Architecture of Scotland in the Industrial Revolution

During the Industrial Revolution, Scotland became one of the commercial and industrial centres of the British Empire.^[1] From the mid-eighteenth century this growing wealth and confidence was reflected in a classically inspired building boom focused on Edinburgh's New Town. It was laid out according to a plan of rectangular blocks with open squares, drawn up by James Craig (1739–95) and built in strong Craigleith sandstone which could be precisely cut by masons.^[2] Most residences were built as tenement flats, divided horizontally, with different occupants sharing a common staircase, in contrast to the houses used in contemporaneous building in England. The smallest might have only one room; the largest, several bedrooms and drawing rooms.^[3] Common features of neo-classical building included columns, temple fronts, rounded arches, flanking wings and domes.^[4][5] This classicism, together with its reputation as a major centre of the Enlightenment, resulted in the city being nicknamed "The Athens of the North".^[6] The gridiron plan, building forms and the architectural detailing would be copied by many smaller towns, although rendered in locally quarried materials.^[7]

Despite this building boom, the centralisation of much of the government administration, including the king's works, in London, meant that a number of Scottish architects spent most of their careers in England, where they had a major impact on Georgian architecture.^[8] Robert Adam (1728–92) emerged as leader of the first phase of the neo-classical revival in England and Scotland from around 1760 until his death.^[9] He rejected the elaborate Palladian style that had dominated building as "ponderous" and "disgustful".^[10] However, he continued their tradition of drawing inspiration directly from classical antiquity, influenced by his four-year stay in Europe, where he saw the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, which for the first time allowed modern Europeans to see classical buildings first hand, rather than work from literary descriptions.^[10] Neo-classicism strived for greater simplicity, often more influenced by Greek rather than Roman models. Adam's major works in Edinburgh included the General Register House (1774–92), the University Building (1789) and Charlotte Square (1791).^[11] He also designed 36 country houses in Scotland.^[4] An interior designer as well as an architect, together with his brothers John (1721–92) and James (1732–94) developing the Adam style, he influenced the development of architecture, not just in Britain, but in Western Europe, North America and in Russia, where his patterns were taken by Scottish architect Charles Cameron (1745–1812).^[12]

Adam's main rival was William Chambers (1723–96), another Scot, but born in Sweden.^[13] He did most of his work in London, with a small number of houses in Scotland. He was appointed architectural tutor to the Prince of Wales, later George III, and in 1766, with Robert Adam, as Architect to the King.^[14] More international in outlook than Adam, he combined Neo-classicism and Palladian conventions and his influence was mediated through his large number of pupils.^[15] The classical influence also reached church architecture. Scots-born architect James Gibbs (1682–1754) introduced a consciously antique style in his rebuilding of St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, with a massive, steepled portico and rectangular, side-aisled plan. Similar patterns in Scotland can be seen at St Andrew's in the Square, Glasgow (1737–59), designed by Allan Dreghorn (1706–64) and built by the master mason Mungo Nasmyth. Gibbs' own design for St. Nicholas West, Aberdeen (1752–55), had the same rectangular plan, with a nave-and-aisles, barrel-vaulted layout with superimposed pedimented front.^[16]

Vernacular architecture of this period continued to dependent on local materials and styles.^[17] Often built by groups of friends and family, the homes of the rural poor were usually of very simple construction. Contemporaries noted that cottages in the Highlands and Islands tended to be cruder, with single rooms, slit windows and earthen floors, often shared by a large family. In contrast many Lowland cottages had distinct rooms and chambers, were clad with plaster or paint and even had glazed windows. In the early 1800s urban settings also included traditional thatched houses, beside the larger, stone and slate roofed town houses of merchants and urban gentry.^[17]

The Industrial Revolution transformed the scale of Scottish towns, making Glasgow the "second city of the Empire",^[18] growing from a population of 77,385 in 1801 to 274,324 by 1841.^[19] Between 1780 and 1830 three middle class "new towns" were laid out on grid-iron plans, similar to those in Edinburgh, to the south and west of the old town.^[20] The other side of increasing wealth and planned architecture for the aristocracy and middle classes was the growth of urban sprawl. In Glasgow the growing workforce was left to the mercy of market forces as suburban tenements were thrown up, particularly to the east of the city,^[20] like those of the Gorbals to the south, where overcrowding, lack of sanitation and general poverty contributed to disease, crime, and very low life expediency.^[21]

Urban centres increasingly made use of locally mined stone. While Edinburgh made extensive use of yellow sandstone, the commercial centre and tenements of Glasgow were built in distinctive red sandstone.^[2] After a major fire in the largely wooden Aberdeen in the 1740s, the city fathers decreed that major buildings should be in the locally abundant granite. This began a new phase in large-scale quarrying and led to the "granite city" becoming the centre of a major industry, which supplied Scotland and England with faced stone, pavement slabs and pillars.^[22]

The sometimes utopian concept of the new town, aimed at improving society through the foundation of architecturally designed communities, was an important part of Scottish thinking from the mid-eighteenth to the twentieth century. In addition to the New Town of Edinburgh these included the complete rebuilding of Inverary for John Campbell, 5th Duke of Argyll by John Adam (1721–92) and Robert Mylne (1733–1811), between 1772 and 1800.^[23] Helensburgh near Glasgow was laid out in 1776 on a grid-iron plan.^[24] Small new towns on a gridiron plan in the period 1770–1830 included Cuminestown, New Pitsligo, Tomintoul and Aberchirder.^[25] At Fochabers, from 1776 John Baxter redesigned the village on a grid plan, with a central square focused on Bellie Church (1795–97), still following in the tradition of Gibbs, with a tetrastyle portico and steeple.^[26] From 1800, Robert Owen's New Lanark, designed as a self-contained community, combining industry with ordered and improved living conditions, was an important milestone in the historical development of urban planning.^[27] Housing was combined with generous communal and living spaces, a children's school and community education centre. It also introduced a village store that supplied good at lower prices and became the model for the co-operative movement.^[28] Scotland also produced one of the major figures in urban planning in sociologist Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), who developed the concept of conurbation, and discarded the idea of "sweeping clearances" to remove existing housing and the imposition of the gridiron plan, in favour of "conservative surgery": retaining the best buildings in an area and removing the worst. He put this into practice in Edinburgh, purchasing and improving slum tenements at James Court, and in new developments at Ramsay Garden.^[29]

In the early nineteenth century the Gibbs-influenced steepled tradition continued in church architecture, as can be seen in Robert Nisbet's Inveresk Church (1803–10). A Grecian form was developed at William Burn's North Leith Church (1813) and St John's Episcopal Church, Edinburgh (1816). The controversy over the style of the Scottish National Monument in 1816 led to the labelling of Greek temple motifs as "pagan" and relatively few columnar Greek churches were built after that in the capital. An exception was Archibald Elliot's Broughton Church (1820–21), which had a Doric temple front. More common in Edinburgh were churches that combined classical elements with other features, like the domed St George's, Charlotte Square (1811–14), executed by Robert Reid, or the Gracco-Baroque of William Playfair's St Stephen's (1827–28).^[30] In Glasgow there was a tradition of grafting porticoes on to existing meeting-houses, which continued in Gillespie Graham's West George Street Independent Church (1818), which was criticised as "popish", and John Baird I's Greyfriars United Secession Church (1821), which was fronted by a Roman Doric portico. Classical designs for the established Church included the redevelopment by William Stark of St George's-Tron Church (1807–08), David Hamilton's (1768–1843) St Enoch's Parish Church (1827) and St Paul's Parish Church (1835).^[30]