Notes from the North 8

The parkland in front of the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art – One on Belford Road is sculpted into what their website describes as a ‘stepped, serpentine mound reflected in pools of water’. 

It was designed by the landscape architect Charles Jencks who is also known for his magnificent Garden of Cosmic Speculation at Portrack House in Dumfriesshire. 


Garden of Cosmic Speculation 
photos taken on a wet day in May 2015

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is only open to the public for 5 hours one day each year when 1500 tickets go on sale to raise money for the Maggie Centres, a cancer care charity named after Maggie Keswick Jencks, Jencks’ wife. The park in front of the Edinburgh art gallery hardly bears comparison but is inspired by the same cosmic concepts that Jencks was able to express more fully in his own garden. The Belford Road site is also open all year round. 

 

At present the gallery building itself is displaying Work no 975 by Martin Creed, a hopeful affirmation in this chaotic, unjust world, with an interesting – controversial for some - spelling of the final word. 



 

The Victorian extension of Edinburgh’s West End has none of the restrained beauty of the Georgian New Town. Its development from the mid 19th century on was the work of a few wealthy, powerful men who commissioned architects to design grand houses and fine gardens to reflect their social standing. One of those men, Sir Patrick Walker, had two daughters, twins, Mary and Barbara. Neither woman ever married and both were devout Episcopalians. When their father died they inherited the family mansion, Easter Coates House and the land round about it. They donated the land for the building of an Episcopalian cathedral, the cost of which they underwrote entirely themselves. There had been no Anglican cathedral in Edinburgh since the disestablishment of the Episcopal Church as the Church of State in 1690. Building began in 1873 and St Mary’s Episcopalian Cathedral opened in 1879. The Walker sisters were wealthy but not quite wealthy enough to fund all three of the cathedral’s spires. The two smaller ones were only added in 1917.

 


The cathedral has its main door on Palmerston Place, a street built in the grandiose style typical of this part of Edinburgh. Not more than 50 yards further on from it towards the Water of Leith there is a remarkably well-preserved interior of one of these buildings which you can visit. No 25 Palmerston Place houses The Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Centre, a spiritualist centre.






It offers a range of holistic therapies, readings and nutritional advice and has a fine research library in the basement, the Alex Johnson Reference Library. 



Arthur Conan Doyle might be surprised to have the building named after him, since it suggests he had a material – as opposed to a spiritual – link with it. Doyle (Conan was his middle name) was born at 11 Picardy Place at the top of Leith Walk in Edinburgh. He was baptised just along the road in St Mary’s Cathedral but never set foot inside the building that now bears his name. Still, there is a very fine pipe and a magnifying glass on the table in the front hall which suggests he, or perhaps his shade, may not be far away.

 

The library is open to the general public on a Thursday (access is by appointment on the other days of the week) and is mainly formed of the original contents of the Theosophical Society which was established in Edinburgh in 1893 in premises on Great King Street. Theosophy had its heyday in the late 19th century when Madame Blavatsky 



was theorising the core beliefs of the society and writing her books, the best known of which is Isis Unveiled. There are several shelves of her works in the library, most of which one suspects are never opened from one year to the next. I am told there are only 92 practising Theosophists in Scotland. 

 

The centre offers plenty of other options if Theosophy is not your thing: a psychic reading - attunes to the sitter, reads your energy and provides insight and guidance (no communication with the Spirit World); a spiritual reading – brings forward messages from the Spirit World; a Tarot reading (self-explanatory); Astrology reading – takes your date and place of birth and draws up a report of astrological events that took place at the time, offers insights into your personality, choices and how you can use the movement of the planets to predict energy shifts. These all cost £45 for 30 minutes whether done in-person or on-line. 

 

For the sceptics among us there are other excitements. The Centre is a Fringe venue and will present the story of Alice Hawkins by her great-grandson Peter Barratt from 13 – 17th August. 



Alice Hawkins was a shoe-machinist and mother of six children as well as one of the leading suffragettes. She was jailed six times for her activism, one of them for pouring ink into a post-box. Hawkins was one of the working-class women chosen to tell Lloyd George why women needed the vote (lousy conditions at work and slave wages among other things) and to ask him how it could be right that men could choose a man to represent them while women could not. 


Alice Hawkins would have known better than most, the importance of a good pair of stout shoes. 

 

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