Scott Monument
(alternate view)

The Scott Monument is a victorian gothic monument to Scottish author Sir Walter Scott. It stands in Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh, opposite the Jenners department store on Princes Street and near to Waverley Station. The tower is 200 1/2 feet high, and the small viewing deck near the top is reached by a narrow spiral staircase with 287 steps. It is built from Binnie shale quarried in nearby Livingston; the oil which continues to leech from its matrix has helped to glue the notoriously filthy atmosphere of victorian Edinburgh (then nicknamed "Auld Reekie" - old smokey) to the tower, leaving it an unintended sooty-black colour.

Following Scott's death in 1832, a competition was held to design a monument to him. An unlikely entrant went under the pseudonym "John Morvo", the name of the medieval architect of Melrose Abbey. Morvo was in fact George Meikle Kemp, forty-five year old joiner, draftsman, and self-taught architect. Kemp had feared his lack of architectural qualifications and reputation would disqualify him, but his design (which was similar to an unsuccessful one he had earlier submitted for the design of Glasgow Cathedral) was popular with the competition's judges, and in 1838 Kemp was awarded the contract to construct the monument

John Steell was commissioned to design a monumental statue of Scott to rest in the space between the tower's four columns. Steell's statue, make from white Carrara marble, shows Scott seated, resting from writing one of his works with a quill pen.

Following an act of parliament permitting it, construction began in 1840 and ran for nearly four years. The tower was completed in the autumn of 1844, with Kemp's son placing the finial in August of the year. When the monument was inaugurated in the 15th of August, George Meikle Kemp himself was absent; walking home from the site on the foggy evening of the 6th of March that year, Kemp had fallen into the Union Canal and drowned.

The monument is now administered by the museums department of Edinburgh City Council.

External links

• The monument's "homepage"
• History of the monument
• Biography of George M. Kemp