The Architecture of Scottish Government from Kingship to Parliamentary Democracy (review)

The spatial relationship between governors and the governed is a most significant architectural question, well meriting detailed examination in the light of debate over the nature of the Scottish Parliament. This well-illustrated book, the first under the imprint of Dundee University Press and published in association with the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), is the first to address the Scottish experience. It examines how the locations in which the two met changed over the centuries, and provides an opportunity to ponder just how ambitious we Scots were.

After a brief resume, by Glendinning, of how the ancients governed themselves (that occasionally blurs the distinction between the spaces in which decisions were made with buildings occupied by officials of the state), Richard Oram follows the interaction between community and realm in Scotland through the mediaeval period. It is a fascinating account of how mediaeval open-air meetings, apparently offering accessibility to the king for everybody, were superseded by meetings in abbeys and royal palaces, leading eventually to purpose-designed buildings for state governance -crucially independent of the royal environment. Moyses recounts huge opposition to a Parliament being held in the Great Hall at Stirling under James VI's minority as being contrary to custom and thereby illegal and unconstitutional (not mentioned in this book). In 1562, St Giles' nave and aisles had been converted into a new Parliament House on a permanent basis (called promiscuously Edinburgh's Tolbooth and Parliament House, as Alan Macdonald has discovered, rather than as stated in the book). This two-storeyed combined national and local government complex was entered throughtheRomanesquedoorway ofHaddo's Hole and up a stately flight of steps. The blocked up windows of this Parliament House can still be seen in the nave arcades. A first floor bridge led to the small and inconvenient outbuilding called the New Tolbooth which acted as supplementary accommodation for civic affairs.

The volume is structured around two principal set pieces—the 1630s Parliament House contrasted with that of the 21^st century. However, for an architectural and spatial book co-sponsored by the (RCAHMS), it allows itself to be sometimes overwhelmed by a superimposed political perspective that works against an understanding of how the buildings evolved. In 1631-2, the city council decided to restore dignity to the city church by creating a new building for Parliament and town council. So the impetus and brief for Scotland's splendid new Parliament Hall was entirely civic, and to locate it within the non-architectural context of a 'crisis of kingship,' as Aonghus MacKechnie does, is erroneous. The building's construction is well recounted, largely from secondary material, by MacKechnie, but tempted by his regal perspective, he makes claims that the building was part of a grandiose urban remodelling of Edinburgh that are very difficult to substantiate.

MacKechnie argues that national urban ambition was expressed in placing Parliament Hall in a geometric triangular relationship with the near-contemporary George Heriot's Hospital, on the one corner, with the palace within Edinburgh Castle in the other, and that roof corbels within Parliament House carved with three towers represented Heriot's. However, they are less likely to refer to the as yet undesigned Heriot's hospital (whose central tower Rothiemay indicates was a much taller spire) than Edinburgh's three-equal-towered civic crest. Moreover, since Parliament Hall was begun on its given site before Heriot's was under way, a broader spatial relationship was probably coincidental. Had it been otherwise, Parliament House's facades facing Heriot's would have been designed as principal facades and built of ashlar—in keeping with the northern façade of Heriot's and the eastern façade of the palace. But they were not. They were secondary facades, harled and largely undecorated. MacKechnie does not, in fact, provide a detailed examination of the architecture...