When looking at the work of the present century no one can dismiss Marischal College, Aberdeen.Wedged behind the huge Town Hall, in an expensive and attractive mid-Victorian baronial style, I saw a cluster of silver-white pinnacles. I turned down a lane towards them, the front broadened out. Bigger than any cathedral, tower on tower, forests of pinnacles, a group of palatial buildings rivalled only by the Houses of Parliament at Westminster—the famous Marischal College. Imagine the Victoria tower with a spire on top, and all that well-grouped architecture below of lesser towers and lines of pinnacles executed in the hardest white Kemnay granite looking out over the grey-green North Sea, and you have some idea of the first impression this gigantic building creates. It rises on top of a simple Gothic one designed by Simpson in 1840. But all these spires and towers and pinnacles are the work of this century and were designed by Sir Alexander Marshall Mackenzie. You have to see them to believe them. True, they do not bear close inspection. The hollow central tower reveals a brick core within to support its spire. The inside seems small after all this outward magnificence—but as a piece of architectural showmanship, Marischal College is fine, an equivalent of Sir George Oatley’s soaring University Tower at Bristol.
Aberdeen’s best modern building I have left to the last. It is the addition to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Cathedral by J. N. Comper, an Aberdonian who has already done much distinguished work in the city. You go in by a rather dingy entrance to a flat Perpendicular-style building designed by Simpson in 1816, when he was a man of twenty-six. You push open the door and your heart gives a leap—there, stretching away as in an old Dutch oil-painting, is Comper’s superb renovation of the interior. White arcades by Simpson, in a simple style with big mouldings, lead to a great double-aisled east end which Comper added in a style perfectly blending with the older building. White plaster vaulting diminishes away in perspective adorned with baroque gold and coloured shields. And there, far at the east end, is a great baldachin over the altar in burnished gold with a gold spire like that on King’s Chapel.And beyond the gold of the baldachin, intensely gold in this blazing whiteness, you see the deep blue tints, the green and the red of Comper’s large east window.
I have only briefly sketched some of the glories of Aberdeen—there in those miles of Highland where the Dee comes falling from the conifer forests of John Smith’s castle at Balmoral. In the words of a little-known Victorian poet,
Farewell Aberdeen ’twixt the Donside and Deeside
How oft have I strayed through the long summer day
On the fringe of the links o’er thy wide-spreading seaside
To see the pink pebbles caressed by the spray.
How gay as a student by King’s rugged steeple
I loitered in archways and meadowpaths green
To my Jacobite sympathies kind were the people
Though deep in Balmoral dwelt Hanover’s Queen.
From windows of dreamland I see thy grey granite
All sparkling with diamonds after the rain,
The Dee and the arch and suspensions that span it
And fir-covered forests that rise from the plain.
Down Union Street with majestical motion
Electrical tramcars go painted in green,
The ships to thy quaysides come in from the ocean
I leave thee for ever, my loved Aberdeen.
5
LEEDS—A CITY OF CONTRASTS1
BERNARD SHAW said something about Leeds—that it ought to be burned down, or words to that effect; expressed of course with more epigrammatic force and probably rather more kindly. And this is not surprising. Leeds is not a city for Mr. Shaw; it caters for communists and conservatives. An individualist would not understand it. So individualists have no right to criticise it. It is as though an art critic walking through a spinney were to object to the contours of a mound made by wood ants. The person to examine the heap should be the entomologist: the person who ought to examine Leeds should be the town planner. An æsthetic appreciation of Leeds is of little value, because Leeds has little use for æsthetics. For this reason the Civic Hall at Leeds must be regarded only as a symbol of the Civic Pride of the Conservative party in that city.
By likening Leeds to an ants’ nest, I do not mean to decry the city or its inhabitants, but rather to show that Bernard Shaw went no deeper than an art critic.
To understand Leeds, to understand its Civic Hall and the regrettable Headrow, one must acquire a Leeds sense of proportion. And this is done by realising two things about Leeds. First, it is a Victorian city. Secondly, it is parochial. These
