Not that it\u2019s hard to notice. Designed by architects, Gillespie, Kidd and Coia in 1968-9, a practice perhaps better known for St Peter\u2019s Seminary at Cardross, a place favoured by local urban explorers, this A-listed Roman Catholic teacher training college<\/a> remains an outstanding, if poignantly bleak example of the brutalist school. In some respects the complex is redolent of Kolloss von Prora<\/em>, the Nazi holiday resort built from 1936-9 on the island of R\u00fcgen at the edge of the Baltic Sea, a place we stumbled on during a visit in 1998.<\/p>\n Disappointingly, St Andrew\u2019s is currently fenced off due to construction works. The perimeter signage bears a name, Morgan Ashurst, presumably the main contractor. Rather than enter the site unauthorised, I decide to ask the security staff for permission to take a few photographs from a discreet distance. My request is met with instant, unveiled hostility, a first for me in the year and a half since embarking on this project. Normally folks clamour to be photographed while regaling me with their life stories.<\/p>\n The guard on duty nixes my request. By way of non sequitur, he adds that a school in Kirkintilloch was recently set on fire. It’s the way he says it. I pause for effect. I\u2019m a 50-year-old woman, I reply, do I look like an arsonist? In spite of my justifiably indignant response, he\u2019s having none of it. Then, when I enquire about the construction works, I get a stony silence. Resigned, I tell the guy that by moving five feet back to the public highway, I can simply assert my rights and take any photographs I want, adding that I only asked as a courtesy. To which the guy threatens me with the police.<\/p>\n Not that I blame the guard personally. In this climate of disproportionate intervention, his role requires him to make a fraught decision \u2013 e.g. to assess whether an individual can or cannot take photographs \u2013 and in the guard’s case, without the intellectual capacity or legal expertise to do so. This kind of amateur policing, operating under the guise of health and safety, is becoming scarily frequent \u2013 you see it all the time in the public sector, where the unqualified now have to weigh up threat or risk as part of their (low-paid) job without the skills, experience and tact necessary, their decisions too often based on value judgments with the end result ineffective at best, dangerous at worst.<\/p>\n In the frisson of the moment I depart abruptly and, entirely lawfully, start snapping, much to the annoyance of the guard. I reason I have nothing to lose, since clearly they\u2019ve already got the cops on speed-dial. Later, while attempting to fathom why my request provoked such full-on belligerence, it occurs that the site, announcing itself as Bearsden Academy, is a PPP project and therefore can be assumed to be politically sensitive.<\/p>\n Backed by East Dunbartonshire Council<\/a>, the new Bearsden Academy is a joint venture between Morgan Ashurst and SPIE\/Matthew Hall in association with others named on the signage, including architects, SMC Parr and inspirED \u2013 the latter betraying an Orwellian newspeak mindset by nomenclature alone. Did I commit a facecrime, I wonder? Later, grazing the internet in the privacy of my shed, nowhere can I find the cost of this project, who\u2019s financing it or how, as a PPP, it will be administered in future, e.g. for how long will it cost us fifty quid to change a lightbulb? Still, it\u2019s reassuring to know that St Andrew\u2019s, with its A-list status, is bulldozer-proof. It’s just a shame the commanding view the college enjoyed is about to be obscured.<\/p>\n Still, never known to be thwarted, me and the husband take a quick detour round the back of the site. Here we\u2019re confronted by the usual homogeny \u2013 twee, boxy, detached houses of the type developers resort to furnishing with specially-commissioned, reduced-scale pieces designed to create the illusion of space and detract from the tiny windows. Oddly, garages here occupy a third of the footprint. In other words, the kind of dwelling most people find desirable because developers provide little by way of alternative. In Scotland, it never used to be like this. In a land of tenements, the aspiration to own a tiny detached house always struck me as a peculiarly English fetish. Leaving my partner to survey these crimes of non-architecture – each house boasts at least two cars parked outside miniscule unfenced ‘gardens’ – I climb up a steep, unimaginatively landscaped bank where, behind a steel fence, I catch a glimpse of the back of St Andrews and a breathtaking view of the south.<\/p>\n To the west, I note another of Harry Bell\u2019s sites, the distinctive mound of Castlehill Roman Fort, off the Duntocher Road. I note how the area is on a direct flight path to Glasgow International Airport, evidently not cited as a wow factor in the sales brochure, but possibly a reason for the tiny windows. In my current frame of mind I couldn’t give a toss. The developers obviously didn’t.<\/p>\n Returning to the sanctuary of my man’s beat-up car, surely an anomaly in this quarter, I’m chastened by an irate rap-on-the-window from one of the Wendy-householders, doubtless for trespassing on her excuse for a garden, unfenced, in a country where there no such law exists. I find my poor husband plainly traumatised by the surroundings.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.elementalfilms.eu\/devilsplantation\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2009\/04\/st-andrews-college-1.jpg\")
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