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Support to save Perth City Hall from the streets of Edinburgh

Margaretha Linacre and Alexander Burke were in Edinburgh to gather support for the campaign to save Perth City Hall.
Margaretha Linacre and Alexander Burke were in Edinburgh to gather support for the campaign to save Perth City Hall.

Campaigners took their dogged fight to save Perth City Hall from destruction to the streets of the capital at the weekend.

Members of the Perth City Market Trust gathered at the Royal Academy on Edinburgh’s Princes Street to urge the public to back their fight.

The effort took to almost 2,000 the number of individual letters of objection they have secured in a matter of a week.

They will be submitted to Perth and Kinross Council as it bids to raze the Edwardian hall to create a civic square.

The trust was joined in Edinburgh by senior figures from Scotland’s architectural fraternity, including Neil Baxter, who is the head of the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland.

He highlighted the importance of the building and its albeit disputed by the council architectural merits.

Mr Baxter told The Courier that the “fine, robust, adaptable building still has a major contribution to make”.

He said: “It needs the imagination of a responsible administration to restore and reuse it positively.

“It is easy to conspire to destroy anything good, while saving something good as a legacy for the future requires vision and imagination.”

Mr Baxter said that to destroy the building would be “folly”, describing it as a structure of “national importance and international interest”.

“The council’s proposal to replace the building with a gap site or, in their terms, a ‘piazza’, indicates a serious misunderstanding of the character of the city which they were elected to protect and benefit,” he said.

“Remove this key building and you do fundamental damage civic vandalism which would be regretted for decades to come.”

During their visit to Edinburgh, the campaigners stressed the differing treatments of two buildings “so similar as to be siblings” the maligned and under-threat Perth City Hall and the capital’s celebrated Usher Hall.

The latter celebrated its 100th birthday this week, making it just one year younger than Perth’s former civic hall.

“It looks like a sister or brother to our own city hall,” said the trust’s Margaretha Linacre. That makes it doubly difficult to accept the treatment being meted out to our own Perth hall.

“It is under threat, yet the Usher Hall is viewed, quite correctly, as a national treasure and is very carefully looked after and conserved.”

Opponents of demolition have until March 14 to register their objections to the council’s bid to dispose of Perth City Hall.

The issue will then be taken before a special meeting of the local authority’s development management committee. A submission to Historic Scotland will follow if councillors cannot be convinced to change their minds.

The campaign to save the hall has not won universal approval, however. Others continue to urge elected members to stick to their guns and not be swayed by a desire simply to retain a part of Perth’s past.

Businessman John Bullough, who is chairman of independent department store McEwens and of Perth City Development Board, has long been an advocate of the hall’s demolition.

Reiterating his claim that bringing an end to the hall’s existence has widespread support, he said: “This has been a wholly democratic process from the start.

“We must not be held back by a very small number of people wasting our time and money with their ridiculous and vain attempts to retain the building for no other reason than nostalgia.

“If we are going to create the vibrant and attractive city centre that Scotland’s newest city deserves, then we are going to have to make a brave decision to be relevant in the 21st Century.

“City centres are evolving every year and we are going have to show innovation and flexibility to keep up.

“It is always sad to see a building with all its memories come to an end of its life but we have to look to what Perth will be for our grandchildren and not what it was for our grandparents.”