Andy Arthur - ThreadinburghA very Edinburgh gothic horror story: the thread about the demolition of Rockville
The Merchiston Pagoda; Tottering Towers; Crazy Manor; Sugar Loaf House; the Chinese House; the Strangest House Edinburgh Ever Built. Call it what you like. Rockville is (was) one of the most important and inspired buildings in Victorian Scotland. Perhaps ever. And it was unceremoniously demolished in 1966.
Rockville, immediately prior to demolition in 1966. A colour photo, the only colour photo I have ever seen, courtesy and with kind permission of Derrick JohnstoneRockville‘s architect, builder and original resident was Sir James Gowans; stone mason, quarry master, builder, architect, engineer, railway contractor, theorist, philanthropist and local politician. Gowans’ father let quarries, including nearby Redhall, and James would take on the role of lessee amd quarrymaster there. He developed a deep understanding of and interest in stone as a building material and would build almost exclusively in it – the name Rockville for his new project was therefore entirely appropriate. When he set out to build it he used not only his own stone, but reputedly stone from a quarry in every county in Scotland, as well as from England, the Continent and as far away as China.
Sir James GowansIt’s hard to summarise how important Rockville is. Or was. On the face of it, it looks like an extreme expression of Victorian Gothic, the romantic fever dream of a madman. But this belies the fact it is actually a structure of incredible rationality, whose design adhered rigidly to strict system of geometry, repetition, patterns and materials. It has as much in common with the work and theories of the Modernist Le Corbusier as it does with some of his Victorian contemporaries.
Rockville, a contemporary illustration from “The Builder”, 1860James’ theories formed a complete system of design and building – and Rockville was the ultimate expression of this. The whole house rigidly conformed to a rule of 2ft x 2ft units, a room could not be 3 times longer than it was wide or 1½ times taller – it had to be in twos. The gingerbread house effect on the exterior of Rockville was actually a dressed stone framework carefully infilled with decorative rubble and this “skeleton” formed the basic unit of the house. Everything else in the entire building was some sort of multiple or fraction of that. The house was 26 units (or 52 feet) wide. its two principle storeys each 7 units (14 feet) tall. From the front, the projecting right bay was 9 units wide, the central bay 7, the entranceway 6 and the tower 4. The top of the cupola which capped the tower reached a height of 33 units or 66 feet.
The “gingerbread house” effect as a result of Gowans design and building system. The frieze on the wall was by James’ father-in-law and shows him, as a master mason and thinkerThere was no angle in his house that wasn’t a right angle, or a limited division thereof. It had to be 0°, 30°, 45° etc. and nothing inbetween. All the mouldings were based on right angles, regular octagons or circles (or halfs thereof). The only places where James allowed himself to break his system was on the mansard rooflines (where the overall profile was a triangle with sides at 60°, but there is a steeper section with a slight flares at the bottom to help with runoff) and the base of the cupola atop the tower, which also had a slight flare to its lower profile.
Looking towards the “pagoda” tower, notice the steep pitch of the roof and the decorative ironwork, the pattern being a repeating unit of the monogram “G” (for Gowans) and daisies; the Scots word for that flower being “gowans”I won’t go on too much about the house here – I’ll do that in another thread more dedicated to the details of the house, but suffice to say some of James Gowans’ ideas were a century ahead of their time. He went from building rather dull and predictable Georgian New Town blocks to Rockville almost out of nowhere, in only a few years. His inventiveness, skill and understanding of the materials he worked with, strong sense of colour (the house glistened green or red or gold or silver in the light depending on how the sun caught his carefully selected stones.) and his attention to quality and perfection marked him out. His biographer, Duncan McAra, says he was “not only one of the most important of Scotland’s Architects, but one of the most original European Master Builders of the 19th century“. And Rockville was his most important creation – it was Gowans in its purest form.
James built Rockville for himself and his young family but his wife, Elizabeth Mitchell, tragically died in 1858 before they had moved in, drowning in her bath in a house they were renting in Greenbank at the time. She was the daughter of another railway contractor, James Mitchell of Ross & Mitchell, a tunnelling expert who had built the Scotland Street Tunnel. Gowans would remarry and with his children, new wife and the family that followed, settled down to a good life at Rockville.
“Rockville House” not long after completion. The girl in the white dress may be either his daughter Rosa Jane or Isabella. A photograph by George Washington Wilson. CC-by-SA 4.0 University of Aberdeen GWW collectionHe was a successful business man, a builder, quarrymaster, railway engineer or architect as required, but sometimes his schemes did not come off as intended. Ultimately he over-reached himself. Together with Frederick Thomas Pilikington – another rogue architect with an uncanny skill with stone – he designed and overly-invested in a new theatre for the city he loved. The concept of the New Edinburgh Theatre, winter gardens and aquarium was ahead of its time and far too big for the city and the venture soon failed. James lost heavily on it. He organised the city’s International Exhibition of 1886, which was a triumph, but again he put too much of his own time, effort and money into this project and it broke him; financially and physically. He was bankrupted and had to move out of Rockville and let it, his health was never to be the same again and four years later he was dead from the prostasis that he had long been suffering from.
The International Exhibition Pavilion in the Meadows, 1886. From the Illustrated London News, February 1886Rockville was initially used as a preparatory school for the entrance exams for the Civil Service and Army Commissions, but soon found a careful new owner in a family who had a similar mindset around public service as James did. This was the Harrison family headed by Dr John Harrison CBE LLD, (1847-1922) and who moved into the house in 1891. John was the son of Sir George Harrison, former Lord Provost – if you’ve ever wondered where Harrison Park or Harrison Road get their names, it’s from Sir George. John was a two times Town Councillor, two times runner up for the election of Lord Provost, and a council member of the Old Edinburgh Club.
John Harrison, picture from an obituary in the Edinburgh Evening News, 10th July 1922The Harrisons added an extra bathroom, a garage for a car and electric and Rockville remained fundamentally unchanged. His widow and daughters lived on there after John’s death in 1922 and its last permanent resident, Helen Roberts (Mrs John Harrison) died in January 1949. At this juncture, the house was put up for sale; it would never again have a long-term occupant. In May, Lyon & Turnbull listed for auction a huge array of “SUPERIOR HOUSEHOLD FURNISHINGS” including the “silver removed from Rockville” as the house’s contents began to be dispersed.
Rockville in 1964The house then came into new ownership and was partitioned and sublet. Occupants came and went: Newton; Crawford; Brown. Classified adverts in the Evening News throughout the 1950s list various items of furniture and clothing for sale from the address. The house was in decline however; Gowans’ masonry was true and sound but the interior timbers had dry rot. In 1960 it was purchased by Mr Raj Bodasing, a retiree sugar cane farmer from South Africa who moved in with his family, and for a brief spell it was once again a single family home. However Raj’s untimely death in 1962 saw the house sold again. In 1962, on the same day that it was announced that the Corporation were preparing a Building Preservation Order to conserve Charlotte Square, a proposal was refused to demolish Rockville and replace it with a Mormon church for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Scottish Development Department blocked this application and the house went back on the market. However being unoccupied it rapidly began to deteriorate further and was soon on its way to becoming just another decaying Victorian villa in a city filled with decaying Victorian villas.
Sale listing of Rockville. Scotsman, 5th June 1963In 1963 it was purchased by the local building company James Miller & Partners. Now known as Miller Homes, this was the company of former Lord Provost Sir James Miller who had built much of interwar suburban Edinburgh. Millers let it be known that their plan was one of demolition and replacement. Local Councillor Maurice Heggie, for the Progressives, and a group of architects including Alan Reiach spoke up for the conservation of the house. He noted that while a number of Napier Road residents considered it “a monstrosity which should be pulled down“, it could make an ideal addition to Napier Technical College. Patrick Murray, curator of the Museum of Childhood, said Rockville was a test-case for the conservation of more recent historic buildings (at this stage it was only 106 years old).
The Edinburgh Corporation Housing Committee at West Pilton, November 1962. Maurice Heggie is on the extreme right. Edinburgh Evening News photo.Millers were unmoved and on August 6th 1965, the Dean of Guild Court, an institution once chaired by Gowans, granted permission to them to demolish Rockville. There was an instant howl of public outrage. Millers were at this time still very much an Edinburgh company, with a reputation to maintain, so as a conciliatory gesture, director Roger Miller wrote to the Scotsman on August 10th announcing that the company was willing to sell the building, at cost, to any society prepared to face the cost of its preservation and adaptation for public use. A three month deadline, expiring in November that year, was set.
November came and went, and no offers were forthcoming. Millers had not yet decided when the house would be demolished so in the meantime, three local students set about raising a petition to have it publicly preserved. Douglas May (19) and Raymond Fraser (18) were studying law and 19 year old David Alves, Art. They had spoken to that outspoken advocate for the preservation of Victorian architecture, Sir John Betjeman, and he had encouraged them that the majority of preservation societies just did not have the money to buy and renovate the house and that state support was needed. The students collected 2,500 signatures and hoped that the Corporation might be enticed to buy the house and preserve it as a museum of Victoriana and public garden. Someone else suggested that it should instead be offered to Disneyland in the hope they might move it stone-by-stone to the US.
Rockville in 1964But Millers were running out of patience, they had a business to run and a bottom line to serve. On January 12th 1966, the Scotsman reported Roger Miller as saying demolition would come “very soon” – the structure’s condition had been made worse by fire-raising by vandals in previous weeks. The students lodged their petition with the Corporation to try and have a stay of execution granted to allow them to present a plan to have the house bought by the City and converted into a children’s home, funded by a public appeal for £25-35,000 for renovation, and have the building placed into trust under the auspices of “a national charity“. The Corporation’s Planning Sub-Committee rejected this on January 19th. On January 27th, the vultures moved in to pick over the carcase of Rockville, the Scotsman reporting that bulk of its Victoriana was “trundled off in lorries to London dealers“, leaving little for local sale. On the 29th, a “gang of Cockney demolition workers” moved in; the lead was stripped from the roof and the rain poured in while the Scotsman’s reporter looked upon the wrecking squad ripping up the dance floor. Miller’s wrecking ball did the rest.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/monochrome_trains/4588896602/
Millers erased Rockville and ploughed up and levelled its gardens. In its place they erected 3 very mundane blocks of flats quaintly insipid named “the Limes” (Rockville was famed for its Pinetum, not its Lime trees). Gowans’ beautiful, signature gateposts remain, like the gateway to a cemetery someone has desecrated by building upon. Perhaps the greatest insult to Gowans’ memory and ideals was that the brick he had fought so hard to keep out of the city as Lord Dean of Guild Court was used to build upon the grave of Rockville, complete with a cladding of synthetic Fifestone.
“The Limes”, James Miller & Partners,It has been said that the end of Rockville was inevitable – just another Victorian villa when people wanted bright new things. The irony is that Gowans’ rigid adherence to his geometric theory, his building system and his prefabrication made Rockville right at home in the 1960s. That year, the city further danced upon the grave of his career by spending £30,000 demolishing the Synod Hall, the former New Edinburgh Theatre that almost ruined him. Sadly it turns out that they demolished one failed concert hall to make way for another, which in turn failed and would never be built. Instead a painful gap site was opened in the city and lay there for almost the next 30 years. To complete the addition of insult to injury, a few years previously they had spent £386,000 building a multi-storey car park upon the Castle Terrace Gardens, a strip of land that James Gowans had purchased at his own expense to form a pleasant public garden for the street.
The hole on Castle Terrace left by the Synod Hall would sit empty for the best part of 30 years while schemes to fill it came and went. Scotsman, December 3rd, 1966.Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
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