Lost Dundee: Dundee's Lost Architectural Heritage

by Charles McKean, Patricia Whatley

Lost Dundee brings the second city of renaissance Scotland back to life showing, through previously undiscovered photographs and drawings, the life and the maritime quarter of this great port. It illustrates Dundee's transformation into a major Georgian town at the centre of the flax trade between St Petersburg and the USA, with the development of major public buildings a result of the influx of wealth into the region. This book goes on to examine Dundee's next transformation into the jute capital of the world. Its identity was transformed by the arrival of railways, which separated the town from the sea, and by the great mills and factories which engulfed it on both sides. The pressures upon medieval Dundee proved so great that in 1871 the process of replacing it with grandiose Victorian boulevards began.The final section illustrates the changes wrought in the twentieth century with the death of jute and its replacement as the city's major employer by tertiary education. This book draws particularly upon the rich visual history sources of Charles Lawson's drawings of old Dundee in the Central Library, the DC Thomson photographic collection, and the University of Dundee Archives. Essential to the understanding of this constantly re-generating city, this book contains 150 drawings, photographs and plans of Dundee.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2008

About the author

Charles McKean was a Scottish historian, author and scholar. He was the author of architectural guides to Stirling, Dundee, Edinburgh, London, Cambridge and East Anglia.

For many years he was a pillar of the of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland (RIAS), serving as chief executive, secretary and treasurer between 1979 and 1994.

He was architecture correspondent for The Times and Scotland on Sunday. He was a professor at the University of Dundee from the mid-1990s and was still its Professor Emeritus of Scottish Architectural History when he died.

Read more: http://www.scotsman.com/news/obituari...

Reviews

[David Kintore · Rating 5 out of 5]

The way a city’s identity is bound up with its buildings is the main theme of this wonderful book about Dundee and its lost architectural heritage.

It would have been fascinating to experience Fish Street and the old maritime quarter now demolished and replaced by Whitehall Crescent.

Couttie’s Wynd still survives, but as the authors note, ‘Now a back lane with wheelie bins and extractor fans, it awaits the revival that has so transformed similar closes in Edinburgh over the last decade’.

[Derek McRonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book to understand the lost architecture of a city guilty of wiping out its past