RHS London Club | Gallery |The Old Regent Road Building

Gallery - Buildings and Classrooms

The Old Royal High School Regent Road

The old school on the Calton Hill. Click to see the new school.

Having been renovated to receive the Scottish Assembly, the building was snubbed as unsuitable and a megabillion pound replacement has now been built. Ah well keeps the builders in funds.
In 1968, pupil Ian George penned these observations on the move to the new building in the school magazine, Schola Regia.

Postscript

"Architecturally, the building which was thus inaugurated is one of the finest in Edinburgh and is admirably adapted to the picturesque site on which it stands. The style is purest Doric, the central portion being modelled on the celebrated Temple of Theseus at Athens, and the whole is distinguished for grace and nobility of mass and ,justness of proportion."

So says the High School prospectus for session 1909-1910, eighty years after the opening of the Calton Hill structure for which the Town Council are now pondering a suitable use. Reading the above, one is tempted to make a comparison with the new building at Barnton : architecturally, our new building presents faceless rectangles to the onlooker; is modelled on the celebrated Swan Vestas matchbox and is tedious through being stylistically identical to thousands of other schools, factories, office blocks and flats being pushed up throughout Britain.

The advantages now that we have moved are obvious : better facilities and uncramped conditions, (at least for the present, a seemingly inevitable increase in the roll may necessitate more building). The Chemistry and Physics Departments now have the kind of laboritories they deserve and the Technical Department has the space to house and use many new machines. This is a great advance. No longer will actors and musicians have to search despairingly for a peaceful corner for devotion to their muse : rooms are set aside for the purpose. The library is no longer so congested as it was in the old school through having to serve a multiplicity of purposes. The aspect of the new gymn that strikes you first is its sheer vastness in comparison with the old one on Calton Hill. This too is very welcome since the old gymn, baths and changing rooms were cramped and far removed from the playing fields at Jock's Lodge and Holyrood.

The lecture-theatre is an enviable acquisition; and the spacious elegance of the new hall together with the facilities it provides for stage-production go a long way towards compensating for the loss of the Great Hall as a gracious and impressive setting for morning assembly and ceremonial occassions. The fact that the old building has managed to fulfil the needs of education reasonably well up to this point is a tribute to the foresight of Thomas Hamilton. However, in its planning, function was second to an ideal: an ideal that the building should be beautiful, imposing and monumental. And so the old building was extravagant : the cost of building another like it today would be prohibitive.

In the planning of the new building, function was the first and the overwhelming consideration-in the sense that it is regarded as a place, for supplying Education; Education being a commodity that comes on the Welfare State and is vital to our exports. In the very well equipped but, to my mind, soulless structure in suburbia, pupils may well develop a new ethos - one appropriate to the Technological Culture worshipping productivity and the gross national product.

Whatever happens, I speak for the whole of the present Sixth Year (whose association with the new building is too transitory to mean much) in wishing the others well in their new surroundangs. But is it not possible that with the increasing emphasis on vocational education, their singing of "Vivas Schola Regia... Sicut arx in colle sita" . . . may become a Huxleyan tribal chant, patriotic but meaningless ?

Now that we are installed in our building at Barnton, the building on Calton Hill will probably be cleaned up. The Arbroath and Craigleith stone may be restored to its original gleaming white. This would prepare it for its new role as conference centre, art gallery, or whatever. Its stone plles wlll stand ready to outlast steel girders, and despite its new use, the Acropolis of the Athens of the North will still be "Schola Regia" to all who were taught in it.

Ian George

Royal High School, Barnton, June 1968.

The Dungeons

" In the old days detention meant hanging the pupils from the ceiling by their thumbs.. how I miss those screams." To misquote from Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone. Disappointingly there is no evidence that the Dungeons in the old Regent Road school were ever used as a severe form of detention, though no doubt some of the boys deserved to rot there.

You might have a piece on the Dungeons on a web site but how are ever going to convey the smell?

Yours, holding my nose,

Ian Cuthbert

This will probably surprise you, but during the eleven years I taught at the old school before moving to Barnton in 1968 I never visited the dungeons.

I saw them for the first time only a few (probably four) years ago on the occasion of the reunion of the class of 1969. The organiser, Robin Boog, had arranged for us to visit the old school and we did a complete tour of both buildings. Unfortunately the changes that had been made internally in both buildings destroyed the reality of my previous experiences and memories, and I would rather not have seen what had been done, but continued with my happy memories unsullied.

Jock Dewar

Share your memories

If you wish to share any memories of what you got up to there or any of the other less public parts of the old or new schools, please send them to Will Dunnett.