Published earlier this week, my book on Scottish architects James Miller and JJ Burnet provides an introduction to their remarkable lives and extraordinary architectural output. I hope that it will renew interest in their work and contribute to the protection of their surviving buildings.
John James Burnet, the son of a wealthy Scottish architect led his profession in Glasgow in the latter years of the 19th and early years of the 20th centuries, producing many of the city’s finest buildings including The Athenaeum on Buchanan Street, Charing Cross Mansions, numerous city-centre commercial buildings including Waterloo Chambers and Atlantic Chambers, the Townhouses on University Avenue and after moving to London, the extension of the British Museum, The Daily Telegraph Building on Fleet Street and Adelaide House by London Bridge. He was knighted and awarded the RIBA’s Gold Medal in 1923 and is one of Scotland’s finest architects.
James Miller, a farmer’s son from Perthshire, is simply Scotland’s most prolific architect. During his long career he designed The Empire Exhibition of 1901, Glasgow Royal Infirmary, Glasgow Central Station, Wemyss Bay Station, St Enoch’s Underground Station, Turnberry Hotel, Peebles Hydro Hotel, Gleneagles Hotel, the interiors of the SS Lusitania and SS Aquitania, Hampden Park, Forteviot Model Village, the Institution of Civil Engineers in Westminster, numerous Banks, Commercial Buildings and Churches in Glasgow and beyond as well as schools, country houses, factories and town halls. Despite this extraordinary output, he has been dismissed as ‘a commercial architect’ and his enormous contribution to Scotland’s architectural heritage, largely ignored.
This is the story of both men, their parallel lives and work, against the background of the British Empire’s booming Second City.
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John Stewart 