George Meikle Kemp (25 May 1795—6 March 1844) was a self-taught Scottish architect who designed and built the Scott Monument in Edinburgh, Scotland.

[1] Settling in Edinburgh, Kemp won a competition to design a monument to the Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott.

Disablingly shy and socially awkward, while able to memorise exact details of buildings and measure precise distances by eye, Kemp is considered to have been high on the autism spectrum.

[5] Kemp's artistic talents had already shown themselves in his childhood when he learned to carve local bog oak into trinkets and quaichs finished with intricate ornament.

At the age of 14 Kemp was enrolled as an apprentice joiner with millwright and carpenter Andrew Noble at Moy Hall, Redscarhead, north of Peebles.

His job required much local travel and he sketched and studied the monastic churches of the area, such as Melrose, Dryburgh, Jedburgh and Kelso.

[2][5][7] The abbey at Melrose was of great and lasting significance to Kemp; he returned to it repeatedly, and it became his most important inspiration for the Scott Monument.

Kemp moved to Glasgow in 1820 and worked there for another four years while attending evening classes at Anderson's Institution, probably studying practical subjects like draughtsmanship, geometry and science.

From London, Kemp made for France in 1825, where he visited and studied more gothic buildings, including the great cathedrals and churches of Abbeville, Beauvais, Amiens, Paris and—in Belgium—Antwerp.

[2] Kemp's elder brother, Thomas, helped by securing a job for him with the architect William Burn on the Duke of Buccleuch's estate at Bowhill near Selkirk.

He had produced an ambitious set of drawings of plans and elevations and had even built a large wooden model of the cathedral to illustrate his proposals.

[5] Some commentators have argued that Kemp was not wholly inexperienced as an architect, claiming that he designed and built the West Parish Church at Maybole in Ayrshire in 1836.

[2] In 1836 a competition was launched to design a monument to the Scottish author Sir Walter Scott, who had died in 1832, to be erected in Edinburgh.

[2] Kemp's design was described by his first biographer, Thomas Bonnar, as “a lofty tower or spire of beautiful proportions, with elaborate and carefully drawn details, chiefly taken from Melrose Abbey”.

The organisers praised the "imposing structure ... of beautiful proportions, and in strict conformity with the purity of taste and style of Melrose Abbey, from which the author states it is in all its details derived”.

This stone was popular in Edinburgh because it was easily worked and could be transported into the city by the Union Canal, but hindsight has shown it be a poor choice because of its propensity for attracting soot.

[2] Kemp took over as his own clerk of works, which gave him a regular income and the opportunity to supervise closely the building of his design.

[10] In an early instance of his determination that the monument should be built in his own way, he rejected a proposal that wooden piles be driven into the ground to support the structure, insisting the excavation for the foundation should be carried down to the bedrock, 52 feet (16 metres) below the surface of Princes Street.

[10] As work progressed over the next four years, Kemp's presence on the building site, visible daily to passers-by on Princes Street, probably contributed to his growing public popularity.

With the public interest in the Scott Monument, Kemp was now admired by the moneyed and influential classes in Edinburgh, and several potentially lucrative architectural commissions came his way.

The workmen who had laboured with him in the building of the monument carried his coffin from his home in Morningside to St Cuthbert's churchyard below Edinburgh Castle, where he was buried.

[2] The Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen sang the Monument's praises some 30 years after its completion: The Scott Monument has been visited from every land; engravings of it are diffused over the wide earth; and as long as it stands in its majestic and imposing beauty, the pilgrims of future centuries, who gaze upon it in silent admiration, will connect the name of its builder with the thought of him who it commemorates.

It is a single-storey Gothic gable added to the L-plan former workshop of Andrew Noble, joiner and millwright, who was Kemp's apprentice master.

[17] A portrait by an unknown artist of Kemp holding a model of the Scott Monument also belongs to the City of Edinburgh Council.

[18] Two photographic portraits of Kemp, posed on the Scott Monument's building site, were made by David Octavius Hill in 1843.

His latest biographer, Morven Leese, writes that Kemp demonstrated “a huge level of self-belief and drive, combined with a very unusual personality”.