Interior-general view of Great Hall of Craig House

Description Interior-general view of Great Hall of Craig House

Date 1895

Collection Records of Bedford Lemere and Company, photographers, London, England

Catalogue Number SC 701973

Category On-line Digital Images

Copy of BL 13223

Scope and Content Great Hall, Craighouse Mental Asylum, Craighouse Road, Edinburgh, looking south (latterly the Royal Edinburgh Hospital and presently part of Napier University) Craighouse Mental Asylum, a huge chateau designed by the architect, Sydney Mitchell, was built in 1889-94 as new hospital premises for the Royal Edinburgh Asylum. The Great Hall, a general amusement room for patients, was photographed in 1895 by the architectural photographer, Harry Bedford Lemere. This huge Baronial-style hall is 19m in length, and rises almost 14m to a magnificent barrel-vaulted ceiling. The walls, lined with oak panelling with oak Corinthian pilasters above, have a set of canopied stone chimneypieces which face each other across the room. A musicians' gallery runs across the south wall. The hall was designed as a day room for recreation where orchestral recitals (often by the patients themselves) were a regular feature. It was an attempt to offer surroundings resembling a great Victorian country house to patients who were wealthy and often from aristocratic backgrounds. Source: RCAHMS contribution to SCRAN.

Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/collection/701973

File Format (TIF) Tagged Image File Format bitmap