Exterior of the Gallery, seen from the Horse Wynd
 Photographer: Antonia Reeve
The Royal Collection © 2006, HM Queen Elizabeth II

The Queen’s Gallery was built in the shell of the former Holyrood Free Church and The Duchess of Gordon’s School at the entrance to the Palace of Holyroodhouse. The buildings were constructed in the mid 19th century from funds donated by Elizabeth, Duchess of Gordon.

Born in 1794, the Duchess was the daughter of a rich India merchant and grew up in London society. She married George, 5th Duke of Gordon in 1813, and they were frequent inhabitants of Edinburgh’s Old Town through their attendance at the Scottish Court. In 1830 Elizabeth became Mistress of the Robes to Queen Adelaide, wife of William IV.

The Gordon family gave generously to Church causes. Without children of her own, the Duchess was deeply concerned for child welfare, especially the very young. With her husband, she began a series of school and church projects in Scotland and in France. 

After her husband’s death in 1835, the ‘Good Duchess’, as she became known, turned more and more to her charitable work and to the Free Church. She demonstrated her commitment by buying the site for a new school and church at Holyrood. When the Duchess died on 31 January 1864, a procession of some 700 children from the schools she had endowed mourned her passing.

The Duchess of Gordon’s School was designed by Archibald Simpson (1790-1847), an Aberdeen architect, and dates from 1846. The main block was built in the Scots Renaissance style. Its main structural materials are local sandstone and timber, with Scots slate roofing.  On the ground floor was an open, covered playground behind an arcade, from where boys’ and girls’ staircases led to separate classrooms on the first and second floors.
 
The Holyrood Free Church next door was built four years after the school, principally to the designs of John Henderson (1804-62). The building provided seats for 700 souls, later increased to 800, in pews arranged facing the pulpit on two levels.

Both buildings fell into disuse in the late 19th century. The Church’s congregation merged with another and moved out. Laws regulated education; compulsory schooling was the norm and funding was provided from the public purse. The advent of new Board schools, laid out in a more modern classroom pattern, saw the closure of many church schools.

In 1999 Benjamin Tindall Architects were appointed project architects to covert the Church and School into a new Gallery for the Royal Collection. Their design is executed in a contemporary style that complements the original 19th-century architecture, elements of which have been incorporated into the new spaces.


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