Here was I, a filthy Saxon, alone at last in Aberdeen. My hotel had a plain grey granite front contrasting with the brown jazz-modern of its interior. I was in Aberdeen, but in this slick lounge with its leatherette and walls of empire wood and sub-Brangwyn decorations. I might just as well have been in Manchester, in Leeds or Salt Lake City.This is progress.This is inter-nationalism.
You can never enjoy the beauty of a Western city in its shopping streets. The multiple stores which affront the dignity of Aberdeen are no less offensive than their brothers shouting out among the now unlovely buildings in Princes Street of Edinburgh. My hotel, where old-fashioned cleanliness and comfort contrasted unexpectedly with its jazzy decorations„ was in the shopping area. I would have to turn down side streets to see the real Aberdeen.
There are three periods of building in Aberdeen—the medieval, the early nineteenth century and the modern.
Away down the tramlines to the north, surrounded by new granite housing estates at a decent distance and on a rise above the beech-bordered meadowland of a river, stands Old Aberdeen, which has a Cathedral, a University and some Georgian houses, built of huge blocks of granite, a strange-textured place with an atmosphere of medieval and Jacobite grandeur about it, a place that really makes you feel you are in the Northernmost seat of learning, so remote, so windswept and of such a solid, grey strangeness. Here is the old King’s College of Aberdeen University and here is its chapel with a low tower from which spring ribs that support a Renaissance style crown. St. Giles’ Edinburgh and St. Nicholas’ Newcastle and St. Dunstan’s-in-the-East London have similar spired adornments. But none of these is so satisfactory as that of Aberdeen. Inside, this chapel is remarkable for its canopied stalls in dark oak, the only medieval church woodwork surviving complete in Scotland after the ravages of Knox. It is not at all like the lace-like soaring of the East Anglian woodwork, it is squat and square and rich with inventive designs through which trail wooden thistles. And to the solid architecture, designed for resisting storms and simply designed because of the hardness of the granite from which it is made, the elaboration of this woodwork is a perfect contrast.Finally there are windows, like the rest of the chapel very early sixteenth century, of a style so curious and original as to be unlike any Gothic outside Scotland. The buttresses run up through the middle of the tracery and the arches of all the windows are round.
Not far from King’s Chapel is St. Machar’s strange Cathedral. The west end is the thing to see; seven tall lancets of equal height flanked by square towers with no openings, and on top of each tower a dumpy spire in a style half Gothic, half Renaissance. The interior has been stripped of its plaster and ancient furnishings, except for a wooden roof of some richness, too high and dark to be visible, so that the effect of the building inside is merely one of size.
You cannot walk back and down the main streets of Aberdeen proper (as opposed to Old Aberdeen) without being aware of the noble planning of late Georgian times: wide streets, such as Union Street, stately groups of grey granite buildings in a Grecian style, crescents on hill tops and squares behind them. These are largely the work of two architects, friendly rivals, John Smith the City Architect and Archibald Simpson. Smith was, I think, the less interesting of the two. He built in correct classic and fifteenth-century style and with granite, close-picked and single-axed so that it was tamed to carry almost as much carving of capitals and mouldings as a softer building stone. A lovely screen in Union Street, rather like that at Hyde Park Corner, is his and many a handsome classic and English Perpendicular style public building.
But the original genius is Archibald Simpson. At the start of my visit my attention was held by a huge wall of granite, so bold, so simple in design, so colossal in its proportions that I stood puzzled. I have seen nothing like it before or since. Egyptian? Greek? Eighteenth century? Modern? No, it couldn’t be modern, for see the granite is weathered. This was the New Market built by Archibald Simpson in 1842. The magnificence of the entrance is designed to show the strength and quality of granite: the architect realised that there was no point in carving this unyielding material into delicate detail. Let the stone speak for itself and then emphasise its scale and texture by a few strong mouldings and broad pilasters projecting only an inch or two from the face of the building. The inside of this covered market is worthy of its outside—colossal, simple, constructional. I seemed to be stepping into one of those many-vistaed engravings by Piranesi. It was a great oblong hall with curved ends and all around a row of plain circular-headed arches rising to the glass and timber roof. Half-way down the wall height ran a gallery of shops. Shafts of sunlight slanted through the arches on to the wooden shops and stalls of the central space and the surrounding gallery. Archibald Simpson: here was an architect of genius, a Soane, a Hawksmoor, someone head and shoulders above the men of his time. Simpson’s work is almost always of the kind that depends on proportion for its ornament. His two-storey houses in crescents, Bon Accord and Marine Terraces for instance, are very plain but have all the subtlety in the glazing bars, now alas too often destroyed in favour of plate glass. But his greatest work is a brick tower and spire opposite the Art Gallery. The fact that it is in red brick makes it stand out, but not glaringly, among the grey granite of the rest of the city. It must have looked
