Wizard of the North

More than any other completed example of a hero building, the Scott Monument in Edinburgh (finished in 1844) provides immediate and unavoidable provocation to even the most casual viewer to meditate upon monumental styles and contexts and their meanings. A Gothic extravaganza on Princes Street, it is, as Charles McKean wrote, ‘like an implant of the Old Town into the classical discipline of the New’. ¹ Indeed it stands as the bristling exception which proves palpable Youngson’s rule regarding the physical separation of these two temporal zones. ² On first serious examination, it seems we have encountered in this buttressed and crocketted tower yet another embodiment of the Romantic spirit of Scott. As such, and by way of its architectural action operating through some abstruse Scotch egalitarian physics, it apparently calls forth a reaction in equal weight of Humean Enlightenment. There seems, that is to say, never to be one extreme here without its opposite and balancing force. Youngson’s rule, cited above is, in fact a statutory ruling: David Hume had taken residence in the 1770s in what he supposedly insisted should be called St David’s Street, almost directly across from the site where the Scott Monument was built in the 1840s. Yet if Hume had his eternal way, then that monument to Scott would never have been built there. For Hume and 14 other recent settlers in the new-built, neoclassical New Town of the 1770s campaigned to stop all construction on the south side of Princes Street, and took their fight to the House of Lords. Finally as a result of their campaign, an Act of Parliament of 1816 was instigated to prevent any building there for all time to come. Hence Youngson’s rule, following that Act, that ‘Thus was saved, in spite of the town council, the most important asset and true singularity of Edinburgh; the physical separation and visible conjunction of the Old Town and the New.’ When in March 1840, however, the committee to build the Scott Monument settled on that southern site on Princes Street (they had originally planned to build the monument on Charlotte Square) they had to seek their own special Act of Parliament in order to overturn, for this one particular case, the earlier statutory injunction which was instigated by Hume and his neighbours for a legal separation of the physical Old and New Towns. ³