FINNART ST PAUL’S BUILDING

Historical Assessment

Finnart St Paul’s Church was designed in 1890 and built in 1893/4. It is a late ecclesiastical masterpiece of its architect Robert Rowland Anderson. It can be considered as Anderson’s attempt to create a revival of the Perpendicular Style for Scotland. It is the largest and most significant of the group of Perpendicular churches which he built in the later part of his career.

Anderson was a pioneer in the rediscovery and recording of the Scottish religious and domestic architecture up to the 17th Century. In some of his buildings he made accurate scholarly revivals of distinctive Scottish forms. At St Cuthbert’s Colinton, for instance, he built a timber steeple derived from the steeple of the Tron Kirk and the steeple from St Ninian’s Manse in Leith. This work was roughly contemporary with the building of St Paul’s, Greenock. Anderson was unusual for architects based in Scotland in having had a full apprenticeship with the most influential architects in London. He worked for George Gilbert Scott and was one of several architects who passed through Scott’s office and were to have a great influence on the development of the Gothic Revival. When Anderson left Scott’s office and set up in practice in Edinburgh, he produced Gothic Revival churches based on the same European prototypes as his most up-to-date contemporaries. Like them, he underwent a change of direction towards more indigenous 14th Century forms around 1880. Anderson was strongly aware of Scottish architectural History and the difference between Anderson’s late Gothic Revival and the revival churches of his contemporaries in London is that Anderson built his churches in recognisably Scottish materials; red sandstone and small slates on the roof.

The church was paid for largely by a small number of public benefactors including the Caird family.

Abstract made by J.Russell Balfour from a Report furnished by John Sanders of Simpson & Brown, architects, in May 1996