The Hub (formerly The Assembly Hall and Tolbooth Church, Castlehill) by James Gillespie Graham (1776-1855) and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852)

The Hub, formerly The Assembly Hall and Talbooth Church, Castlehill

James Gillespie Graham (1776-1855) and Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin (1812-1852)

1842-1845; stair hall and library added by Hardy and Wight, 1893; conversion to "The Hub," Benjamin Tindall Architects, 1999

Junction of Lawnmarket, Castlehill and Johnston Terrace, Edinburgh

Work on what was originally a church and assembly hall was already in progress when Pugin visited Edinburgh in the summer of 1842. This was a project to which he had, apparently quite reluctantly, contributed. [Continued below]

Photograph and text by Jacqueline Banerjee, 2009.

[You may use this image without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

As Rosemary Hill explains,

Pugin, who still found it difficult to refuse a friend, had given Graham a design for the spire, a copy of the one he had just designed for St George's, Southwark, where work was still going on slowly for lack of funds. Thus it was that the spire that Pugin had intended to see rising over London's first post-Reformation Catholic cathedral was going up instead in Edinburgh above the intended meeting place for the Assembly of the Church of Scotland, John Knox's kirk, the 'Abomination of Desolation' as Pugin considered it. (Hill 273).

As this suggests, Pugin's own Roman Catholic project, St George's, never did get its spire (for the church as completed, see here), so it is only in Edinburgh that we can get a sense of what that whole cathedral might have looked like.

Nevertheless, it was good that the design for the spire was used somewhere, and in such a prominent position too. At 240' high, it towers above Edinburgh Castle and can be seen from all over the city, a much-loved feature of Edinburgh's skyline — making it of "major townscape importance" ("Historic Scotland"). No longer a church, the building now serves not just as "hub" of the Edinburgh Festival, but as a year-round restaurant and events venue.

References

Hill, Rosemary. God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain. London: Allen Lane, 2007.

"Historic Scotland" (Information supplementary to the Statutory List).Viewed 2 June 2009.

Last modified 2 June 2009