comprised a plethora of "boards" (or quangos) with responsibility for fisheries, lunacy, education and so on.

By the 1920s, architects in private practice and government designers in the Office of Works were competing to produce a suitable design. By now the project had assumed greater significance, as Scottish administration consolidated into modern departments headed by civil servants. There was also a more ostentatiously political dimension. Successive Conservative governments were keen to "devolve" administrative power to Edinburgh in an effort to appease a modest, but growing, Home Rule sentiment.

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The various designs were controversial from the start, with Edinburgh residents especially agitated that the new building might desecrate Calton Hill, the proposed site for as long as anyone could remember. An Office of Works plan from 1929 was a case in point. Endorsed by Edinburgh Town Council, the government nevertheless refused to make it public. Smelling a rat, The Scotsman managed to copy the plans and published them in full. Readers soon denounced it as "looking like a jam factory", and the offending plans were withdrawn.

More rival proposals and infighting followed. The writer and MP John Buchan called for an "outward and visible sign of Scottish nationhood", while an exasperated prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, considered the controversy "unique in its recklessness". Even the King and Queen followed developments and offered comments and concerns via official channels.

Perhaps the site itself was a bad omen. The setting for public hangings until 1864, the old Calton Jail was described by one prisoner as "by far the worst prison in Scotland; cold, silent and repellent. Its discipline was extremely harsh, and the diet atrocious". During the First World War it housed suffragettes and pacifist protesters, including, ironically, the future Scottish Secretary Arthur Woodburn. Finally, in December 1933, Sir Godfrey Collins (the publisher-cum-Scottish Secretary) accepted the design proposed by Paisley-born architect Thomas Tait, and the contract went to the practice of Sir John Burnet, Tait & Lorne, which had left its distinctive architectural mark on almost every continent. Tait, however, had just four and a half months to plan his commission.

In the circumstances, he did an impressive job. A workaholic, Tait designed everything himself, down to the smallest details. His original cost prediction was just under 500,000, but he later reduced the floor space and therefore his estimated price. Before the ink was even dry on planning approval for the scheme, however, the floor area had to increase by 6,000sq ft to accommodate extra staff, and costs began to rise as the design constantly changed (again, shades of the Holyrood project 60 years on).

In late 1936, Sir Godfrey died, and his successor, Walter Elliot, watched as the Duke of Gloucester laid the foundation stone on 28 April, 1937. Again there were complications. When the Prisons Department was added to a newly restructured Scottish Office, not to mention additional staff for the Departments of Health and Agriculture, even more floor space was required.

The location of the secretary of state's office, meanwhile, had shifted between the fourth and fifth floors, finally settling on the latter, and John Colville (who succeeded Elliot as secretary of state in 1938) could not resist interfering further during a site visit. He discovered that a parapet obstructed the view from his desk and asked that it be altered – at great expense – so that he could enjoy both an upward and downward vista.

Colville also disliked the turreted Governor's House, a hangover from the old Calton Jail, on whose original foundations the new building now stood. Colville ordered its demolition, but, fearing another scandal, the First Commissioner of Works persuaded him to change his mind.

There was also the question of a name for the new building. A radio competition proposed everything from the New Tolbooth, to the unlikely-sounding Thistleneuk, but St Andrew's House was Colville's personal choice. "It is hoped that the new government building on the Calton Hill, Edinburgh, will be ready for occupation early in September," he told MPs in early 1939. "I am glad to be able to announce that His Majesty the King, accompanied by Her Majesty the Queen, has graciously agreed to open the building formally on the afternoon of Thursday, 12 October. With the King's approval, the new building will be known as St Andrew's House."

The royal opening, however, never took place. A gold key, produced specially for the King, was never used, although His Majesty, accompanied by Colville and Thomas Tait, finally visited the building on 26 February, 1940.

St Andrew's House certainly had presence. Tait himself described the design as "simple and sculptoresque rather than decorative, but carried out with that strength and refinement expressive of present-day sentiments and also so essential to a building which forms an addition to probably the most beautiful city in the world".

Tait had succeeded in making St Andrew's House look as if it belonged (as, arguably, did Enric Miralles, with Holyrood), skilfully composed to answer the profile of Calton Hill rising behind it. Interior rooms featured discreet lighting and wood panelling, the most ornate adorning the Scottish secretary's office on the top floor, where the wood was said to have come from a walnut tree planted by Mary, Queen of Scots.

The "sculptoresque" style described by Tait had Dutch elements, but was essentially American in composition. Reminiscent of the League of Nations building in Geneva, it embodied post-Depression optimism. Figures above the main doorway (designed by William Reid Dick) signified Agriculture, Fisheries, Health, Education, Architecture and Statecraft. An illustration of the building appeared on the cover of JA Bowie's book The Future of Scotland, which advocated the modernisation of the Scottish economy.

St Andrew's House soon became a fixture on the Edinburgh landscape. The gleaming white stonework, however, quickly blackened under the cloud of soot and grime that permeated the city's atmosphere, and although it escaped wartime damage, its windows rattled as bombers roared overhead to attack Clydebank.

As more administrative powers were devolved to Edinburgh, St Andrew's House became more busy. So busy in fact, that by the 1970s the Scottish Office again inhabited a miscellany of buildings across the city, much as it had done in the 1920s. The solution was New St Andrew's House, a concrete monolith a short distance from what now became known, rather dismissively, as "Old" St Andrew's House.

Further traumas followed. Partially gutted in anticipation of devolution in 1979, St Andrew's House instead had to adjust to 18 years of Conservative government. Ministers had mixed feelings about the place. Michael Forsyth insisted on having his office in Old, rather than New, St Andrew's House, while Jack McConnell, as First Minister, disliked the darkness of the wood panelling in the old secretary of state's office and opted to have a more modern space.

In 2002, St Andrew's House underwent a major restoration, ensuring that this icon of modernism was fit for purpose in the post-devolution age it perhaps unwittingly anticipated. Indeed, one of its faade's symbolic figures, "Statecraft", hints at further constitutional upheaval, which no doubt Thomas Tait's stylish building will face with equanimity.

Tait's life and times

THOMAS Smith Tait was born in Paisley in 1882, the son of a master stonemason. Educated locally and apprenticed to a local architect, John Donald, in 1896, Tait soon acquired a reputation as a brilliant draughtsman at Paisley Technical School.

Employed by Sir John Burnet as his personal assistant in 1903, Tait won a scholarship to Glasgow School of Art. Encouraged by Burnet to take a continental study tour, Tait rejoined him at his London office in 1905.

In 1914, he sailed for New York, where he designed banks and met Frank Lloyd Wright, another influence. Major London and colonial commissions followed Tait's return to the UK, including the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street and bridges in South Africa and Sydney.

In 1930, the partnership of Burnet, Tait & Lorne was formed. Two of its most famous commissions followed in the mid-1930s, St Andrew's House and the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938.

Tait lived in some style at Hampstead (with self-designed art deco interiors). He semi-retired in 1952 and died at his country home, Scotrea, Strathtay, in 1954.