Architecture of Scotland in the Industrial Revolution

During this period, the country underwent an economic and social transformation as a result of industrialisation, which was reflected in new architectural forms, techniques and scale of building.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, Edinburgh was the focus of a classically inspired building boom that reflected the growing wealth and confidence of the capital.

While urban centres were rebuilt in local materials, including Aberdeen in granite and Glasgow in red sandstone, the homes of the rural poor remained basic, particularly in the Highlands.

The nineteenth century also was the revival of the Scots Baronial style, pioneered at Walter Scott's Abbotsford House and confirmed in popularity by Queen Victoria's residence at Balmoral Castle.

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.

[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.

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.

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 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.

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.

[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.

[32] Important for the adoption of the style in the early nineteenth century was Abbotsford House, the residence the novelist and poet, Sir Walter Scott.

[35] In ecclesiastical architecture, a style with more in common to that in England was adopted, based on late Medieval models, often using arched windows, stained glass and carvings.

[36] Important figures included Frederick Thomas Pilkington (1832–98), who developed a new style of church building which accorded with the fashionable High Gothic.

Working mainly in Glasgow, he turned away from the Gothic style toward that of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, as can be seen in the temple and columns that were part of the Caledonia Road Church (1856).

[37] David Rhind (1808–83) employed both neoclassical and Baronial styles and his work included many branches of the Commercial Bank of Scotland, among them their headquarters in Edinburgh.