Candia McWilliam spoke at last Thursday's meeting about St Stephen's Church (Breaking news, 7.2.14). A Broughton resident, she is also a notable author and daughter of the late architectural historian and Edinburgh champion Colin McWilliam.
We reproduce her words here for their thoughtful response to a specific case, and for their relevance elsewhere in Edinburgh's World Heritage Site.
If, having read it, any reader feels moved to write to the Church of Scotland asking for their tight bid-deadline to be postponed a little to assist the community buy-out of St Stephen's, they should address their remarks to The General Trustees by email gentrustees@cofscotland.org.uk or The Church of Scotland,121 George Street, Edinburgh EH2 4YN.
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Good evening; thank you for giving up your precious time. I’m honoured to have been asked to speak to you. In a way I wish I were not here; certainly I wish profoundly I were not here for the reason I am.
I‘m a poor stand-in for my father, Colin McWilliam, whom some of you will have known. It is wonderful to follow on from the words of Professor David Walker who, with my father and the only recently late and much-missed Johnny Gifford, made the Edinburgh volume of the Buildings of Scotland. It is also magnificent that we are lucky enough to have Professor Walker present here with us tonight.
I wish I could say I am channelling my father for your and St Stephen’s benefit. I’m not at all sure my stubborn elegant dad would have wanted to be channelled. Certainly, he would have enquired about the style of the fluting of any such channel.
But he would for sure have set himself to the cause of keeping within its busy community this vast, generous, classically severe, Baroquely powerful church that arrests the downward rush of St Vincent Street.
It is part of our personal daily lives, of our community, and of the wider city, intrinsic to the panorama it is our luxury to inhabit, and a reassurance in our prospect as we look out over the sparkling water of the Firth to the Kingdom of Fife or up or down through the haar to its great consoling tower.
People are involved with towns in three degrees; the individual, the corporate and the public. But of course it is impossible to cast people in such rigid roles. In practice our concerns and activities overlap in an infinite number of ways, many of which are quite unpredictable. No one in a town, except the occupants of graveyards and other places of permanent confinement, does the same thing in the same place all the time.
Just hear these words of Robert Adam. They come from his preface to Works in Architecture (1773):
The rising and falling, advancing and receding, with the convexity and concavity, and other forms of the great parts, have the same effect in architecture, that hill and dale, fore-ground and distance, swelling and sinking have in landscape: That is, they serve to produce an agreeable and diversified contour, that groups and contrasts like a picture, and creates a variety of light and shade, which gives great spirit, beauty and effect to the composition.
The classical system is effectively an extension of human scale. Here lies this church at a bifurcation in the road, literally as well as topographically.
What do people demand of towns, apart from the predictable necessities? It seems to be a balance of opposites; public and private life, industry and idleness, the natural and the man-made, the material and the transcendent.
In terms of function, a town is a place of activities known and unknown (mother and toddler/Jujitsu), separate or shared (the loneliness of addiction and its healing through identification and affinity), of business or pleasure or a combination of both (fundraisers, charity sales, school concerts, performances, weddings and other great necessary human rituals). Despite (or rather because of) the good functional reasons that may be behind them, the social encounters of town life become important in themselves, encouraged and confirmed by their setting in the townscape.
The same sort of requirements can be stated in terms of place. Here the town’s first job is to define space, starting with the ground, and finally coming to terms with the sky, after accommodating people and our activities on the way.
In this definition it must first be intelligible, but it must also be partly mysterious, even if only a short interval of time separates you from the answer to the mystery.
These words are my father’s; I understand them to mean that to live fully in a town we must be faced with something greater than ourselves; for which architecture may be among the loftiest metaphors. A great habitable kindness of connective imagination, if you like; or heart, facilitating the connection and passages of our society and our communal and individual lives.
The entry from large spaces into small and back again, the reassurance of a half unseen but manifestly symmetrical layout, the gradual working out of the question posed by a curved street, encounters with buildings and their quick-change act into space-defining screens, the pursuit of distant signals, these are familiar parts of the experience of walking, with whatever purpose in mind, through the town.
Here my father is showing us the scope of the scape within which we, who live in towns, have our being, and our internal, as well as bodily, narratives.
Highly effective, firmly attractive, visible and elevating from many distances, essential to a large family of variously congregated souls, gracefully accepting of its transformed and evolving purposes, St Stephen's came into being in the year 1827–8 on this difficult site of which the church’s mighty solid geometry makes forceful hospitable sense.
This morning outside Tesco I was approached by an SSPCA chugger who said to me, identifying that all old ladies like creatures (a fairish assumption in this case), 'Animal welfare is up 70 percent'.
I said, rather pickily I admit (he was a nice man, you could tell), 'Do you mean down? Or do you mean cruelty is up by 70%?'
'It’s what I said; welfare is up. By welfare I mean neglect.'
Can the world so swiftly have entered this looking glass of reversed usages?
Is it pedantic to ask for clear sight and a decision to retain, utilise and enjoy this strong, purposeful and commodious building, that welcomes us into its compressed curly arms – the Swiss roll Sphinx as my youngest child called it – as babies, hears us sing and stretch and heal and dance and play, and attends us when we no more have the option to move but are perforce confined at the last? What might we be allowing to take place amid this mindfully civilised city should this focus – the Latin word for hearth, which is surely the heart of a home – be so changed in its nature that it may stand a chance of being extinguished?
Let it continue to hold open its stone arms.
