CONTEXT 183 : MARCH 2025 9 ‘EVERY TIME I post about parliament, restoration people say “turn it into a museum”. It has asbestos, falling masonry, ancient cabling posing a huge fire risk, the sewage pipes could fail. Making it a museum doesn’t solve this. It’s not MPs making this expensive, most offices aren’t there anyway.’ Political correspondent Jessica Elgot, jessicaelgot.bsky.social ‘ALEXANDER Thomson’s only surviving church in St Vincent Street has now closed to worshippers, his Egyptian Halls remain vacant, James Salmon’s Lion Chambers is crumbling, JJ Burnet’s exquisite Savings Bank Hall lies empty and, as far as Mackintosh’s surviving buildings are concerned (having already lost his School of Art), as Stuart Robertson (the director of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society) recently confirmed, Scotland Street School is currently closed, the Lighthouse never reopened after the pandemic, the Lady Artists Club lies vacant and, in the last couple of weeks, the city council has put his Martyrs School on the open market. These are just the leading examples, with many, many more architecturally and historically important buildings now at risk… ‘Glasgow is still, just, Britain’s finest Victorian city (as opined by John Betjeman, one of the founders of the Victorian Society) – and it now has a heritage crisis that needs both a local and a national response.’ John Stewart writing in Building Design Alexander Thomson’s Holmwood House was saved from destruction by the National Trust for Scotland in 1994. (Photo: Jonathan Taylor) From The Life of Alexander Thomson, an 1888 address to the Glasgow Philosophical Society by the architect Thomas Gildard (available at www.archiseek.com) We must take Thomson’s genius as we find it, and that is chiefly in having re-created a style – re-created it as water exhaled from the pure clear lake returns to the earth refreshing it as new. This style is homogeneous, not here a little and there a little, but is within itself complete. A cultured architect visiting Glasgow sees from a distance some building of original composition, yet exquisite proportion, and hastes towards it that he may examine its details. He finds that these are of the aptest congruence with the general design – as if an arboriculturist, seeing from a distance some unusual tree, uncommon in its massing, grouping, and general configuration, found when he came to it, that its bark, its leaves, its flowers, its fruit could belong only to itself, and that they naturally arose from the very disposition that gave to this particular tree its specialty of outline. In this re-creation there is as much genius exercised as in the original devising. Shakespeare, in re-creating the story of the conspiracy against Julius Caesar – fitting it for an Elizabethan audience – showed perhaps more genius, so ‘bettering the instruction’, than did Plutarch, from whose Lives he derived the information. Thomson imposed upon himself the task of carrying the spirit of Greek art from the temple-crowned Athens to the warehouse-thronged Glasgow; and, notwithstanding that the Greek remains are comparatively few, so conjuring with them that had it been possible for our nineteenth-century architectural necessities to have been the architectural necessities of Greece in the time of Pericles, they would have been to the old Athenians as they are to us by Thomson. As I have said elsewhere, his genius seemed to be less derived from than native to Greece, as if it had breathed its air, and joyed in its sunshine – developing under Helios, rather than ‘pushing’ in a conservatory – less educated by Stuart and Revett [authors of The Antiquities of Athens] than impulsed from such circumstances as gave colour and character to the Athenic life when at its fullest. The aptest congruence The writer’s voice
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