Oldmeldrum Town Hall is a municipal structure in the Market Square,
Oldmeldrum
Oldmeldrum (commonly known as Meldrum) is a village and parish in the Formartine area of Aberdeenshire, not far from Inverurie in North East Scotland. With a population of around 2,187, Oldmeldrum falls within Scotland's top 300 centres of popu ...
,
Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The structure, which is used as a community events venue, is a Category B
listed building
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...
.
History
The first municipal building in Oldmeldrum was a town house in the Market Square which was commissioned by the local
laird
Laird () is the owner of a large, long-established Scottish estate. In the traditional Scottish order of precedence, a laird ranked below a baron and above a gentleman. This rank was held only by those lairds holding official recognition in ...
, William Urquhart, who was the 4th Urquhat of Meldrum and 17th Chief of the Clan Urquhart and whose seat was at
Meldrum House
Meldrum House is a Category B listed country house and estate in Oldmeldrum, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. It dates to around 1625 (although its datestone is not in its original position), and it received its historic designation in 1971.
History
T ...
. The town house featured a
spire
A spire is a tall, slender, pointed structure on top of a roof of a building or tower, especially at the summit of church steeples. A spire may have a square, circular, or polygonal plan, with a roughly conical or pyramidal shape. Spires a ...
, which incorporated a clock and a bell, and was completed in the mid-18th century. By the 1870s, the old town hall had become dilapidated and the burgh leaders decided to rebuild it; the new structure was designed in the
neoclassical style
Neoclassical architecture is an architectural style produced by the Neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century in Italy and France. It became one of the most prominent architectural styles in the Western world. The prevailing sty ...
, built in
granite
Granite () is a coarse-grained ( phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies under ...
and was completed in 1877.
[
The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with five bays facing onto the Market Square. The central bay, which slightly projected forward, featured a round headed doorway with ]voussoir
A voussoir () is a wedge-shaped element, typically a stone, which is used in building an arch or vault.
Although each unit in an arch or vault is a voussoir, two units are of distinct functional importance: the keystone and the springer. The ...
s, a keystone, an entablature and a cornice and, on the first floor, a date stone and the coat of arms
A coat of arms is a heraldic visual design on an escutcheon (i.e., shield), surcoat, or tabard (the latter two being outer garments). The coat of arms on an escutcheon forms the central element of the full heraldic achievement, which in its ...
of William Urquhart which may have been recovered from the original town house. The outer bays were fenestrated by round headed casement windows with voussoirs on the ground floor and by square headed casement windows on the first floor. At roof level there was a parapet
A parapet is a barrier that is an extension of the wall at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony, walkway or other structure. The word comes ultimately from the Italian ''parapetto'' (''parare'' 'to cover/defend' and ''petto'' 'chest/breast'). ...
and a central clock tower flanked by scrolls
A scroll (from the Old French ''escroe'' or ''escroue''), also known as a roll, is a roll of papyrus, parchment, or paper containing writing.
Structure
A scroll is usually partitioned into pages, which are sometimes separate sheets of papy ...
and surmounted by a bell turret with an ogee
An ogee ( ) is the name given to objects, elements, and curves—often seen in architecture and building trades—that have been variously described as serpentine-, extended S-, or sigmoid-shaped. Ogees consist of a "double curve", the combinat ...
-shaped dome and a weather vane
A wind vane, weather vane, or weathercock is an instrument used for showing the direction of the wind. It is typically used as an architectural ornament to the highest point of a building. The word ''vane'' comes from the Old English word , m ...
. Internally, the principal room was the assembly hall on the first floor.[
The building continued to serve as the meeting place of the burgh council for much of the 20th century, but ceased to be the local seat of government when the enlarged Gordon District Council was formed in 1975.
A plaque, intended to commemorate the lives of six locally born people, was installed on the front of the building by the former commander of the RAF Hospital in Cyprus, Air Marshal Sir John Donald, in 2006. The people commemorated on the plaque were the botanist, William Forsyth, the physician, Sir Patrick Manson, the mathematician, ]George Chrystal
George Chrystal FRSE FRS (8 March 1851 – 3 November 1911) was a Scottish mathematician. He is primarily know for his books on algebra and his studies of seiches (wave patterns in large inland bodies of water) which earned him a Gold Meda ...
, the physician and botanist, Sir George Watt, the former Lord Provost of Aberdeen, Sir Thomas Mitchell, and the banker, Donald Gordon.
In 2007, a library which had been established in the building was closed and converted into a community café, and in 2011, a Community Interest Company known as "Making Meldrum Better" took over the management of the town hall. Since then the main role of the building has been that of a community events venue.
See also
*
References
{{reflist
Government buildings completed in 1877
City chambers and town halls in Scotland
Category B listed buildings in Aberdeenshire