Oddly Gothick
From my archives: discovering a link in the chain of Edinburgh's gothic cultural heritage
From 2010 to 2020 I had a website, where I wrote about history, environment and spirituality. The website sadly went offline, but I’ve been rediscovering some of its content recently, and selecting a few worthy of seeing the light of day.
This one (slightly edited), from 9 March 2011, was at the very start of a journey that led me to write my favourite history paper, ‘A gothic reformation: tractarianism in the Scottish episcopal church’.
St Paul’s and St George’s Church in Edinburgh used to be two churches — you can probably guess what they were called. After the small congregation of St George’s moved across the road into the big building of St Paul’s, their little chapel was later demolished. I’ve finally worked out where on York Place it used to be: its here, where the casino is! The Rectory was at no.7, which adjoined it on the left and was built at the same time. It looks like a classical georgian house until you look closely. There are ‘Gothick’ crenellations on the roof, ‘Gothick’ clustered columns round the door, and ‘Gothick’ cruciform arrowslits (!) on either side of the second floor windows. As an attempt at making a building look Mediaeval it is not, to our eyes, a great success, with its round arches and its regular rectangular windows. But in 1794 there wasn’t much better around.
A lost architectural mishmash of a chapel might seem a bit of a footnote in cultural history, except that the Rector for whom it was built, Alexander Cleeve, was the tutor of Walter Scott, who had just begun to practice as an advocate when St George’s was built. Whereas Edinburgh Gothic went off in a scholarly direction, Scott ran away with the fantasy to weave wonderful works of fiction, and a house, Abbotsford.
In Abbotsford, Scott invented the style known as ‘Scottish Baronial’ which was used to design pretty much every tenement in Edinburgh and Glasgow for the whole of the nineteenth century.
Alexander Cleeve, sticking crenellations, clusterings and cruciforms onto his Georgian House, might have a lot to answer for!